TV has become the primary political battleground in Venezuela

At midnight on Sunday, Radio Caracas Television ended its final broadcast - a consequence of President Hugo Chavez's refusal to renew its public broadcasting licence.

RCTV has already been replaced with a new state-funded channel that will, in the President's words, "better reflect society".

The channel's closure brought some 5,000 anti-Chavez protesters on to the capital's streets. Ugly scenes followed as police tried to scatter them.

None of this came as much of a surprise. President Chavez has long detested RCTV, accusing it of helping to incite a coup against him in 2002.

When he won re-election for a third time last December, he warned he would not be renewing its licence. The public knew this confrontation was coming.

We should be wary of regarding this as a typical case of autocratic suppression. Venezuela has long been a deeply divided country. And this is reflected in the public debate about broadcasters' rights.

Many Venezuelans, like the President, genuinely wanted the closure of the station. And we should not ignore the fact that there were also rallies in favour of the President at the weekend.

Nor can we ignore the wider context. President Chavez has a convincing electoral mandate.

His redistribution, since 1998, of the country's oil wealth in the direction of the deprived barrios and the rural poor, combined with his willingness to take on the wealthy elites, have begun to erode some of the staggering injustices of Venezuelan society.

But those elites have not been shy of fighting back, not least through the privately owned media.

How the US Media Distorted the Story

The US News media are only too ready to spin this story into an anti-Chavez propaganda piece.

The 'news' is framed as a simple matter of censorship: Prominent Venezuelan TV station RCTV is being silenced by the authoritarian government of President Hugo Chávez, who is punishing the station for its political criticism of his government.

According to CNN reporter T.J. Holmes, the issues are easy to understand: RCTV "is going to be shut down, is going to get off the air, because of President Hugo Chávez, not a big fan of it."

Dubbing RCTV "a voice of free speech," Holmes explained, "Chavez, in a move that's angered a lot of free-speech groups, is refusing now to renew the license of this television station that has been critical of his government."

Though straighter, a news story by the Associated Press still maintained the theme that the license denial was based simply on political differences, with reporter Elizabeth Munoz describing RCTV as "a network that has been critical of Chávez."

In a May 14 column, Washington Post deputy editorial page editor Jackson Diehl called the action an attempt to silence opponents and more "proof" that Chávez is a "dictator."

Wrote Diehl, "Chávez has made clear that his problem with [RCTV owner Marcel] Granier and RCTV is political."

In keeping with the media script that has bad guy Chávez brutishly silencing good guys in the democratic opposition, all these articles skimmed lightly over RCTV's history, the Venezuelan government's explanation for the license denial and the process that led to it.

RCTV and other commercial TV stations were key players in the April 2002 coup that briefly ousted Chávez's democratically elected government.

During the short-lived insurrection, coup leaders took to commercial TV airwaves to thank the networks.

"I must thank Venevisión and RCTV," one grateful leader remarked in an appearance captured in the Irish film The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

The film documents the networks’ participation in the short-lived coup, in which stations put themselves to service as bulletin boards for the coup—hosting coup leaders, silencing government voices and rallying the opposition to a march on the Presidential Palace that was part of the coup plotters strategy.

On April 11, 2002, the day of the coup, when military and civilian opposition leaders held press conferences calling for Chávez's ouster, RCTV hosted top coup plotter Carlos Ortega, who rallied demonstrators to the march on the presidential palace.

On the same day, after the anti-democratic overthrow appeared to have succeeded, another coup leader, Vice-Admiral Victor Ramírez Pérez, told a Venevisión reporter:

"We had a deadly weapon: the media. And now that I have the opportunity, let me congratulate you."

That commercial TV outlets including RCTV participated in the coup is not at question; even mainstream outlets have acknowledged as much.

As reporter Juan Forero, Jackson Diehl's colleague at the Washington Post, explained, "RCTV, like three other major private television stations, encouraged the protests," resulting in the coup, "and, once Chávez was ousted, cheered his removal."

The conservative British newspaper the Financial Times reported, "[Venezuelan] officials argue with some justification that RCTV actively supported the 2002 coup attempt against Mr. Chávez."

As FAIR's magazine Extra! argued last November:

"Were a similar event to happen in the U.S., and TV journalists and executives were caught conspiring with coup plotters, it’s doubtful they would stay out of jail, let alone be allowed to continue to run television stations, as they have in Venezuela."

When Chávez returned to power the commercial stations refused to cover the news, airing instead entertainment programs—in RCTV's case, the American film Pretty Woman.

By refusing to cover such a newsworthy story, the stations abandoned the public interest and violated the public trust that is seen in Venezuela (and in the U.S.) as a requirement for operating on the public airwaves. Regarding RCTV's refusal to cover the return of Chavez to power, Columbia University professor and former NPR editor John Dinges told Marketplace:

"What RCTV did simply can't be justified under any stretch of journalistic principles…. When a television channel simply fails to report, simply goes off the air during a period of national crisis, not because they're forced to, but simply because they don't agree with what's happening, you've lost your ability to defend what you do on journalistic principles."

The Venezuelan government is basing its denial of license on RCTV's involvement in the 2002 coup, not on the station's criticisms of or political opposition to the government.

Many American pundits and some human rights spokespersons have confused the issue by claiming the action is based merely on political differences, failing to note that Venezuela's media, including its commercial broadcasters, are still among the most vigorously dissident on the planet.

tags: venezuela  chavez  media  propaganda  latin america  

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