Popular Venezuelan cartoonist fired over drawing

[Zorro]

A popular cartoonist said she lost her job over her representation of the late Hugo Chavez's iconic signature as a flat-lined heartbeat to dramatize Venezuela's health care crisis.

Award-winning Rayma Suprani said that she was fired by El Universal, one of the country's largest and most-prestigious dailies, after the sketch was published Wednesday.

The ouster of the veteran journalist has alarmed press freedom advocates who say once-independent media are seeing criticism of the socialist government snuffed out. Several columnists resigned from El Universal to protest its sale in July to a Spanish company whose shareholders are unknown and who they fear may represent the government's interests.

"We don't know who bought EL Universal or who pays the salaries," Suprani said in an interview Wednesday with CNN en Espanol. "But now we know they are bothered by the critical editorial line so we can presume that it wasn't some invisible man but the government got its hands on it."

http://news.yahoo.com/popular-venezuelan-cartoonist-fired-over-drawing-162223100.html

No blasphemy allowed.

[maximillian1974]

1. Dan Rather....'nuff said.

Same stuff happens here to more respected actual journalists. I'd have fired her

[Marksman_91]

3. Why?

As far as i know, Chavez did even more disrespectful things to many people. And Rayma had been doing cartoons for Eel Universal for over a decade. She only got fired now because the new owner of the newspaper is a boligarch. The government is essentially censoring any media that speaks out against them by buying them off through Chavista multi-millionaire proxies and imposing strict censorship rules on the outlets. Same thing happened with Globovision more than a year ago, which was the last TV channel to be openly against the regime, but after the new ownership came in, one by one each journalist that worked there was fired or resigned due to the strict new rules they imposed about what they could and couldn't say. It's really fucked up.

[Bacchus4.0]

2. here is the cartoon