Reply #12: I don't know how ANYONE can say Venezuelan media did its job [View All]

[Judi Lynn]

as it agitated continuously against Hugo Chavez, organizing marches, attributing high seriousness to them, then going completely silent when the Venezuelan masses learned Chavez had been abducted from office, through their own grapevines, and swarmed into the streets.

It's inconceivable anyone could countenance this.

Caracas's mayor, Alfredo Peña CLOSED a small public station which was NOT controlled by the right-wing media during the coup:

During the ephemeral Carmona government, the state-run Venezolana de Televisión was shut down, and the private TV stations refused to broadcast the Apr. 13 popular uprising, which Chávez spokespersons repeatedly note as ”proof that the ones who most violate freedoms of expression are the opposition.”

The Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders issued a statement exhorting Peña to give an explanation for the Catia TV closure.

”We ask you to explain your reasons for closing the premises of Catia TV and at the same time we remind you that, whatever they are, they could not justify forcing this station off the air,” wrote the organisation's secretary-general Robert Ménard.

Provea, one of Venezuela's leading human rights groups, called the closure a ”denial of the rights to freedom of expression and information consecrated in the constitution,” and demanded that the city government ”immediately restore these legal guarantees.”

The Community Media Association added its voice to the demands and declared, ”Mayor Peña is depriving the working class communities of western Caracas of the right to inform themselves and express themselves independently.”

”The one who has shut down a media outlet is not President Chávez but rather one of his most ferocious opponents,” said the Association.
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http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=19274

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A recent Human Rights Watch report, which was harshly criticized by supporters of Venezuela's 'Bolivarian Revolution', said that "there are few obvious limits on free expression in Venezuela. The country's print and audiovisual media operate without restrictions." Two months after the report was published, on July 14, one of the country's audiovisual media outlets came up against a rather serious restriction-it was shut down and its equipment confiscated. The outlet in question is called CatiaTV, but it was not shut down by the Chavez government but by the mayor of Caracas, Alfredo Pena, who is an opponent of Chavez.

CatiaTV was an experiment in genuine community television. It was started by a group of people in Catia, a vast and extremely poor borough of Caracas, who thought to film one of the community's events to show it to the community. It gave poor people the opportunity to make their own programs, about themselves, for themselves. In April 2002, when the coup against the Chavez government took place, workers in CatiaTV were instrumental in helping to get the state television channel, Channel 8, back online, breaking the monopoly of misinformation of the private television networks and facilitating the reversal of the coup.

Reporters Without Borders (which did protest against the closing of CatiaTV), demonstrating a disappointing lack of understanding of the Venezuelan media situation, said that reporters there were "caught between an authoritarian president and an intolerant media." The private networks are advocates of a coup, call supporters of Chavez 'monkeys', and distort information to a remarkable degree. But the people can't rely solely on the state media. This is exactly what makes community media like CatiaTV so important. It is also why Alfredo Pena shut it down.
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http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=45&ItemID=3993