News

Easy to See the Speck in the Other's Eye
By Diana Cariboni
Inter Press Service
May 30, 2007

Continued

Edgardo Escoto, the government beat reporter for the opposition radio station Circuito Radial Voces, commented to IPS that he has been censored by presidential spokespersons. "They refuse to talk to me; they hide the president's itinerary from me," he said.

In Nicaragua, the last media outlet to lose its broadcasting licence for apparently political reasons was the La Poderosa radio station in 2002, during the administration of Enrique Bolańos, when the station's equipment was seized without any legal proceedings.

La Poderosa was an outspoken critic of the government, and aligned with former president Arnoldo Alemán, who has been convicted of corruption.

Under the government of Alemán (1997-2001), newspapers that were critical of the government, like La Prensa and El Nuevo Diario, reported that they suffered harassment by tax authorities and a boycott by the government, which cancelled all official advertising, after publishing articles on corruption among public officials.

RCTV is not the only media outlet that has stopped operating in Venezuela as the result of a government measure. During the April 2002 coup in which Chávez was removed from power for two days, the public station Canal 8 was shut down.

And in 2003, Caracas Mayor Alfredo Peńa, an outspoken Chávez opponent, also closed down the community station Catia TV for several days.

That is why the government and its supporters argue that only the opposition has closed down media outlets in Venezuela. Former information minister Andrés Izarra, who is president of the Venezuela-based international TV network Telesur, pointed out to IPS that in the case of RCTV, the station "was not closed down; what happened was that its concession was not renewed."

With respect to the question of freedom of speech, Chávez supporters also note that during the April 2002 coup, private stations like RCTV refused to provide coverage of the Apr. 13 popular uprising that swept the president back to power with the support of loyal army troops, airing instead reruns, cartoons and old Hollywood films.

Furthermore, RCTV and other stations only aired anti-Chávez propaganda and coverage of anti-government marches during a two-month business and oil industry shutdown in 2002-2003 aimed at bringing down the president.

But Ciro García, president of the chamber of broadcasters, remarked to IPS that the decision against RCTV "has placed in a difficult situation more than 150 private radio stations that are awaiting the renewal of their licences."

Another incident that the opposition in Venezuela complain about and invoke to accuse Chávez of undermining freedom of speech was a two-day closure and 13,900 dollar fine imposed on the opposition-aligned El Impulso paper in the west-central city of Barquisimeto in October 2005, for tax evasion.

In addition, RCTV was fined on numerous occasions, some of which involved its failure to cooperate with the tax laws. The 24-hour news station Globovisión has also been fined, and some of its satellite equipment was compounded two years ago after an inspection discovered irregularities. And neither of the stations received official advertising.

But "if we look at the diversity of the media, there is much more freedom of expression in Venezuela than in Chile, for example," Felipe Portales, who runs the Freedom of Expression Programme at the public University of Chile's Institute of Communication and Image, told IPS.

Although no arbitrary measures against the media have been reported in Chile in recent years, freedom is restricted by the concentration of ownership in a few hands, according to Portales and the director of the Fucatel Media Observatory, Manuela Gumucio.

"With the exception of Cuba, Chile is the country that has the least freedom of expression in Latin America, in terms of media plurality," with "a situation that is worse than what we experienced before the end of the dictatorship" of General Augusto Pinochet in 1990, said Portales.

The coverage of the RCTV case is one illustration of that, she said. "The Chilean media have only shown one version, the anti-Chávez side. We don't have the necessary elements to form an opinion on it," she argued.

Both Portales and Gumucio also blame the lack of diversity on the unequal distribution of official advertising.

And in Cuba, like in Colombia -- although for different reasons -- there are no opposition stations that could be closed down.

Private ownership of the media in Cuba came to an end in the 1960s, after President Fidel Castro took power in the 1959 revolution. The media are entirely controlled by the governing Communist Party.

Dissidents, who are labelled "mercenaries on the payroll of the empire" (the United States) by the socialist government, have no access to the media. A group of journalists not in line with the government or openly opposed to it were handed stiff prison sentences in 2003 on charges of transmitting or providing information to "enemy" media outlets.

The only exception are the Catholic magazines Palabra Nueva and Vitral, founded in 1994 in the western province of Pinar del Río, whose editorial team fell into crisis early this year, however, after the arrival of the new bishop, Jorge Enrique Serpa.

Vitral became known for its critical view of conditions in Cuba. But Serpa decided that the publication should avoid being "aggressive" and should be less anti-establishment.



Continue to p. 3>>>

NOTE: The Venezuela Information Office is dedicated to informing the American public about contemporary Venezuela, and receives its funding from the government of Venezuela. More information is available from the FARA office of the Department of Justice in Washington DC.

Venezuela Information Office
733 15th Street NW, Suite 932 Washington, DC 20005  tel: (202) 347-8081  fax: (202) 347-8091