Venezuela's Media Coup
by Naomi Klein
Dissident Voice
February 18, 2003
Poor
Endy Chávez, outfielder for the Navegantes del Magallanes, one of Venezuela's
big baseball teams. Every time he comes up to bat, the local TV sportscasters
start in with the jokes. "Here comes Chávez. No, not the pro-Cuban
dictator Chávez, the other Chávez." Or "This Chávez hits baseballs,
not the Venezuelan people."
In
Venezuela, even color commentators are enlisted in the commercial media's open
bid to oust the democratically elected government of Hugo Chávez. Andrés
Izarra, a Venezuelan television journalist, says that the campaign has done so
much violence to truthful information on the national airwaves that the four
private TV stations have effectively forfeited their right to broadcast.
"I think their licenses should be revoked," he says.
It's
the sort of extreme pronouncement one has come to expect from Chávez, known for
nicknaming the stations "the four horsemen of the apocalypse."
Izarra, however, is harder to dismiss. A squeaky clean made-for-TV type, he
worked as assignment editor in charge of Latin America at CNN en Espańol until
he was hired as news production manager for Venezuela's highest-rated newscast,
El Observador on RCTV.
On
April 13, 2002, the day after business leader Pedro Carmona briefly seized
power, Izarra quit that job under what he describes as "extreme emotional
stress." Ever since, he has been sounding the alarm about the threat posed
to democracy when the media decide to abandon journalism and pour all their
persuasive powers into winning a war being waged over oil.
Venezuela's
private television stations are owned by wealthy families with serious
financial stakes in defeating Chávez. Venevisión, the most-watched network, is
owned by Gustavo Cisneros, a mogul dubbed "the joint venture king" by
the New York Post. The Cisneros Group has partnered with many top US
brands--from AOL and Coca-Cola to Pizza Hut and Playboy--becoming a gatekeeper
to the Latin American market.
Cisneros
is also a tireless proselytizer for continental free trade, telling the world,
as he did in a 1999 profile in LatinCEO magazine, that "Latin America is
now fully committed to free trade, and fully committed to globalization.... As
a continent it has made a choice." But with Latin American voters choosing
politicians like Chávez, that has been looking like false advertising, selling
a consensus that doesn't exist.
All
this helps explain why, in the days leading up to the April coup, Venevisión,
RCTV, Globovisión and Televen replaced regular programming with relentless
anti-Chávez speeches, interrupted only for commercials calling on viewers to
take to the streets: "Not one step backward. Out! Leave now!" The ads
were sponsored by the oil industry, but the stations carried them free, as
"public service announcements."
They
went further: On the night of the coup, Cisneros's station played host to
meetings among the plotters, including Carmona. The president of Venezuela's
broadcasting chamber co-signed the decree dissolving the elected National
Assembly. And while the stations openly rejoiced at news of Chávez's
"resignation," when pro-Chávez forces mobilized for his return a
total news blackout was imposed.
Izarra
says he received clear instructions: "No information on Chávez, his
followers, his ministers, and all others that could in any way be related to
him." He watched with horror as his bosses actively suppressed breaking
news. Izarra says that on the day of the coup, RCTV had a report from a US
affiliate that Chávez had not resigned but had been kidnapped and jailed. It
didn't make the news. Mexico, Argentina and France condemned the coup and
refused to recognize the new government. RCTV knew but didn't tell.
When
Chávez finally returned to the Miraflores Palace, the stations gave up on
covering the news entirely. On one of the most important days in Venezuela's
history, they aired Pretty Woman and Tom & Jerry cartoons. "We had a
reporter in Miraflores and knew that it had been retaken by the
Chávistas," Izarra says. "[but] the information blackout stood.
That's when it was enough for me, and I decided to leave."
The
situation hasn't improved. During the recently ended strike organized by the
oil industry, the television stations broadcast an average of 700 pro-strike
advertisements every day, according to government estimates. It's in this
context that Chávez has decided to go after the TV stations in earnest, not
just with fiery rhetoric but with an investigation into violations of broadcast
standards and a new set of regulations. "Don't be surprised if we start
shutting down television stations," he said at the end of January.
The
threat has sparked a flurry of condemnations from the Committee to Protect
Journalists and Reporters Without Borders. And there is reason for concern: The
media war in Venezuela is bloody, with attacks on both pro- and anti-Chávez
media outlets. But attempts to regulate the media aren't an "attack on
press freedom," as CPJ has claimed--quite the opposite.
Venezuela's
media, including state TV, need tough controls to insure diversity, balance and
access, enforced at arm's length from political powers. Some of Chávez's
proposals (such as an ominous clause banning speech that shows
"disrespect" to government officials) overstep these bounds and could
easily be used to muzzle critics. That said, it is absurd to treat Chávez as
the principal threat to a free press in Venezuela. That honor clearly goes to
the media owners themselves. This fact has been entirely lost on the
organizations entrusted to defend press freedom around the world, still stuck
in a paradigm in which all journalists just want to tell the truth and all
threats come from nasty politicians and angry mobs.
This
is unfortunate, because we are in desperate need of courageous defenders of a
free press at the moment--and not just in Venezuela. After all, Venezuela isn't
the only country where a war is being waged over oil, where media owners have
become inseparable from the forces clamoring for "regime change" and
where the opposition finds itself routinely erased by the nightly news. But in
the United States, unlike in Venezuela, the media and the government are on the
same side.
Naomi Klein is a leading anti-sweatshop
activist, and author of Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines
of the Globalization Debate? (Picador, 2002) and No Logo: Taking Aim at
the Brand Bullies (Picador, 2000). This article first appeared in The
Nation (www.thenation.com). Visit www.nologo.org.