Cartoon Coup D’Etat
by Paul Haste / May 28th, 2007
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/05/cartoon-coup-d%E2%80%99etat/‘The Presidential Palace is in our hands; why don’t you show that?’ Chávez’s supporters shouted to the journalists… instead, RCTV was broadcasting Looney Tunes cartoons.
Venezuela takes an important step towards democratizing its media on 28 May when a billion dollar media corporation loses its television broadcast license to ‘those who almost never have a voice,’ in President Hugo Chávez’s words.
Radio Caracas Television — RCTV — and its multi-millionaire owner, Marcel Granier, who are about to lose their unceasing political war against Chávez and Venezuela’s Bolívarian revolution, are claiming that ‘independent media are being closed down,’ that Chávez is a dictator intent on ‘restricting freedom of expression and democratic rights.’
Reporters without Borders declares that RCTV losing its license is ‘a serious attack on editorial pluralism’, while editorials in US newspapers have predictably misrepresented the controversy, claiming Chávez is retaliating against his critics in the opposition media who ‘disagree’ with the Bolívarian revolution.
The reality is rather different. As Reporters without Borders doesn’t mention, perhaps understandably so, given its financing by the US State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy — which also finances rightist opposition political parties in Venezuela — RCTV was an active participant in the violent coup d’etat that deposed President Chávez for almost 48 hours in 2002.
On the day of the coup, RCTV abandoned all pretense to report news impartially, calling opposition supporters to illegally demonstrate at the Miraflores Presidential Palace in Caracas while showing the constant on screen message ‘Ni un paso atras’: ‘Not one step back.’
It deliberately showed film from one angle to falsely claim that Chávez supporters were firing on opposition demonstrators, when another camera angle would have shown that Chávez supporters were defending themselves from sniper attacks — no opposition demonstrators were in sight. The constant repeated broadcasting of this film was then used as justification for some military officers to declare their ‘disobedience’ to the president, and these declarations were faithfully broadcast to attempt to legitimize a military takeover.
The American editorial writers who fail to mention all this, also fail to comment on the Venezuelan media’s support for the subsequent fascist junta that took control in Caracas and proceeded to dismiss the entire Supreme Court and the Congress, suspend the constitution, arrest the democratically elected president and then sent armed police onto the streets to suppress any resistance.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/05/cartoon-coup-d%E2%80%99etat/
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