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an impression which may be left in the minds of DU'ers who don't know a lot about the Venezuelan news media. You have heard a little too much of the deliberate misinformation authored by opposition sources for consumption by people outside Venezuela. It gleefully gets spread here by our right-wing. There are many sources you can use to start looking into this, but I've got a quick reference which might throw some light on this, which you can use for encouragement to keep looking for more info. on the subject until you know you do have the whole picture: Opposition allegations are repeated constantly, often without rebuttal, and sometimes reported as facts. At the same time, some of the most vital information is hardly reported or not reported at all. For example, the opposition's efforts to recall President Chavez hit a snag in March when more than 800,000 signatures for the recall were invalidated. These signatures were not thrown out but were sent to a "repair process," currently being tallied, in which signers would get a second chance to claim invalidated signatures.
The opposition accused President Chavez of trying to illegitimately deny the people's right to a referendum, and the press here has overwhelmingly echoed this theme. But some vital facts were omitted from the story: the disputed signatures were in violation of the electoral rules, and could legitimately have been thrown out altogether. Furthermore, these rules -- requiring signers to fill out their own name, address and other information -- were well-known to organizers on both sides and publicized in advance of the signature gathering process. <1> These rules are also common in the United States, including California.
But readers of the U.S. and international press would not know this. And few would know that the members of Venezuela's National Electoral Commission -- which is supervising the election -- was appointed by the Supreme Court, with opposition leaders applauding the appointments. <2>
Even worse than most news stories on Venezuela are the editorials of major newspapers, where factual errors have become commonplace. The Washington Post has accused Chavez of holding political prisoners and having "muzzled the press," <3> and referred to the Electoral Commission as "Mr. Chavez' appointees." <4> All of these allegations are incontestably false.
According to the U.S. State Department, "There no reports of political prisoners in Venezuela." <5> And far from being "muzzled," the press in Venezuela is one of the most furiously partisan anti-government medias in the entire world. Two months ago one of Venezuela's most influential newspapers actually used a doctored version of a New York Times' article to allege that the Chavez government was implicated in the Madrid terrorist bombing! <6> But the media has never been censored by the Chavez government. <7>
(snip/...) http://www.independent-media.tv/item.cfm?fmedia_id=7516&fcategory_desc=Venezuela~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~If you ever heard that an independent tv station closed in Venezuela, please be informed that it was NOT Hugo Chavez who did it, but rather the mayor of Caracas, who hates his guts, who did it: For the past two years Venezuela has seen heated debate between the Chávez government and the major privately-owned media, particularly the TV networks, which denounce state pressures they say are intended to force them into silence -- something that has not occurred so far.
(snip)
”Officials from city hall closed our offices with bars and locks on July 10, and blocked our access to the studios, antenna and transmission equipment,” said station director Márquez.
Catia TV president Blanca Eekhout commented that the closure ”is a flagrant offence against freedom of expression in a community that has produced and broadcast its own programmes for the past year and a half, and harkens back to the attacks on the community media outlets during the dictatorship of Pedro Carmona.”
(snip)
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.
(snip/...) http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=19274~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Here's an open letter to the Washington Post concerning an article published early this year, attempting to plant that bogus information in the minds of Americans who don't know better: Published: Saturday, April 02, 2005 Bylined to: Philip Stinard Venezuela's Media Minister Andres Izarra replies to the Washington Post The Venezuelan Minister of Communication & Information has replied to Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl, who stated in an article published March 28 that in Venezuela, journalists are persecuted and the press is censored. Mr. Jackson Diehl
The Washington Post
Washington DC USA
Mister Diehl:
It's impossible to believe that a journalist at a newspaper as important as the Washington Post is so badly informed as you appear to be in your article "Chavez's Censorship: Where Disrespect Can Land You in Jail," published March 28.
You can believe, if you wish, that Venezuela used to be "the most prosperous and stable democracy in Latin America" (with 80% of the population in extreme poverty, civil strife, and military uprisings), put you can't write, without lying, that in Venezuela, journalists are persecuted and the press is censored, because there isn't a single case that supports what you say.
You say the truth when you affirm that "some newspapers and television stations openly sided with attempts to oust the president via coup, strike or a national referendum." Before being Minister of Information and Communication, I worked as news director for RCTV, an important private TV station in Venezuela. Immediately after the coup of April 2002 against President Hugo Chavez, when hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets demanding the return of their elected president, RCTV and other private channels decided not to report on this civil uprising, preferring to broadcast cartoons and old movies. Since I couldn't bring myself to participate in this censorship, I resigned.
As journalist Duncan Campbell reported for the (London) Guardian, "The five principal TV channels gave publicity spots to those who convened the demonstrations that supported the coup." Moreover, the principal media owners in Venezuela assured Dictator Carmona, "We can't guarantee the army's loyalty, but we can promise the media's support" (see "Coup and Counter-Coup," The Economist Global Agenda, April 16, 2002).
The private media promoted all of the campaigns to discredit President Chavez and his policies. For example, during the petroleum industry sabotage of Christmas 2002-2003, more than 13,000 political propaganda advertisements were broadcast in a two month period in order to "animate an economically devastating and socially destabilizing general strike directed at overthrowing Chavez. (These ads) energetically promoted opposition leaders, while at the same time defaming the President and ignoring news that favored him" (see COHA Investigation Memorandum. The Venezuelan Media: More Than Words in Play," Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Press Memorandum 03.18, April 30, 2003). However, despite all this, the openly conspiratorial media were not persecuted, neither then, nor now.
You are lying to your readers, Mister Diehl, when you say, "Beginning this month journalists or other independent activists accused by the government of the sort of offenses alleged by Izarra can be jailed without due process and sentenced to up to 30 years," because you are confusing the law that protects children from obscenity in the broadcast media with the laws on national security and the President's security, which are more strict in the United States.
US Code, Title 18, Section 871, "Threats against the President and presidential successors," prohibits any offense or threat made against the President of the United States. Examples include July 2, 1996, when two people were arrested by the secret service for shouting insults at President Clinton ("You suck and those boys died...") on the occasion of an attack against a military installation in Saudi Arabia in which 19 US soldiers died; or a minister who was arrested for saying "God will hold you to account" to President Clinton, concerning his decision not to prohibit a certain kind of abortion.
US Code, Title 18, Section 1752(a)(1)(ii) declares that it is a crime to intentionally enter a restricted zone during a presidential visit, and it has been used to arrest more than 1,800 demonstrators during the Republican Convention in August of 2004, despite the fact that the demonstrators were several blocks from President Bush's location; it was also used to arrest a gentleman for carrying a sign against war on October 24, 2002, during Bush's visit to Ohio; also arrested was a dead soldier's mother for wearing an anti-war t-shirt during a speech by First Lady Laura Bush in New Jersey; and a couple in West Virginia was arrested for wearing anti-Bush t-shirts during a rally.
You know, Mister Diehl, that the Patriot Act together with an Executive Order give President Bush the power to determine when a person represents a threat to the United States. If the person is a US citizen, he can be detained for an indefinite length of time without rights, be declared an enemy of the state, and even lose his citizenship. If the person is not a US citizen, he can be detained without any rights and be brought before a secret military tribunal without anyone, not even his family members, finding out. If a foreigner in the US says that "Bush is the Devil," he can be imprisoned and end up in Guantanamo.
Your interest in having people believe that in Venezuela, journalists are threatened like foreign agents, is understandable due to the number of agents that act as journalists, in both Venezuela and the US, to diffuse opinions concocted by the US State Department:
Declassified documents from the State Department (from the NGO National Security Archives) concerning the US Office of Public Diplomacy, managed by Otto Reich during the 1970's, demonstrate that the Washington Post was one of the newspapers used by the US government to spread its black propaganda against the Sandanista government. Washington Post journalist Marcela Sanchez publicly stated that in the months before the August 2004 presidential referendum, in which President Chavez was reaffirmed, (Roger) Noriega and others in the State Department visited the Washington Post's editorial board in order to influence its reporting on that topic.
Or have you forgotten, Mister Diehl, that journalist Maggie Gallagher, who collaborated with the Washington Post, was accused of accepting money in exchange for supporting one of President Bush's proposed Constitutional Amendments?
I can't imagine, Mister Diehl, how you came up with the terms "without due process" and "summarily," which you repeat in order to give the false impression of a dictatorial Venezuela that only exists in your imagination and in that crazy quilt of scraps that is your article. Surely, it will sound "ridiculous" to you, but now and for the first time in history, the press is more free in Venezuela than in the United States. Is that what bothers you, Mister Diehl?
It is not President Chavez' fault that the Bush administration can control the globalized world with the same methods and the same men as in the 1970s. It's not my fault if the Washington Post of Katherine Graham ... which was an example for the world in the Watergate case ... now acts as if it had been bought by the Nixon Family.
Instead of your incomplete, cartoonish, and malicious portrait of Venezuelan media and laws, I would have preferred to see, from a respectable "independent newspaper," a balanced analysis of our informative landscape. But I think that it's more likely that we'll find out, in the not-so-distant future, that you too, Mister Diehl, receive money from the State Department.
Andres Izarra
Minister of Communication and Information
Respuesta del Ministro Andrés Izarra
al diario Washington Post http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=29153 |
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