Mass Media

The Inter- American Press Association (IAPA) holds it's biyearly meeting in Caracas this week - the first to be held in Venezuela in many years. But that doesn't mean that the organization hasn't been deeply involved in Venezuela.

The Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) is not defending press freedom, but rather taking sides in a partisan struggle in a politically polarized country.

For some time it has been apparent that President Hugo Chavez – the democratically elected president of Venezuela – and his government have been on the US’s ‘regime change shopping list’. It is all too obvious that in the eyes of the world’s ruling elites Chavez is promoting the ‘wrong kind’ of democracy. To remedy the democratic problem that Venezuela poses, the US’s main democracy manipulating body, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), has been busily financing a group called Instituto Prensa Y Sociedad (IPYS).

Most consumers of the international media will be surprised to find that the controversy over Venezuela's oldest TV station, RCTV, is still raging. We were repeatedly informed that President Hugo Chavez "shut down" the station on May 27th. But in fact the station was never "shut down."

The president of Venezuela's RCTV, Eladio Larez, is no stranger to the CIA. His contact with the agency goes back nearly twenty years when he helped the CIA funnel money through Venezuela to the Nicaraguan opposition as they worked to topple the Sandinista government.

The refusal to renew the 20-year-old concession license of the private Venezuelan television channel RCTV set off extraordinary media hysteria worldwide. Reporters Without Borders (RSF), naturally, participated in the international disinformation campaign, publishing an extremely biased report about RCTV on June 5, 2007.

Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal can barely contain their displeasure over Hugo Chavez wanting Venezuela to have majority ownership of its own assets and no longer let Big (foreign) Oil investors plunder them. Those days are over.

Standards that aim to hold media conglomerates accountable should be upheld and active enforcement of already existing laws should be applauded rather than frowned upon. Venezuela is providing an example of what many in the U.S. have been calling on the FCC to do for years-abide by the law.

Reporters Without Borders is at the forefront of the right-wing media war against Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution. Indeed, the political lines of the US government, the US-backed Venezuelan opposition and RWB coincide exactly.

A debate on the non-renewal of RCTV's broadcast license was removed from YouTube under allegations of copyright violation, along with thousands of other Venezuela-related videos, even though the site maintains many similar videos from the same broadcaster without problems.