By CHRIS CARLSON - VENEZUELANALYSIS.COM Venezuela’s emerged student “freedom fighters” seem to be missing a lot in their understanding of democracy, tyranny, and freedom itself. But, even more interestingly, I came to realize that the real freedom fighters in Venezuela aren’t the anti-government students and journalists, but rather another much larger group of political activists who have been almost totally ignored in mainstream and international media. RCTV: The Voice of El Pueblo Apparently, the whole thing exploded when the government of Hugo Chavez denied the private television channel RCTV a renewal of its 20-year broadcast license, forcing it off the public airwaves last May. Marches in the streets of Caracas were centered around “freedom of expression,” claiming that the government’s decision was taking away the people’s freedom to express or receive information in opposition to the government. One of the marchers’ most common chants was “libertad, libertad!” turning the RCTV television channel into a symbol of freedom. Another common slogan assures that RCTV is “La Voz del Pueblo” (The voice of the people) But does RCTV really represent freedom of expression or the voice of the people? We might better ask the question, does any private corporate media represent freedom of expression? The pro-Chavez marchers clearly understand that this is not the case because they know that this type of media does not actually represent the voice of the people, but rather the voice of the business interests that control it. But pro-RCTV marchers don’t seem to understand that behind their beloved television channel lie specific economic interests that obligate it to promote certain views and suppress others. The voice of “el pueblo” hardly has any influence, except when the people are saying what RCTV wants to hear. Actually this is nothing too surprising. All private corporate media in the world function in basically the same way. The financing comes exclusively from advertising, which means they are financed by some of the largest economic groups and advertising agencies in the world. Nearly all of the world’s corporate media is under the ownership of large national and multinational corporations as is RCTV, founded by a businessman from the United States in the 1920’s. His family, long since one of the major elite families of the country, still controls the majority of the shares, and still makes most of its income from selling advertising to huge multinational conglomerates. And so views that go against the economic interests of these groups are, of course, suppressed, whereas those views that could be beneficial to the economic interests of the elite capitalists are repeatedly espoused. Just as the economic groups that own and finance CNN (Time Warner), for example, would not normally permit CNN’s programming to advocate views that would be damaging to its interests (anti-globalization movements or the break-up of media conglomerates, for example), the economic groups that own and finance RCTV would obviously not espouse views that go against their interests. And in the grand battle between things like capitalism or socialism, privatization or nationalization, neoliberalism or protectionism, the corporate media all come down on the same side of the debate. Although all of this is well known among the political left, Venezuela’s student movement apparently doesn’t get it. RCTV is far from the voice of el pueblo. A forum for national debate that categorically prevents certain views and promotes others in line with specific economic interests is hardly the symbol of freedom that Venezuela’s opposition has made it out to be. What the opposition activists seem to ignore is that the surge in poverty, crime and violence that has been felt across Latin America over the last 20 years is largely the result of the neoliberal policies and reforms promoted by Washington and the very elite economic groups that control RCTV and other private media; the same private media that, after President Carlos Andres Perez called out the military to massacre thousands of people protesting the neoliberal reforms in 1989, didn’t seem to be at all worried about freedom of expression, liberty, or democracy.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Feb 2014 15:52:35 +0000
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