Hugo! (65 page)

To him, the Venezuelan corporate media was out of control and
needed to be reined in. Advocates of the media law pointed out that
many of the provisions differed little from US Federal Communications
Commission
regulations that sought to protect children during normal
viewing hours. Above all, they hoped the law would lead to more
balanced
coverage by a media that not only was ferociously critical of
Chávez but also participated in efforts to overthrow him — not all of
them legal.

It wasn't hard to find examples. When the government and opposition
groups held huge competing demonstrations in March 2002, for example,
the station manager at RCTV channel 2 ordered news operations manager
Andrés Izarra to give blanket coverage to the opposition march. Izarra
sent ten television crews. But he was ordered not to cover the pro-Chávez
march at all. It was the same at the other major networks.

Some journalists admitted they had stopped being journalists
presenting both sides of the story and instead had turned into
political
activists trying to destroy a president. "The common attitude has
been that we can leave aside ethics and the rules of journalism," Laura
Weffer, a political reporter for
El Nacional
, confessed to a writer for
the
Columbia Journalism Review
. But the consequence of that was
fomenting an intense hatred among people in the mountainside barrios
who now viewed once respected journalists as prostitutes for the
media moguls and wealthy elites. "Before, when we went up to the hills,
we were welcomed as if we were the Red Cross," a reporter for
Ultimas
Noticias
told the
CJR
. "Afterward, reporters were showered with rocks
and bottles at the bottom of the hill." Another female reporter, in tears,
told Weffer how she was called a
puta
, a whore, when she tried to enter
a poor neighborhood wearing a press pass.

International media outlets were not quite as bad as the Venezuelan
media, occasionally providing fairer coverage of important events such
as the mobilization of Chávez supporters in the streets calling for his
return during the coup. In general, though, they followed the lead of
the locals.

They slanted their coverage to highlight the point of view of
Chávez's
opponents and downplay the opinion of his supporters, who
happened to be a majority of the population. One way they did so was
by the sources they chose. The vast majority of
"analysts" cited by major
US outlets were Chávez critics as opposed to more neutral observers or
those who tended to view Chávez sympathetically. In one study, Latin
America specialist Justin Delacour tracked the "independent" analysts
most often cited by five major US newspapers:
The Miami Herald
,
The New York Times
,
The Washington Post
, the
Los Angeles Times
, and
the
Chicago Tribune
. Delacour found that the four analysts most often
cited were critics of Chávez — Michael Shifter of the Inter-American
Dialogue in Washington, DC,
Venezuelan historian Alberto Garrido,
newspaper editor Teodoro Petkoff, and "pollster" Luis Vicente León.
Only the fifth most cited analyst,
Larry Birns of the Washington-based
Council on Hemispheric Affairs, "could be described as somewhat sympathetic
to Venezuela's government." And he was a distant fifth — he
was cited 16 times, while the others were cited a total of 107.

In contrast, eight Venezuela scholars whose articles appeared in
the March 2005 issue of the journal
Latin American Perspectives
and
who had a
moderate or favorable view of Chávez were not quoted a
single time during the nearly two-year period studied. They included
Steve Ellner, a respected American political scientist who has lived in
Venezuela for nearly three decades. The others were Pomona College
professor
Miguel Tinker-Salas, Edgardo Lander, Dick Parker, Jesús
Maria Herrera Salas, Margarita López Maya, Luis Lander, and Maria
Pilar García-Guadilla.

Many of the foreign
correspondents had probably barely heard of
these experts, since they were so immersed in the world of the opposition.
Many simply "parachuted" in to the country for periodic reporting
assignments, checked in at five-star hotels, and spent much of their time
hobnobbing with the elites and trading observations with one another.
Venezuela expert Julia Buxton called it the "Hilton Hotel" brand of
journalism. Even many of those stationed full-time in the country were
more connected to the upper and middle classes than to the working
class in the barrios, where some rarely ventured. Instead they hung
out in upscale neighborhoods at trendy restaurants and bars. One wire
service journalist's antipathy to Chávez was so blatant, she sported a
button above her desk that said SAQUEMOS AL LOCO — let's get rid of the
crazy one.

Foreign correspondents regularly ridiculed Chávez among one
another and complained about his long speeches. They would groan
when he came on television and mock his statements. Some hoped
he would lose the presidential election or get thrown out of office so
they would not have to listen to his hours-long talks any more. They
openly stated that his programs amounted to craziness and seemed to
be in lock-step with the opposition's thinking. Most of their sources, of
course, were linked to the opposition. At one point, one even repeated
in conversation an opposition slogan, opining that Chávez "has to go."

In one news bureau, shouting matches occasionally broke out
between journalists who wanted to present a more balanced portrait of
Chávez and those who were clearly on a mission to destroy him. The
debate about how to cover the president turned into a constant battle.
In the end, the anti-Chávez journalists won out, overwhelming in sheer
numbers those who favored a more neutral approach. It wasn't far off
from Andrés Izarra's experience working at RCTV.

To many foreign correspondents, Chávez was a laughingstock
and a nut. And their copy reflected it. In one typical story sent around
the world in February 2003 as the oil strike died, Reuters wrote that
Chávez's opponents "accuse him of ruling like a dictator, ruining the
economy with anti-capitalist policies, threatening media freedom and
trying to make Venezuela a copy of communist Cuba." In normal
journalism, that loaded sentence would be followed by an immediate
rebuttal giving the other side of the story and what Chávez's supporters
thought of him: namely, that his government was the most democratic
in the nation's history; that the opposition's coup and oil strike was what
was destroying the economy; that the media was arguably the freest in
the world, publishing and broadcasting outrageous attacks against the
president and encouraging his overthrow; and that Venezuela was a
far cry from communist Cuba, with a free press, a largely free-market
economy, and a multiparty political system with regular free and fair
elections. It even had a recall mechanism to remove the president and
other elected officials halfway through their terms.

But the writer didn't provide that information. It was standard operating
procedure at Reuters and many international or US news outlets.
The opposition to Chávez was highlighted, placed high up in stories,
and described in fine detail. The other view favoring him was mentioned
lower down or not at all, with little or none of the extensive detail
and supporting evidence given to the often spurious opposition charges.
The overall impression was that Chávez was a crazed dictator bent on
destroying one of Latin America's oldest thriving democracies. As the
media watchdog group FAIR put it, "Hugo Chávez never had a chance
with the US press."

Delacour, who sympathized with Chávez, also found the anti-
Chávez bent extended to the
op-ed pages of US newspapers. In fact, it
was even worse. When he tracked the opinion pages of the twenty-five
largest-circulation newspapers in the United States during the first six
months of 2005, he found that "95 percent of the nearly one hundred
press commentaries that examined Venezuelan politics expressed clear
hostility to the country's democratically elected president." The views
of op-ed writers such as progressive economist Mark Weisbrot, who criticized
US policies toward Chávez and viewed some of his programs
favorably, rarely appeared. Instead, rabid anti-Chávez critics such as
Mary Anastasia O'Grady at
The Wall Street Journal
and
Jackson Diehl
at
The Washington Post
had their own regular columns in which they
could constantly bash Chávez from the podium of two of America's
most powerful newspapers with little rebuttal to their often specious
arguments. No one had a regular column in any newspaper defending
Chávez. Newspaper editorial writers across the United States seemed
almost universally contemptuous of him. Delacour concluded that

In spite of the fact that recent polls indicate that Chávez's
domestic approval rating has surpassed 70 percent, almost all the
commentaries about Venezuela represent the views of a small
minority of the country, led by a traditional economic elite that
has repeatedly attempted to overthrow the government in clearly
anti-democratic ways.

In presenting opinions that are almost exclusively hostile
to the Chávez government, US commentaries about Venezuela
serve as little more than a campaign of indoctrination against a
democratic political project that challenges US political and economic
domination of South America. The near absence of alternative
perspectives about Venezuela has prevented US readers
from weighing opposing arguments so as to form their own opinions
about the Chávez government.

Some North Americans wanted to see for themselves what was happening
in Chávez's controversial Bolivarian Revolution. So they traveled
to the country and went on "reality tours" where they visited barrios and
other projects that journalists, columnists, and analysts often ignored
or had never been to even as they excoriated Chávez. What the visitors
found often contradicted the one-sided version provided by much of the
media. "All I had heard about Chávez was that he was a dictator," stated
Donna Santiago, a Philadelphia beneficiary of a Venezuelan program
providing discounted
home heating oil. "The man is far from that. He's
a really warm person. I wanted to bring him home and stick him in
the White House." The coordinator of a Venezuelan community radio
station noted that the experience of Santiago wasn't unusual. "People
go back to the USA and say, 'I went to Venezuela and saw something
totally contrary to what CNN is telling me.' "

Chávez did not accept the one-sided media coverage passively. If the
mainstream media would not report on his political project in a more
balanced way, he had a solution. He would create his own media
outlets.

During the 2002 coup, Chávez was left with only one media source
— small community radio stations often run out of people's apartments
in barrios and a handful of low-budget
independent community television
stations. These
alternative media outlets were virtually the only
ones sending out word about Chávez's kidnapping, and played an important
role in organizing resistance to the coup. They were also among
the first targets of repression during Pedro Carmona's brief reign. Procoup
police raided the stations, confiscated equipment, and detained
and sometimes beat staff.

After Chávez's return to power, he moved to expand and strengthen
the alternative media. The government granted broadcasting
licenses to
scores of "pirate" radio stations. It also provided $2.6 million in 2004 for
radio and television stations including
Catia TV in the sprawling barrio
of Catia in western Caracas. The number of alternative radio and television
stations jumped from about fifty nationwide before the coup to
three hundred by early 2004.

They were hardly media powerhouses.
Radio Perola, one of those
raided during the coup, transmitted from a thirteen-kilowatt station in
the former storeroom of a housing project. Its message reached barely
a few hundred homes. Another station,
Radio Un Nuevo Dia, had just
five kilowatts. Its transmitter was set up in the corner of a bedroom
in a cleaning lady's two-room cinder-block house. She hung bedsheets
from the ceiling to separate the equipment from the cots where her
two children slept. Operating mainly with volunteers, the alternative
stations played salsa music and focused on community problems like
trash pickup or potholes.

In November 2003 the government decided to move beyond
merely funding the alternative stations. It set up one of its own — Vive
TV. The idea was to present a different version of Venezuela, Latin
America, and the world than the one depicted by big corporate stations
like
Venevisión or
RCTV, which preferred steamy soap operas and
American-style consumer-oriented programming such as
Quien Quiere
Ser Millionario
(
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
).
Vive TV aimed to
focus on the lives not of beauty queens and movie stars but of the vast
Latin American underclass. By late 2004 its transmission was capable of
reaching between 60 and 70 percent of the Venezuelan population.

But the big corporate networks still dominated in Venezuela and
throughout Latin America. Chávez came up with another idea to
counter their control. He proposed a twenty-four-hour regionwide television
news network to be run cooperatively by various countries. It
would be Latin America's answer to CNN. Its "reason for being is the
need to see Latin America with Latin American eyes," stated its general
director, veteran journalist Aram Aharonian. Chávez also hoped
it would be a counterweight to the largely negative image of him created
by the mass media that dominated international news programs
in Latin America. They included
CNN en
Español, Spain's Televisión
Española, and Gustavo Cisnero's
Univisión.