Venezuela’s Chavez Denies License Renewal to Hostile TV Broadcaster

Fresh from his latest inauguration, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has decided to deny the renewal of the TV broadcasting license of Radio Caracas TV, a station that has opposed him for years. After 54 years on the air, RCTV may well be taken off by a government that is growing less and less democratic. The pretext is RCTV broadcasts of shows that “poison the souls of children with irresponsible sex.” In reality as José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director for Human Rights Watch, said, “Chavez is not renewing the concession to punish a medium for its opposition to the government.”

RCTV is famous for producing some of the sappiest, crappiest telenovelas (soap operas on steroids) in the Spanish-speaking world. However, it also shows Miguel Angel Rodriguez’s “The Interview,” which spends every weekday morning opposing just about everything the president does. Juan Forero of the Washington Post provided an example of this in a recent report, “Could we say to Venezuelans that a person of this sort, Hugo Chavez, is rising up against the liberty of Venezuelans?” Rodriguez asked a guest on a recent morning. “Is this constitutional reform, the enabling law and this giant step to consolidate 21st-century socialism a method of finding a legal way to install totalitarianism?”

What has the pro-Chavez crew up in arms is a lingering resentment of RCTV’s backing of the unsuccessful April 2002 coup against Mr. Chavez. Congressman Saul Ortega maintains the station bosses “were part of the team of conspirators. It’s a subversive channel that skirts the law. In no other country would that have been permitted.” Maybe they were. But if so, the proper thing to do is bring charges against them. It has been almost 5 years since the attempted coup, and no charges have been filed. Instead, the station will suffer a death sentence passed bureaucratically.

Leftwing fascism is no better than the rightwing kind, and like the rightist version, it doesn’t always arrive in one big bundle. Often, it creeps into a society. Venezuela still maintains a fairly robust press. Another TV channel, Globovision (available in the US on DirecTV), gives Mr. Chavez as much trouble as RCTV, and the newspapers of Caracas include anti-Chavez voices. All the same, Mr. Forero reports, “the government has steadily been pressuring the opposition media -- prompting a once aggressive station, Venevision, to dramatically tone down its news reports. Journalists say access to information is routinely denied, and state advertising is withheld from some opposition media outlets. The government is now planning to close many press relations offices, funneling all information through the communications minister, according to a report in El Universal newspaper.”

Defenders of the president point out that denying a license to RCTV silences only one outlet and an irresponsible one at that. However, the rest of the media are not oblivious. Closing a single outlet that has defied the government puts the others on notice. Mr. Chavez is taking yet another step down the path that so many jack boots have stomped before.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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