First, there’s this little gem from La Hojilla, VTV’s excellent news-dissection show:
…in which the host, Mario Silva, has great fun at the expense of two journalists. One, Mayela Leon, is from the anti-Chavez news channel Globovision; the other is from Venevision, also an oppositionist channel. Leon is particularly dumb in the way she incriminates her employers, not to mention herself. She admits that her station was complicit in the coup; however, she makes an absurd claim: that the ten coup-mongering military commanders didn’t name in advance how many deaths had happened as a result of the staged violence on April 11. (In fact, the “trial” recording made by CNN’s correspondent, Otto Neustadt, quite specifically shows they pegged the toll as “six dead and dozens injured”!)
Silva is particularly amused at how a set of microwave equipment owned by the Venezuelan people–namely, the transmission towers on Mt. Avila–was made to serve not the people, but the coup. Since the collaborating “journalists” (and by now, that term should ONLY be applied to them in the loosest sense) used public property in a coup d’etat against a democratic leader, that makes them guilty of treason. RCTV has already paid the price for its role in that high crime. Globovision and Venevision, however, are still on the air, even though both are no less at fault. (When do their licences come up for renewal, BTW? Anyone who knows, please drop me a comment–thanks.)
Then there’s this:
Patricia Poleo, rabid opposition “journalist” (again, note those snarky little quotation marks) confesses that the commercial media all showed up at the presidential palace on April 12, the day after the coup, to receive instructions from the new “government” (again, note quotes) on how to slant their news. The order: no pro-Chavez anything. No word on the massive protests mobilized to bring Chavez back. No word on the fact that most of the military was not behind the rebel officers. Only pro-coup, pro-Carmona news allowed.
And when the coup was obviously falling apart like a well-ripened Roquefort cheese? Then they were under orders to show no news at all. Only movies and cartoons.
The people, in other words, had no right to be informed, only mindlessly “entertained”–if not propagandized and lied to at every turn.
Yeah, tell me those “journalists” were objective. Yeah, tell me that the non-renewal of RCTV’s licence was an affront to free speech. Yeah, yeah–blah, blah. Exactly what was the media’s complicity in this antidemocratic act, if not the worst attack on free speech since Hitler illegitimately seized power in Germany–or Bush illegitimately seized power in the US? Shit, this is the exact sort of thing one would have expected to see in the old Soviet Union–but most certainly not a newly “free and democratic” (again, note quotes) Venezuela!
So, where are those “democratic free-speech advocates” now, when it’s been revealed beyond all doubt that your heroes are liars? Let’s hear from you, if you have anything worthwhile to say. I promise that I will publish every stupid thing you say, unedited–in the name of free speech, of course.
