Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts

Friday, December 24, 2010

A media agenda for Venezuela? Surely Not!

Part of the daily routine at IKN Nerve Centre™ is to check on news stories doing the rounds in the region and to help that along, your humble scribe has a Google News widget that separates news stories by country. It's always Spanish language reports, but for some unknown reason this morning the whole Google feature had lapsed into English language (I have no idea why...first time ever).

Anyway, one shrugs one's shoulders and gets on with it. As usual I skimmed across the various country buttons such as Brazil...
Brazil, Red Cross to take part in Colombia hostage release
Bogota – Brazil and the International Committee of the Red Cross agreed to provide logistical support for the planned release of five Colombian public ...
Fox News View related stories »
...which had the usual mix of bizstuff, a bit of Lula-talk, political bits and bobs etc. And so it continued with Peru....
Salinas teens' services destined for Peru
BY KIMBER SOLANA • ksolana@thecalifornian.com • December 24, 2010 About a dozen Salinas High School students will welcome the New Year in Peru by working ...
The Salinas Californian
...and its general, newsworthy infromative mix, then to Colombia....
Brazil, Red Cross to take part in Colombia hostage release
Bogota – Brazil and the International Committee of the Red Cross agreed to provide logistical support for the planned release of five Colombian public ...
Fox News View related stories »

...and the same kind of thing, even Paraguay...

WikiLeaks: Paraguay govt sought DEA spying help
By PEDRO SERVIN AP ASUNCION, Paraguay -- The Paraguayan government worked closely with the DEA earlier this year to expand its capacity to spy on cell phone ...
Washington Post

...and Bolivia got the same type of journalistic, no-nonsense information-first headlines that keep you up to date with things happening in the country.
Bolivia Recognizes Palestine As Independent State
(RTTNews) - Latest in a trend of growing Latin American political support for the Palestinian people, Bolivia recognized Palestine as a "free and ...
RTT News View related stories »

But then I clicked on the Venezuela button:
Venezuela: Emergency Powers Given to Chavez Endanger Human Rights
by Anna Mahjar-Barducci Due to the Venezuelan flood emergency that resulted in more than 130000 homeless nationwide, the Parliament gave President Hugo ...
Hudson New York View related stories »

Notice anything different about the coverage, folks? This was all a bit of an eye-opener to me, because I usually get the Google news service piping me Spanish language reports and features which never hold this amount of obvious media bias. For sure they'll cover the polemic issues out of Venezuela, but there's no obsession on Chávez, pseudo-human rights issues and general vitriol towards the country, because Venezuela has all its own business, political and social affairs worthy of report and comment. In Spanish language reports, headlines will tell you what to expect in the report, they don't immediately try to enforce an image that's been built up around a country. 

No wonder you guys get South American affairs so wrong.
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Saturday, June 13, 2009

Bagua: The stinking hypocrisy of English language media coverage in South America


Imagine the sandal and headlines if Hugo Chávez closed a radio station in Venezuela just days after it spoke out against the government's position on a hot topic?

What kind of fuss would the biased jerks (sometimes known as 'reporters') filling your head with bullshit about LatAm make if Correa closed a radio station that had, just a week earlier, informed people about the massacre being carried out by national police on its local population and bravely bucked the trend of local media silence on what was really happening?

Consider the ruckus that the pathetic, corporate lapdogs spoonfeeding you news would be eager to create if Evo Morales closed a media channel by finding some non-existent technicality and rushing through paperwork.

And now consider that the only English language coverage of an enormous story in Peru about the sudden and totally unjustified closure of Peru's Radio La Voz de Bagua can be found in the marginal independent website 'Living In Peru' (a site that's normally so pro-everything-Peru it's virtually unreadable)?

You want total violation of freedom of speech and gagging of the media? Forget Venezuela and come to Peru, because not only can you do it at a stroke of a pen but you can get away with it, thanks to corporate media's hypocritical silence. Reuters? Bloomberg? AP? AFP? New York Times? Financial Times? Dow Jones Newswires? Washington Post? LA Times? The Guardian? NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING, despite having lazy , self-serving hacks crawling all over the continent.

Here's the beginning of the Living In Peru article, please click through for the rest:
Peru's Ministry of Transports and Communication has officially closed the local Radio Station La Voz de Utcubamba (in the Amazonian Region).

According to Carlos Flores, spokesman for La Voz de Utcubamba, the station has all its legal licenses, permits and paperwork “in order” since 13th March 2007.

However, the aforementioned Ministry issued a closure order against the radio station (official number 211-2009-MTC) alleging that it had not “sent the documentation regarding licenses for some of the station’s equipment”.

This is the only radio station that has transmitted live coverage of the Bagua conflict, providing a voice through its microphones to the people of Bagua CONTINUES HERE

Translation: "Do not discriminate. The deaths of police and indigenous are equally as painful. The jungle is not a battleground."

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Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Government takes over TV channel

This week in South America, the controversial owner of a national TV channel has decided to step aside after doing a deal with his President that means he won't be called in for the multimillion dollar debt he's leaving behind. In return the TV channel has been taken over by the state and will be run by a branch of the Ministry of the Economy. Meanwhile the President has picked the new head of the channel and the whole of the editorial staff has been sacked, almost certainly to be replaced by pro-government lackeys.

The thing is, you probably haven't heard a single thing about this usurping of power because it didn't happen in Venezuela, Bolivia or Ecuador. Because the above events have all taken place in "friendly nation" Peru there's just no news value, is there? Ex-Pres Alejandro Toledo is always good for an anti-Twobreakfasts quote, and his "They want to take over the media" is only one step behind reality. Too late, they already have.

UPDATE: This morning, President Twobreakfasts lied to a press conference on the subject. He said that the gov't has no interest in taking charge of a television station. well good thing, too, as it's illegal for the Peru government to control a private media channel. But it doesn't answer why he decided to sack all the editorial team.
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Friday, May 8, 2009

Venezuela: I'm confused


News from Venezuela is that the Supreme Court has denied a restraining order action on RCTV and Globovision (two rampant opposition TV channels) brought against them by The Latin American Foundation for the Development of Equity (Fundaequidad). The Supreme Court upheld the TV channels' right to free speech under article 58 of the Venezuelan constitution.

And thus the opposition media, via the most important judicial chamber in the land, upholds its constitutional right of unfettered opinion and is free to continue with its accusations that the government of Venezuela is gagging free speech and owns its puppet judiciary.

Is that right? Am I missing something here?

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Monday, May 4, 2009

Freedom of the Press, USA style

And so we get the latest installment of the "Freedom House" (I mean, you're just asking for trouble with a name like that) Annual Media Study. So let's not dwell on the boring stuff (I mean, why does Iceland always manage to top every one of these "life quality" type polls? And why is it the worst affected country by the financial crisis? And are these two facts related?) because I know that all you care about is Latin America and how we got on down here. So here's the necessary chart, again colour-coded for your dee lek tay shun.


Four countries are deemed by William Taft and friends to have free press down here. Thanks Bill.

1) Costa Rica. Reason: Those dudes are so relaxed they can't be bothered to complain about anything.

2) Uruguay. Reason: Cows outnumber people 100 to 1. Four times as many people live in Buenos Aires as the whole of Uruguay and you want controversy and drama? Go drink a medio/medio.

3) Chile.Reason: Press is deemed free because when media bosses share cocktail receptions /holiday homes / lovers with gov't ministers, the journalists who work for them aren't stupid enough to question anything done by the administrations.

4) Guyana. Reason: Not a clue. Not only that but Guyana climbed out the yellow zone this year.

Anyway, congrats to the above greenies, I suppose. Then we have a whole bunch of states in the yellow, "partly free" zone. We got Bolivia up quite high (cos Santa Cruz papers tell the locals what they want to know, same with La Paz papers), we got Peru kinda middling (despite editors sacked by owners because they had the guts to point out rampant APRA corruption) and we have Argentina scoring quite low (mainly due to the ongoing spat between The Kirchners and Grupo Clarín) and a host of other mediocre scores for their own reasons.

Really, the yellow zone is where all of LatAm belongs, as the general LatAm saga of corrupt business&media pushes against corrupt government and then corrupt gov't pushes back (lather, rinse, repeat), but that just wouldn't be controversial enough, would it now? Because we gotta have

Venezuela in the red zone!

Despite letting media channels operate for five whole years after playing a key role in the failed coup d'etat, and despite reading rabid anti-Chavez headlines every single day in the most popular of dailies (without any editors getting booted or arrested, natch), Freedom House decides that Venezuela has a "Not Free" press and puts it in the same bunch as Zimbabwe, North Korea, Palestine and Israel.

Phun Phactoid: The director of Freedom House was for many many moons a bigwig at USAID. Almost certainly unrelated to the argument...not.
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Monday, January 5, 2009

USA denies Chávez assassination plot


If you're a media dude in the LatAm of today and you want to create your own personal false polemic that grabs a corner of the limelight, here's a rough guide. Follow the bouncing ball, people:

1) Start some wild rumour that attacks the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez, or just pick up on the latest BS being chattered around the ruling class bars and restaurants in Caracas/Maracaibo.

2) Collar some government lackey as they leave office at the end of the day, or at a cocktail reception or in the local McDonalds or wherever.

3) Ask him/her if there is any truth in the rumour that yada yada...

4) Diligently note the response

5) Bingo! You got yourself a headline.

And also note that, far from being jealous, other media dudes will be happy to feed off your BS and run stories such as "According to a report in the Daily Blabber, Venezuela rejected all yada yada blah blah.....". So imagine for a second if that kind of trash journalism was allowed to happen in "the serious countries". You'd quickly get headlines such as "USA Denies Chávez Assassination Plot" or "The UK Denies Insurgency Campaign in Bolivia" or "Sarkozy Insider Denies Presidential Cocaine Habit" or whatever.

This note was brought to you by the following sponsors:

"International Herald Tribune", "Venezuela Denies Iran-Syria Missile Report"

"El Universal", "Venezuela Denies Prescence of FARC Bosses In Country"

"Reuters", "Venezuela Denies Mulls Changes To Forex Rate System"

"Associated Press", "Venezuela Denies Report That Chávez Invited Russia To Open Military Base In Venezuela"

There are another 10,000 or so of these; just Google "Venezuela denies" and see what happens for yourself.

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