Anti-Chávez channel is taken down

Stop picking on Chavez - simply because big oil got kicked out of his country. Chavez saved that country from being exploited by big oil. He is their savior.

Dirty Chavez.

How come no one care about Venezuela when the poor people were starving, and the rich were raking it in, and now that the rich are having to spread things around we get all concerned about Democracy in Venezuela. How come papers in the US don't give a shit about the coup in Venezuela, or Honduras, or Haiti in the last decade but are all pious when someone the poor people love shuts down a television station.

IF YOU ACTUALLY WANT TO KNOW WHY THE POOR PEOPLE LOVE HIM THEN READ THIS http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/venezuela-2009-02.pdf
This paper looks at some of the most important economic and social indicators during the 10 years of the Chávez administration in Venezuela, as well as the current economic expansion. It also looks at the current situation and challenges.
Among the highlights:

The current economic expansion began when the government got control over the national oil company in the first quarter of 2003. Since then, real (inflation-adjusted) GDP has nearly doubled, growing by 94.7 percent in 5.25 years, or 13.5 percent annually.

Most of this growth has been in the non-oil sector of the economy, and the private sector has grown faster than the public sector.

During the current economic expansion, the poverty rate has been cut by more than half, from 54 percent of households in the first half of 2003 to 26 percent at the end of 2008. Extreme poverty has fallen even more, by 72 percent. These poverty rates measure only cash income, and do not take into account increased access to health care or education.

Over the entire decade, the percentage of households in poverty has been reduced by 39 percent, and extreme poverty by more than half.

Inequality, as measured by the Gini index, has also fallen substantially. The index has fallen to 41 in 2008, from 48.1 in 2003 and 47 in 1999. This represents a large reduction in inequality.

Real (inflation-adjusted) social spending per person more than tripled from 1998-2006.

From 1998-2006, infant mortality has fallen by more than one-third. The number of primary care physicians in the public sector increased 12-fold from 1999-2007, providing health care to millions of Venezuelans who previously did not have access.

There have been substantial gains in education, especially higher education, where gross enrollment rates more than doubled from 1999-2000 to 2007-2008.

The labor market also improved substantially over the last decade, with unemployment dropping from 11.3 percent to 7.8 percent. During the current expansion it has fallen by more than half. Other labor market indicators also show substantial gains.

Over the past decade, the number of social security beneficiaries has more than doubled.

Over the decade, the government’s total public debt has fallen from 30.7 to 14.3 percent of GDP. The foreign public debt has fallen even more, from 25.6 to 9.8 percent of GDP.

Inflation is about where it was 10 years ago, ending the year at 31.4 percent. However it has been falling over the last half year (as measured by three-month averages) and is likely to continue declining this year in the face of strong deflationary pressures worldwide.

The Venezuelan media is not so restricted. Of course that does not justify this new proposed law, which is terrible. But neither does it justify the widespread misrepresentation of the reality of press freedom in Venezuela. (Even if this new law were to pass, it would have little or no effect, since it would not be enforced and would probably be ruled unconstitutional by the country's supreme court.) Venezuela is not Colombia, where journalists have to flee the country in fear of their lives when the president denounces them.

MacShane is taking advantage of the fact that after 10 years of media misrepresentation with no significant countervailing force, anyone can say anything about Venezuela and Chávez and it will not be challenged. A group of Latin America scholars recently bought a full-page ad in the Columbia Journalism Review to call attention to outright fabrications by the Associated Press.

My congratulations to the British left for not caving in to this crude McCarthyism. We need more courage like that in the world.

Mark Weisbrot

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/04/venezuela-media-freedom-chav...

This is not to say that Chavez doesn't open his mouth before thinking and that he is a perfect president, but recording this without the context of media's involvement in coups is incredibly biased...

Free press? Venezuela beats the US

Of course Chávez's new media law is bad. But it won't make a dent in the huge amount of press freedom in Venezuela

Denis MacShane attacks the British left for defending Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan president, against an onslaught from the media, "new cold warriors", and rightwing demagogues throughout the world. His rhetorical trick is to tar the left with a new media law currently being debated in the Venezuelan congress, which he says "would impose prison sentences of up to four years for journalists whose writings might divulge information against 'the stability of the institutions of the state'."

Of course this is a bad law. There are a number of bad laws on the books in Venezuela, and in fact numerous countries in the region have desacato (pdf) laws that make it a crime to insult the president. Do MacShane's targets – he mentions Ken Livingstone and Richard Gott – support such laws? I would bet serious money that they do not. So his main line of attack is misleading if not downright dishonest.

MacShane also misrepresents the reality of press freedom in Venezuela. In fact, there is a much more oppositional media in Venezuela than in the US, and a much greater range of debate in the major media. This can be seen simply by looking at the most important media in both countries. In the US, for example, not even the most aggressive rightwing commentators such as Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity would present the idea that the president should be lynched. But Globovision, one of the largest-audience TV networks, had a show where a guest did just that.

This is not an isolated example in Venezuela. Its media routinely broadcasts reporting and commentary that would not be allowed under FCC rules in the US. And the vast majority of the media in Venezuela is still controlled by the rightwing opposition. This fact was buried in a footnote in a highly prejudiced and misleading 230-page report by Human Rights Watch. The footnote acknowledged that RCTV, which lost its broadcast licence for a long list of offences that would have landed its owners in jail in the US, still has a cable audience that is bigger than all the Venezuelan state television combined.

If the US had a media like Venezuela's, Barack Obama could never have been elected president. That's because the majority of Americans would have believed, as those beholden to some rightwing sources do, that he is a Muslim who was not born in the US. Think of Fox News and the Washington Times as the vast majority of the US media – that is the reality in Venezuela, only the media is more political and less accurate than America's biggest rightwing outlets.

What happens when our major media threaten to step over the line and become political actors? They almost never do it, but in 2004, two weeks before the 2004 US election, the Sinclair Broadcast Group of Maryland, which owns the largest chain of TV stations in the US, decided to broadcast a film that accused candidate John Kerry of betraying US prisoners in Vietnam.

Nineteen Democratic senators sent a letter to the FCC calling for an investigation, and some made public statements that Sinclair's broadcast licence could be in jeopardy if it carried its plans through. Sinclair backed down and did not broadcast the film.

Until there is a more democratic media structure in Latin America, there will inevitably be conflicts between progressive governments and right-wing media outlets. It is of course possible that governments will abuse their regulatory authority with respect to the media. So far, however, it has been overwhelmingly the other way around: major media outlets have abused their power and control over the means of communication in ways that undermine democracy.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He is co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2000), and has written numerous research papers on economic policy. He is also president of Just Foreign Policy.

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/op-eds-&-columns/op-eds-&-columns/media-battles-in-latin-america-not-about-free-speech/

That said, reasonable people may differ on what is the proper role of government in the regulation of media, or what limits – if any – should be placed on freedom of expression. Some civil libertarians object to laws allowing individuals to file civil lawsuits for libel or defamation, and certainly a case can be made that in the UK, for example – where the law allows a much broader range of action against media than in the US – that this unduly inhibits the press.

But international organizations or editorialists who take an absolutist or anarchist position with regard to countries such as Ecuador should apply the same standards to the United States and other rich countries.
For example, about two weeks before the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, the Sinclair Broadcast Group of Maryland, which owns the largest chain of TV stations in the U.S., decided to broadcast a film that was highly critical of candidate John Kerry. Nineteen Democratic senators sent a letter to the US Federal Communications Commission calling for an investigation, and some made public statements that Sinclair's broadcast license could be in jeopardy. Sinclair backed down and did not broadcast the film.
The reason that such actions are rare in the United States is that the media rarely breaks certain rules or even comes close. This is true even of Fox News, which is considered to be the most partisan of major U.S. media outlets. And it is difficult to think of any cases of U.S. media doing what Teleamazonas did – broadcasting false reports that appear to be intended to destabilize the government. It simply would not be tolerated in the United States.

Of course the standards of the U.S. media are a low bar for comparison. After all, this is a country where the major media – by simply repeating official statements without challenge – helped lead us into the Iraq war by convincing a majority of Americans that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. On the home front, our media has also convinced most Americans under 50 that they will never see their social security benefits – something that is about as likely as the end of all federal government authority in the United States. On the great issues of the day, the major U.S. media more often than not fail in their duty to inform the public.

But the comparison is still relevant. Some commentators in Ecuador have argued that the government’s proposed telecommunications law will lead not to actual censorship but to self-censorship. But watching the TV news and talk shows in Ecuador, there is far less self-censorship than in the United States. (Again, a low bar: for the most part, over the past eight years, you had to go outside the U.S. to see images of U.S. military or Afghan/Iraqi casualties in these foreign wars). Government officials, for example, are grilled more aggressively by host journalists than they are in the U.S.

My own view is that the best solutions will be found in the area of introducing more competition in the media. The proposed media law in Argentina provides for the broadcast spectrum to be divided equally among private, public, and community media outlets. It is possible that Ecuador will move in a similar direction. These changes are especially important in a region where internet coverage reaches perhaps a third of the population, and the vast majority of citizens get their news from broadcast media. As Michael J. Copps, a commissioner on the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has emphasized, “"Using the public airwaves is a privilege -- a lucrative one -- not a right.” He has argued, in the New York Times and elsewhere, that the U.S. government should use its legal authority to deny the renewal of broadcast licenses to media outlets that do not honor their pledge to serve the public interest.

People need to put this in the context of a vilently oppositional media despite the fact that Chavez wins the popular vote. All of the media supported the coup against him in 2002 despite it being not democratic obviously, and despite his support by the people.

Media Battles in Latin America Not About “Free Speech”

Mark Weisbrot
The Guardian Unlimited, January 8, 2010

For at least a month now in Ecuador there has been a battle over regulation of the media. It has been in the front pages of the newspapers most of the time, and a leading daily, El Comercio, referred to the fight as one for “defense of human rights and the free practice of journalism.” This was in response to the government’s closing down of a major TV station, Teleamazonas, for three days beginning December 22.

International organizations such as the Washington-based Human Rights Watch and the Committee to Protect Journalists joined the Ecuadorian media in denouncing the government’s actions, with the latter calling it “nothing but an attempt to intimidate the media into silence.”

But as is generally the case when private media monopolies are challenged by progressive governments, the view presented by these powerful corporations and their allies in the United States is one-sided and over-simplified. Ecuador, with a democratic left government, is facing the same challenge faced by all of the left-of-center governments in the region: the private media is dominated by heavily monopolized, often politically partisan, right-wing forces opposed to the progressive economic and social reforms that the electorate voted for. All of these governments have responded to that challenge.

In Argentina, a new media law seeks to break up the media monopoly held by the Clarín Group, which according to press reports controls 60 percent of the media. The Brazilian government created, for the first time in 2007, a federally-launched public TV station. The Bolivian government, which faces perhaps the most hostile media in the hemisphere, has also expanded public media. What all of these governments are doing – although they would not put it that way – is trying to move their media more in the direction of what we have in the United States. That is, a media which is heavily biased toward the interests of the wealthy and the upper classes, but nonetheless adheres to certain journalistic norms that limit the degree to which the media is a direct, partisan, political actor.

In the case of Ecuador, it is worth looking at the details of why Teleamazonas’ broadcasting was suspended for three days. The government found that it had, for the second time in a year, violated a rule that prohibits the broadcast of false information that can lead to social disturbances. In the first offense of this type, for which the station was fined $40, it had broadcast a false report indicating that the government’s electoral commission had a “clandestine center” where voting results were manipulated. The second offense, committed in May, was a false report stating that, as a result of proposed exploration for natural gas on the island of Puná, the people there would not be able to fish for six months. Since most of the labor force on the island makes their living from fishing, the false report actually did lead to social disturbances. Both of these reports were found to have no basis in fact. It is also worth noting that social disturbances in Ecuador are often more serious than in the United States: eight of the last ten presidents did not serve out their terms of office.

I think it is the media's job to inform the public in any given country. That does mean airing the presidents speeches. Talking about a speech is just commentary. Fox should be required to air presidential speeches if they want to be recognized as a news source.

Not a surprise, people aren't just now learning that chavez shouldn't be running a country and that hes going to stop any and all things that goes against him, specially if those things are in his country.