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Independent Venezuelan media?

Thread ID: 19306 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2005-07-27

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arkady [OP]

2005-07-27 13:04 | User Profile

This struck me at first as a rather strange story. A Venezuelan media company is opening a new TV station (in Venezuela), whose aim is to be “an alternative to media giants.” Why should the amerikan kongress care about what a Venezuelan TV station does, you may ask, and rightly so. And yet, kongress is mightily perturbed, making ostentatiously self-righteous denials that it might try to go so far as jamming the station, yet preparing to flood Venezuela with what it calls "accurate news" (just like we get here at home, right?) and fretting that it might be broadcasting “anti-americanism.” Stranger still, the Venezuelan station's owners have brought the tame darkie Danny Glover in as a front man to testify on their behalf. What does he know about Venezuelan broadcasting? Still scratching your head?

So was I. Just why should this foreign TV station, operating in its own country, be any concern of ours? Well, look at it this way: who runs the “media giants?” And who would be most likely to feel threatened by the emergence of “alternatives” to their product? And who would be terrified of independent media outlets springing up in other countries -- or, worst of all, even here? Imagine, people getting news from sources that haven't been given prior approval by the Media Lords! Glover even darkly (pun intended) hints that "control of ideas by the established media" in the United States has created "a large degree of insecurity and fear," which is as close as even a negro is permitted to get to naming nameskis.

In that light, this story makes rather more sense: [url]http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/07/26/venezuela.channel.ap/index.html[/url]