Slashdot Mirror
Venezuela's Contrarian TV Station Survives on YouTube
carlos_J writes "Ars Technica is running a story about RCTV, a Venezuelan television station whose broadcast license was refused renewal by the government. In response, the station turned to YouTube to get its message out. Says Ars, 'El Observador clips have been seen 175,000 times since May 28, and the channel is currently the most-subscribed channel of the week. While putting the station's shows on YouTube is an excellent idea, YouTube still lacks anything near the reach of over-the-air broadcasts. But the use of the site to avoid censorship is growing, and it's not hard to imagine a day in the near future when the site (or sites like it) becomes as essential as local TV stations. As that happens, YouTube will come into even more conflicts with governments that have an interest in controlling what their citizens see, It's already happening--Thailand's king, for instance, has a thing for iPods but isn't too keen on YouTube. Will Hugo Chavez show more tolerance? '"
uh... he'd be the guy who shut down the live television channel
(puts on thinking cap)
hmmm...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How long before Venezuela blocks YouTube?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
A joke of a country that takes better care of its poor than the United States.
Fine, fine. How about we take your computer and redirect the money you spend on broadband and software and give it to the poor? After all, using your money to give food and shelter to the homeless is much more important than your "need" to post on slashdot, yes?
And please don't think I'm defending Chavez himself in any ways, but let's remember that Thatcher refused to renew the license of Thames Television. True, their license was lost for capitalist reasons (not being profitable enough), and RCTV was removed for political reasons, but many would argue that those reasons are not really all that different.
And let's be honest about this. In America in 2007, if CNN started taking an active role in the violent removal of Bush (who, while contraversial, was democratically elected), how long do you think the Bush administration would put up with that?
Chavez is authoritarian, heavy-handed and a bit megalomaniacal. But sometimes all of us need to take a good look in the mirror about the state of democracy here before we get all high and mighty about defending democracy elsewhere.
"A government that robs Peter to pay Paul will always have the support of Paul." --George Bernard Shaw
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
"Communism is man's exploitation of man. Capitalism is just the opposite."
It's good that youTube is there to provide an outlet to anyone who has a video they'd like the world to see, and I'm sure the fans of that channel's shows will be happy to see them there. But considering that the station supported a coup to overthrow the democratically elected president of their nation, I can't blame him for taking their antennas away.
You can't take the sky from me...
Okay, I think that refusing to renew the license of this broadcaster was a bad move. BUT, under the legal theory that controls this sort of thing, it's pretty much a no-brainer.
i n_Venezuela#Events_leading_up_to_the_coup
Those broadcast licenses are *supposed* to be held in the public interest. This TV station supported a military coup against the democratically elected government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Attempted_coup_
That's a pretty unambiguous abuse of the public trust. Can you imagine what would happen to NBC's affiliate broadcast licenses if they supported a military coup against our government? If they weren't tried for treason and shot, they certainly wouldn't be allowed to keep broadcasting.
Which brings us to the subject of restraint - actually, Chavez has shown a remarkable degree of restraint so far against those who tried to overthrow him militarily. They haven't even filed charges against the military officers - the man that the coup tried to install as President was Chavez' opponent in following last Venezuelan election.
I seriously doubt that he's going to try and block Youtube.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
In my life I have learned that there are some good people who have terrible reputations because they have sinned against the shapers of opinion. Hugo Chavez is almost certainly one of these, a democratically elected leader who committed the crime of trying to spend oil profits on the poor instead of handing them over to American oil executives. The Bush government (never democratically elected, having stolen Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004) fomented at least one failed coup attempt against Chavez. So Chavez steps on private broadcasters who want to bring him down? Fox News was instrumental in installing our own torture-loving, war-mongering, never-elected wiretapper-in-chief; if I were the new president, I'd be just as rough on Fox as Chavez is on the would-be Foxes of his nation. And ask yourself: how much of what you "know" about him is from sources who want to destroy him? The poor of Venezuela LOVE this man. Do the poor of America love Bush? Could Bush walk through the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans without bodyguards? That's what I thought.
I wish that were true, but it's a bunch of crap. Barring the use of fairly extreme measures on your part to preserve security, it's easy enough for the government to find you and send some men around to cart you off to someplace highly pixelated on google maps.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A joke of a country that takes better care of its poor than the United States.
Take a ride around Caracas and look at the slums. You will swear you are in Haiti. If the Chavez government spends a larger fraction of the budget helping the poor, it is only because it has to, not because there is some parity between US poor and Venezuelan poor.
But this is irrelevant to the discussion. You can help the poor without resorting to censorship.
The actions of others don't dictate actions you made. We don't arrest or kill people who say I wish so and so was dead to find out later that someone killed him for you.
King or not, it is a free area of the world. You can't be free when the ruler stops you from your free speech. you cannot take anything that his supporters might do and automatically associate it to a person not participating in it. If so the far left wackos out there would make everyone guilty of some stupidity. It goes the same for the far right.
I can't belive someone in this day is even suggesting the thought of holding a third person responcible for someone elses free speech.
Let's pretend the government owns the airwaves as a public resource and licenses its use, ie the license to use the airwaves is granted by the government, not anyone's God-given right. Let's pretend a TV station who holds a government license for use of public airwaves sponsored a coup against a democratically-elected government. Let's pretend that coup attempt failed. Wouldn't the rule of law require that the people who attempted to overthrow the government be held accountable? Wouldn't a reasonable repercussion be that the TV station involved in the coup have its license revoked for its attempted overthrow of the government? Wouldn't it even seem especially charitible of the government to refrain from taking special action and simply refuse to renew the license when it came up for renewal?
Because that's exactly what happened here.
I have no sympathy for this station. Freedom of speech, my ass.
Tyrants almost always disguise their lust for power as sympathy for the persecuted and downtrodden. Castro did it in the 50's; Chavez is doing the same thing now.
I hope our youth are paying attention to what's happening in Venezuela right now, because I think the next 20 years will be an invaluable lesson in how a dictator-to-be dupes a populace with promises of govenrment-provided prosperity and national unity. In other words, he's going to steal from the minority rich to buy the support of the majority poor, and anyone who dissents will be silenced.
Pay attention, folks! Dictators haven't changed much since Lenin, despite each's promises of a socialist utopia. Maybe one of these centuries we'll recognize these tyrants before we let them rise to power and exploit their people.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I know it all looks rather dictatoreque of Chavez to refuse to renew their licence, but if any western media channel behaved in the way they did, normal regulatory bodies would have shut them down long ago. Imagine the bias of Fox news multiplied by 100 and you begin to get the picture. During the coup attempt against the Chavez government in 2002 the news channels deliberately manipulated news footage to make it look like Chavez supporters were shooting people. What do you think would happen to a US TV Station if it did something like that and the whole Channel was behind it? I should imagine if the BBC had supported a foreign-backed coup against the democratically elected government of the UK, they would be shut down as well.
What Venezuela needs is effective media monitors like Ofcom, perhaps with international observers. Also, the reason we keep hearing so much about Chavez is not because of his actions, it is because he is not a US ally. If he was a US ally and was doing these things, the media would be largely disinterested. That is important to realise. For example, much was made of his enabling act, yet the same kind of act was used by several previous Venezuelan presidents. The difference being that they were US allies and he isn't.
Chavez has also been given de facto dictatorial powers, so the law is de facto and de jure, whatever Chavez says it is, so of course "it's legal". But is it right?
If Chavez was really winning the battle of ideas and making things better in his country, he wouldn't have to oppress his oponents. Right now he's a genuinely popular leader, but he's going to end up driving Venezuela into the ground.
You don't understand the situation. RCTV didn't just call for Chavez to stand down - during the military coup it reported that Chavez decided to stand down when he in fact didn't.
Imagine that there was an armed group of people dragging Bush out of White House and TV stations claiming that Bush agreed to leave willingly - is that okay with you ?
It is in fact illegal in USA to scream "Fire" in a crowded theater when there is no fire. I would assume it's also illegal to claim that president of a country decided to leave his post when he didn't.
Obama 2012: our incompetent asshole is slightly less of an incompetent asshole than the other incompetent asshole !
The fastest route to bringing Venezuela back to reality is simply to stop buying Citgo products. Dry up the money. Dry up Chavez.
Even if a Citgo boycott did have an effect on Chavez...
While Chavez can be an enormous asshat at times, Venezuela looks like a human-rights paradise
compared to plenty of other oil-producing nations.
Redirecting your money to one of them isn't really the answer either.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
There is no democracy in the world that would allow a television station that participated in an illegal coup of a democratically elected leader to be on the air. It was amazing it wasn't stricken of its license immediately -- it was allowed to run until the end of its current license. You think if ABC tried to participate in an illegal coup of President Bush today -- someone who's far less popular in the US than Chavez is in Venezuela -- that they would still be allowed to operate? Are you serious?
Hey, our president hasn't gotten his approval ratings out of the mid 30 percent range in years, yet we haven't several consecutive days' worth of continually growing protests in our streets. You might want to hold back on that "wide popular support" assertion.
How does that hold to logic at all? You can't compare our protests to theirs. We are sufficiently isolated. They are not.
Do you know anything of Venezuela's protesting? There's an awful lot on it. It's a minority, although the disagreement in the closing for RCTV is a majority. You can look up the polls, I've posted one in another comment.
http://use.perl.org
But as you should probably know, the Chavez - Citgo link, is an urban myth.
There is such a thing as too much skepticism.
From the wiki:
"Citgo Petroleum Corporation or Citgo, a subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., the Venezuelan state-owned petroleum company"
"Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) is the Venezuelan state-owned petroleum company. It has activities in exploration, production, refining and exporting oil, as well as exploration and production of natural gas. PDVSA dominates the oil industry of Venezuela, the world's fifth largest oil exporter.
PDVSA purchased 50% of the United States gasoline brand Citgo from Southland Corporation in 1986 and the remainder in 1990."
So yeah... I think you can buy the "Chavez-Citgo link."
Now, that doesn't mean boycotting Citgo is a good idea. First of all, as my freak above pointed out, it simply redirects money to arguably worse governments that make money off oil. Second, oil companies actually sell to each other. If an Exxon station doesn't have enough while Citgo has too much, Exxon will buy up Citgo's and sell it, and they'll both be happy. (Sorry to put the damper on anyone's delusion about the nature of "competition" in a market economy.)
Due to the fungible nature of oil, it's really hard to boycott any one provider without a lot more coordination than you can hope to rally in this case.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
That's a new one. How come we're not hearing about people being "disappeared" there, like we were during the 80's when right-wing governments controlled much of South America?
There's plenty to criticize about Chavez, but you seem to be making shit up.
He isn't blocking RCTV
You're right, he only shut them down, confiscated their equipment, and some of his supporters have been filmed shooting at people protesting the station's shut down (see here).
But he's not blocking them, that would be something so monstrous only Bush would do it, right?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Contrary to some reports, the RCTV station is not being closed down. Rather, the Venezuelan government has chosen not to renew RCTV's licence to broadcast via Venezuela's Channel Two when this expires on 27 May. RCTV will continue to be able to operate freely in Venezuela on the public airwaves on cable and on satellite, as will the many TV and radio stations that RCTV owner Empresas 1BC runs across Venezuela[i].
Why has the government decided not to renew RCTV's licence?
As with other democracies, Venezuelan law allows the government the right to grant broadcast licences, renew them or let them expire. The government has made the decision not to renew because of RCTV's violation of numerous laws - most notably the active support it gave to a military coup in April 2002 to overthrow the democratically-elected Chávez government.
In addition to its violation of laws that prohibit the incitement of political violence, RCTV has not co-operated with tax laws and has failed to pay fines issued by the Telecommunications Commission.
RCTV's involvement in the 2002 coup
In April 2002, a violent military coup temporarily overthrew the democratically-elected government of President Hugo Chávez. At least 13 people were killed and in the 48 hours that the coup plotters held power there was violent repression against those protesting for Chávez's return and many were shot at by the police. The coup plotters overturned key components of Venezuela's democratic constitution - closing down the elected National Assembly, the Supreme Court and other state institutions.
Sections of Venezuela's private media - including RCTV - played an active role in supporting this coup which became known as the world's first 'media coup'. One of the coup leaders Vice-Admiral Victor Ramirez Perez, underlined the key role of the media in organising the coup, stating, "We had a deadly weapon - the media." The media's role is highlighted in the documentaries, The Revolution Will Not be Televised and the new John Pilger film The War on Democracy.[ii]
RCTV's specific involvement included running adverts encouraging the public to take to the streets and to overthrow the democratically elected president.[iii] As www.venezuelanalysis.com highlighted, RCTV was the first to broadcast the false claim that Chávez's supporters were shooting at opposition demonstrators, which then served as a justification for high level military generals to declare their disobedience to the government[iv] and RCTV also showed exclusive interviews with coup plotters.
RCTV's involvement was publicly highlighted on a television chat show the day after the coup, where journalists and military plotters boasted of their collaboration in creating a violent confrontation that could be used to justify the overthrow of the government. In this exchange, one conspirator says: "I must thank Venevision and RCTV" for the role it played[v]. RCTV's participation was so extensive that its production manager, Andrés Izarra, who opposed the coup, immediately resigned so as not to become an accomplice.
In addition to direct misrepresentation of events, RCTV also censored news reporting to try to stop the public from finding out what was really happening. RCTV's owner Marcel Granier ordered on the day of the coup and the following day that there was to be "No information on Chávez, his followers, his ministers, and all others" on the station. [vi] A managing producer of one of the station's news programmes affirmed this when testifying to the Venezuelan National Assembly. Instead, in the days of the coup, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to demand the return of President Chavez, RCTV showed only cartoons[vii]. This is in clear violation of regulations contained in Arti
minorty rich is a tyranny all in itself
in any society of wide income disparity, that is, a small pool of rich and a large pool of poor, there is always this essential story:
1. minority rich angers poor with self-serving policies
2. populist rides poor's discontent to revolutionary power
3. populist enriches his cronies, ossifies, and creates a new minority rich class
rinse and repeat forever
this story has held true from the french revolution to chavez (well, since before the french revolution with various peasant revolts, unsuccessful and successful), and will continue for many years to come
UNLESS:
a strong vibrant middle class emerges. only through a strong middle class does a country enjoy social and political stability
such as the usa. you have various wackadoodles in the usa talking about revolution, but such a thing is basically impossible amongst the suburban suv driving starbucks drinking set, which is, the majority. there will be no revoltuion in the usa, ever, UNLESS:
take note usa: rising ranks of the poor and ultrarich. the usa is trending back towards an unjust society: the middle class shrinks, the rich grow richer, the poor ranks rise
the middle class should be dominant and huge. only such a country can be stable and prosperous and truly just
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yeah, what a dictator. He was overthrown in a coup, and what did he do to the *lead organizer* of the coup (Pedro Carmona**) when he got back into power? Kill him on the spot? No, even worse: he was put under *house arrest*. Such strict, brutal house arrest that he was able to flee to Colombia. What a brutal dictator Chavez is!
Imagine how the US would react if Bush was overthrown in a coup and then got back into power. What do you think would happen to anyone even remotely related to the coup?
** By comparison, what was that great icon of freedom, the US-backed coup leader Pedro Carmona doing shortly after overthrowing the government? Why, his first acts were to dissolve the legislature, the judiciary, and abolish the constitution that was overwhelmingly approved in referrendum. But, in the strange world of the Right, he's a democratic hero, and Chavez is an evil dictator.
"Now," she thought, watching the dolphins adjust their bowties, "might be a good time to up my medication."
You must be skeptical, this tv station was just part of the opposition fireworks, If anyone can fake videos are them, specially if it is for self-defense.
Of course, for an European or American citizen this wouldn't make sense but in Latin America the media are just part of the good old corporative empire that was always allied to corrupt governments (aka the owner of the stations were family with the leaders OR even the leaders themselves) it is not hard to find a TV station owned by a political party in LA, seriously.
Of course, this doesn't mean Chavez is a saint, he is just moving his country's media from an over biased right to a biased left, both of which are very bad.
But seriously, this is not about freedom of speech, it is about corrupt media corporations battling a corrupt government.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
So the question appears to be - is advocating and/or supporting the forced overthrow of a democratically elected government a legitimate expression of dissent or not? If it is, then clearly Chavez is in the wrong - but then so is pretty much every democratically elected government which has a treason offence on the statute books. But if it isn't, then Chavez has not "stifled dissent" at all, but has instead shown remarkable tolerance - far more than some Western governments, it must be said.
Moreover, I'm having trouble generally with the idea that anyone who supports a military junta is working to repair democracy, promote legitimate opposition, or make their country safe for dissenters. It seems to me that what they're advocating will have rather the opposite effect - after all, armies have not historically been known for their tolerance of divergent opinions.
but if any western media channel behaved in the way they did, normal regulatory bodies would have shut them down long ago. Imagine the bias of Fox news multiplied by 100 and you begin to get the picture.
Forgive me, but what part of:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
do you not understand?
During the coup attempt against the Chavez government in 2002 the news channels deliberately manipulated news footage to make it look like Chavez supporters were shooting people. What do you think would happen to a US TV Station if it did something like that and the whole Channel was behind it?
Well, the factuality of this claim is in question. Assuming that we're talking about the same deaths during the coup (we might not be, of course), at least Freedom House agrees with the claim.
What would happen to a U.S. station if it incorrectly claimed government officials were involved in illegal murders? Well, we can already see how CNN was treated. Even if they hadn't issued a retraction they would have kept their broadcast license. Take a look around at all of the 9/11 conspiracy nonsense - where is the heavy hand of the U.S. government to silence it or keep it off the airwaves? Excluding the minds of the paranoid and delusional, nowhere. The U.S. government allows it. Why? Because we allow free speech and this is, in spite of all the nonsense we hear about, a free country. If anything the U.S. greatly benefits from having a free market of ideas, which inevitably includes numerous lemons.
What Venezuela needs is effective media monitors like Ofcom, perhaps with international observers.
Oh yeah, that's a great idea. Let's bring the magically impartial people who, unlike the rest of the world, do not bring in bias to their thought process. Then let's make them the ultimate gate keepers of what the people get to hear. And instead of censors, let's call them "media monitors" or "observers". That would be double plus good! No need to let the people hear those pesky claims of others and evaluate sources. They're too dumb for that sort of thing.
Also, the reason we keep hearing so much about Chavez is not because of his actions, it is because he is not a US ally. If he was a US ally and was doing these things, the media would be largely disinterested.
As an American who has lived in Latin America before (2 years in Argentina - slums of Buenos Aires, 3 months Chile - rather nice parts of Santiago), I must agree that media coverage of Latin America is lacking in the U.S.. Most people simply don't care about the area here in the states (prior to traveling to Argentina, numerous people asked me what part of Africa it was in), and that leads to little coverage unless something bad happens like, say, a country turning from democracy to a dictatorship very, very quickly.
We can play with the red herring of "people only dislike Venezuela because he dislikes the U.S.!" all we want. No need to defend the U.S. on this note - it has in the past, does in the present, and will in the future associate with many unsavory characters. That's the way international relations work, and if you can find a single country that hasn't done the same then please let me know. The question is not so much one of International Relations in my book as it is a matter of domestic government. That said, consider the following:
One claim against the station is that it allegedly helped a military coup, making it in the view of many "bad". If that's the case, then what about Chavez, who staged his own failed military coup in 1992? Was that not