Posted on 05/30/2007 1:46:36 PM PDT by GFritsch
The Venezuelan government's shut-down of Radio Caracas Television on Sunday marks a low point for free speech in the Americas. President Hugo Chávez replaced a fierce critic of his administration with a state-owned TV station that spouts government propaganda.
As disturbing as is this latest move to chill freedom of speech, the regional trend is just as troubling. In some countries, politically motivated governments attack media in an attempt to silence opposition voices. In other countries, journalists are being killed with impunity in the absence of effective law enforcement. Recent examples include:
• Ecuador, where President Rafael Correa has filed a criminal-defamation complaint against the La Hora newspaper's editorial-board chairman, Francisco Vivanco Riofrío. Mr. Vivanco faces up to six months in jail for an editorial that criticized the government for trying ''to govern with disturbances, rocks and sticks.'' President Correa used an antiquated law against insulting the president to punish the paper. This charge could be levied against newspapers in any democratic country with free speech.
• Honduras, where President Manuel Zelaya ordered private radio and television stations to air government propaganda for up to 12 days. The broadcasts began on Monday night, and the first featured the president himself. Mr. Zelaya criticizes Honduran media for unfair coverage. But his authoritarian takeover of the airwaves invites comparisons to Mr. Chávez's brazen assault on freedom of expression.
• Mexico, which has become the second most-deadly country in the world for journalists after Iraq. More Mexican journalists have been murdered on the job than in Colombia, where journalists long have been targets. With drug turf wars assailing Mexico, journalists increasingly are among the victims. Corruption and ineffective law enforcement allow perpetrators of the crimes to go unpunished. The unfortunate result is media self-censorship. Hermosillo-based Cambio Sonora newspaper just shut down after being bombed twice in two months. It had denounced the lack of protection against of organized crime. Mexico's federal government needs to strengthen its response. Those who assault media stifle democracy itself.
The Organization of American States should redouble efforts to reverse these discouraging anti-media trends. For all the democratic reforms in Latin America in the 1990s, too many laws curbing free speech remain on the books and too many journalists remain in the line of fire. This is unfortunate, because the press provides a vital check on government corruption, waste and abuse of power.
And the killing is being done by whom?
All the illegal immigrants need to go back over our Southern border and fight for their First Amendment rights there.
Oh, I forgot. Mexicans have no First Amendment rights.
This is unfortunate, because the press provides a vital check on government corruption, waste and abuse of power.
So that's what our media is supposed to do.
And what gets stifled when the media assault the republic itself, like they love to do in the United States?
}:-)4
All those who love Hugo still love Hugo...
It does nothing of the sort.
“The Organization of American States should redouble efforts to reverse these discouraging anti-media trends.”
Yeah, no doubt they’ll protest in the strongest terms. But they’ll REALLY mean it this time. No, really.
Funny how its the socialist darlings who are muzzling the Press. I don’t see the NYT protesting too much over this.
So what we do is set up a lobbying group for press freedom in Mexico, headquarter it in Mexico City, put out the word among the illegal population, and make sure it pays well. Some of them go home.
NNow, what other industries can we set up there?
One wonders how the liberals who are so enamored of Chavez view this.
the press provides a vital check on government corruption, waste and abuse of power.It does nothing of the sort.
In America, at least, journalism styles itself as "objective." But journalism has rules ("If it bleeds, it leads," "Man Bites Dog" rather than "Dog Bites Man," and "never question the objectivity of a fellow journalist"). Those rules systematically exclude what normally happens and what isn't bad.Those rules are in place to promote journalism at the expense of the people who get things done. Consequently journalism is the furthest thing from objectivity.
Liberals: It's Bush's fault.
Hugo Chavez, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin could not have said it better. Maybe Hugo will give you a job...to determine the continued Hugo-objectivity of the peoples' struggle against bourgeois concepts of press freedom and countervailing opinion
Is FOX News (besides FR/Internet) the only widely-known media outlet reporting on the dictator Chavez, and his method-of-operation in shutting down a media outlet and the resulting demonstrations?
BTTT
The principle of the First Amendment is freedom.Maybe Hugo will give you a job...to determine the continued Hugo-objectivity of the peoples' struggle against bourgeois concepts of press freedom and countervailing opinionAnd freedom is inconsistent with censorship.
The reality is that although radio transmission can exist without censorship, broadcasting - the ability to be hearable over a geographical area of hundreds of square miles - has depended on censorship of everyone else but the relative handful of government licensees. The principle of broadcasting is that you have a right to listen purchased with the duty to shut up.
That system was justified on the grounds that bandwidth was scarce. But in the 21st Century, bandwidth is not scarce in the way that it (arguably) has historically been. For example, there are laws against intercepting someone else's cell phone call - which means that it is technologically possible for anyone to do so, and hence, technologically, it is possible that cell phones could be constructed to be able to listen to any of a large number of other cell phones. That is, if the law were changed it is technologically possible to have hundreds or thousands of "radio" channels in a given city. So the "limited bandwidth" rationale of FCC censorship is at this point something of a red herring.
In an alternative universe where the FCC promotes our ability to talk rather than promoting only our ability to listen, there's nothing wrong with broadcasting as such. In that universe broadcasting is just like blogging or FReeping. And not different in principle from newspaper publishing - there is no barrier to entry.
But in the real America, the newspapers have gone into "go along and get along" mode with each other. Newspapers do not knock their competitors but promote journalism in general rather than saying that our brand of newspaper is giving you the word, and Brand X newspaper is slanted. So what you have is a situation where all the newspapers claim that journalism as such is objective, by definition. Journalism has created itself as an establishment which, by the power of PR, is able to persuade a huge plurality if not a majority of people to check their mental faculties at the door and accept the premise that journalists are superior beings who - unlike you or me - are "objective."
And if newspapers do that, broadcast journalists do it in spades. They need that system of consensus as a rationale for their very licenses to broadcast. According to that rationale, they aren't broadcasting propaganda of the left or right, they are broadcasting objectivity in the public interest and therefore are the good guys who should have licenses. How can you say that there is a First Amendment problem with broadcasters, when broadcast journalism is indistinguishable from print journalism, and there is no barrier to entry in print journalism?
Well, at least here on FR, I can say that there is a problem with broadcast journalism. Here on FR, I can point out the obvious fact that it is arrogant to claim superior objectivity, and to thereby claim that anyone who doesn't go along with you "is not a journalist, not objective." I can say that journalism which claims to be objective is the establishment in America. I can say that "talk radio" hosts like Rush Limbaugh are in fact journalists, whatever Tim Russert or any other establishment journalist might say. The fact that Rush doesn't presume to claim to be objective is not disabling as a journalist, it is a virtue - the virtue of humility.
I deliberately chose to take this issue on in this thread because it represents a hard case. Venezuela has a dictator shutting down actual dissent. In the US, the reality is that Big Journalism, not the government, is the establishment which is suppressing dissent.The Democratic Party promotes Big Journalism. And Big Journalism returns the favor and promotes the Democratic Party. Consequently the Democratic Party is "known" to be the party of the little guy, and the Republicans are "the party of the rich" - even though it is the Democrats who get the largest individual donations, and the Republicans who get the most donations.
BTTT
Freedom of speech and of the press is alive and well in the U. S. - and in most part of the Americas. Books are readily available, as they are not in totalitarian states.
The MSM in the U. S. is seeing a precipitous decline in its circulation because of technology changes in the society and because of the MSM’s biased reporting in many instances.
However, smaller print operations in the U. S. are healthy and flourishing - such as weekly newspapers.
Today the problem is not with too few sources of information, but so many as to present to the public a bewildering choices of so-called multiple truths.
That calls for an educated citizenry, which unfortunately is not the tendency in a sea of information of which much is sheer entertainment.
Venezuela under Chavez is becoming rapidly a totalitarian state. The Chavez “congress” MAKES LAWS on freedom of expression. It is a complete inversion of our freedom here
In Chavez’s Venezuela it is now “freedom to have no (freedom).”
We shouldn't’t get so bogged down in the minutiae that we lose sight of the overall. If anyone despairs of the way they are in the U. S., and in free societies in general, I suggest they simply take a short trip to someplace like Cuba and Venezuela. They will then learn what it's all about sans theories.
The idea that "so many" "so-called truths" is a problem to be compared with the McCain-Feingold/Fairness Doctrine approach which is actually a Newspeak definition of "objectivity" as being an attribute of journalists, and none other, is absurd.That calls for an educated citizenry, which unfortunately is not the tendency in a sea of information of which much is sheer entertainment.
At least with actual ideological competition in media, people are at least somewhat exposed to views other than the establishment Big Journalism perspective which is simply that Big Journalism should not be questioned. In the McCain-Feingold/Fairness Doctrine world, without the alternative media, we only could infer that by reading between the lines. Just like the Soviet peoples had to read between the lines of Pravada or Isvestia.
Journalism has always had the best and worst of people like every other occupation but a little more so.
May I please be so direct as to inquire as to your actual - your own - experience in this field of work??
I have no actual experience in journalism, I just have a lot of experience of journalism. And as Adam Smith put it,The biggest "story" journalists tell is that journalism is more important that the people who get things done. More trustworthy than the farmer, more trustworthy than the policeman, more trustworthy than the soldier, more trustworthy than the doctor, more trustworthy than the businessman. But in fact journalism is a business, and that business essentially trades on its reputation. And if you are not cautious, you will allow journalism to award itself that reputation, without really earning it.
It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing.
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