President Hugo Chavez's desire to convert Venezuela into a worker's paradise along the lines of Cuba has been met by tremendous resistance from the "wealthy families" that own the media. Oh yeah, and a huge percentage of the Venezuelan people, too, who have engaged in mass protests against his rule. But using Klein's "strong media" model, they've only been whipped up into this frenzy by the reactionary forces of the media. Read this entire passage:
During the recently ended strike organized by the oil industry, the television stations broadcast an average of 700 pro-strike advertisements every day, according to government estimates. It's in this context that Chávez has decided to go after the TV stations in earnest, not just with fiery rhetoric but with an investigation into violations of broadcast standards and a new set of regulations. "Don't be surprised if we start shutting down television stations," he said at the end of January.
The threat has sparked a flurry of condemnations from the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders. And there is reason for concern: The media war in Venezuela is bloody, with attacks on both pro- and anti-Chávez media outlets. But attempts to regulate the media aren't an "attack on press freedom," as CPJ has claimed--quite the opposite.
Venezuela's media, including state TV, need tough controls to insure diversity, balance and access, enforced at arm's length from political powers. Some of Chávez's proposals (such as an ominous clause banning speech that shows "disrespect" to government officials) overstep these bounds and could easily be used to muzzle critics. That said, it is absurd to treat Chávez as the principal threat to a free press in Venezuela. That honor clearly goes to the media owners themselves. This fact has been entirely lost on the organizations entrusted to defend press freedom around the world, still stuck in a paradigm in which all journalists just want to tell the truth and all threats come from nasty politicians and angry mobs.
This is unfortunate, because we are in desperate need of courageous defenders of a free press at the moment--and not just in Venezuela. After all, Venezuela isn't the only country where a war is being waged over oil, where media owners have become inseparable from the forces clamoring for "regime change" and where the opposition finds itself routinely erased by the nightly news. But in the United States, unlike in Venezuela, the media and the government are on the same side.
Klein thinks a powerful government committee with the ability to censor messages it doesn't like will be "courageous defenders of a free press." I guess because it's worked so well in places such as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
What can you say to such idiocy? (I especially loved the bit about "the opposition" to a war "over oil" in the U.S. being "erased." Here's proof that she obviously hasn't been paying attention.) Then again, this is The Nation, which New Republic publisher Martin Peretz succinctly describes in this article: "The Nation is edited for aging ex-communists on the West Side. On the Upper West Side."
So true.
For more on Ms. Klein, I recommend this scathing review of her work from The Economist. And here's an equally scathing review of her most recent book, Fences and Windows.
