How Hate Media Incited the Coup: Venezuela's Press Power

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

At 12:21 PM -0600 12/3/02, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>>Those of you who are sanguine about your ability to make the 
>>corporate media -- especially TV -- serve your left-wing purpose 
>>might reflect upon Venezuelan experience.  Even a popularly elected 
>>president -- with a far larger and far more ardent support among 
>>the poor Venezuelan masses than any US left-winger can claim for 
>>himself or herself here -- has found it impossible to use privately 
>>owned channels and newspapers to communicate his side of the story 
>>and demonstrate his actual popularity; the Venezuelan media in fact 
>>went further and directly contributed to the coup and are doing the 
>>same now for the next coup attempt to come:
>
>as long as we're drawing strained analogies, how about B-92? or 
>media outlets in russia back in the late 80s early 90s when they 
>were seemingly always being taken over by gov't troops? none of 
>these is actually comparable to the situation in the US now. imo.
>
>incidentally, i'm perhaps less "sanguine" about "my" ability (or 
>that of an organized left rather than me, where you try to isolate 
>it) than you seem to think. don't push me into an indefensible 
>position and expect me to try to defend it or to take up hopelessly 
>irrelevant analogies and try to argue against them.

Why is the Venezuelan experience irrelevant?  Left-wingers in 
Venezuela -- with the president himself a left-wing populist -- are 
larger, more militant, and far better organized than in the USA. 
What makes you think that we can succeed in "owning" commercial TV 
communication when left-wing Venezuelans can't?

As for B92, it says that it got its start as a student radio station 
(@ <http://www.b92.net/doc/aboutus.phtml>), but you just expressed 
your contempt for comparable efforts in the United States: e.g., 
Pacifica.

At 11:17 AM -0600 12/3/02, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>that's one of the problems with a network like pacifica *in 
>principle*: it's the progressive radio ghetto.

Besides, Serbian and Montenegrin "independent" media received funding 
from Soros and the US government:

*****   Funding for open media presently comes through several United 
States agencies. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) provided 
$188,670 in fiscal year (FY) 1998 to independent newspapers in Serbia 
and Montenegro and to the Association for Independent Electronic 
Media (ANEM). Through the Support for East European Democracy (SEED) 
program, the United States Agency for International Development 
(USAID) provided $2,300,000 to the Internews agency and ANEM in the 
same year. In addition, USAID's Office of Transition Initiatives 
(OTI) gave $1,830,000 in support of independent media. The United 
States Information Agency (USIA) has budgeted $50,000 for a media 
training project in the future and in FY 1998 allotted $300,000 to 
connect independent media and schools to the Internet. Open 
Society-Yugoslavia, an NGO, spent $2,728,000 in FY 1997 to support 
open media and communications.

<http://www.usip.org/oc/sr/sr990414/sr990414.html>   *****

US left-wingers (as opposed to liberals) can't expect comparable 
support from US and foreign governments and philanthropists.
-- 
Yoshie

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