Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>What makes you think that we can succeed in "owning" commercial TV
>communication when left-wing Venezuelans can't?
-Wasn't Chavez in the habit of giving 5 hour speeches on TV every week for -the first couple of years? That certainly sounds like owning a part of -the media.
The problem with Venezuela as an example is that Chavez lost support partly because of assaults on moderate forces that he turned into enemies. The unions in the privileged petroleum sector are problematic in an economically polarized society, but Chavez went out of his way to antagonize them to the point of losing all international labor support for his regime when he engaged in authoritarian union-busting tactics. Just by his authoritarian actions, he unified his own opposition and turned what should have been just elite economic resistance to his initial rather moderate policies into a broad-based social opposition to his regime.
I think Chavez is still on balance better than the opposition alternative but he lost his legitimacy and almost his position not because of media propaganda but because of stupid authoritarian actions that has cost him defections even within his own political party and associated movements.
One reason I dislike "blame the media" arguments is not so much that they don't have some substance, but because they are invariably used to ignore more substantive problems with left strategy that media bias may make worse but did not create in the first place.
Nathan Newman