APRIL 21, 2002....
...Evidence that Venezuela's media establishment was up to its collective ears in last week's failed coup within a coup to oust the democratically elected President Hugo Chávez and install a right-wing dictatorship has been trickling out of the country for the past few days, thanks to honest reporting from the ground by journalists such as David Adams and Phil Gunson, in The St. Petersburg Times.
Conspirators are said to have met many times during the past year at the home of Miguel Henrique Otero, publisher of El Nacional, one of Venezuela's two main dailies, and other newspapers. Among them was Alberto Ravell, CEO of Globovisión, a CNN affiliate which is the country's main all-news TV station, Marcel Granier, of RCTV, another leading station, and Gustavo Cisneros, Venezuela's wealthiest man and a friend and fishing partner of former President Bush. The Cisneros Group owns Venevisión, one of the country's main networks, and is part owner of the local Direct TV franchise, Caracol Television, and the U.S. Spanish-language network Univisión.
Venezuela's media establishment, closely aligned with a local oligarchy that has the receptive ear of the Bush administration, almost unanimously abhors Chávez' populist policies, big-mouth authoritarian style, friendship with media buster, Fidel Castro, and intolerance of criticism. Chávez hates them back.
Led by Cisneros, the media group, which also included Andrews Mata, owner of El Universal, Venezuela's other major daily, met with self-proclaimed interim President and big business mouthpiece Pedro Carmona on Saturday April 14, as demonstrators were pouring out on the streets of Caracas demanding Chávez' return. Flanked by one of the generals who had installed him in the presidential palace only a day earlier, Carmona asked the media bosses for help.
They obliged: shortly thereafter, the news blackout, which had started the night before, became total. Neither El Universal nor El Nacional published their Sunday editions. Globovisión's Ravell reportedly even called CNN's Atlanta headquarters to ask, in vain, that the U.S. network join the news blackout.
Venezuelans with access to cable and satellite - mostly the rabidly anti-Chávez middle and upper classes, the 20 percent not living in abject poverty - were thus able to find out that the coup was failing without leaving their homes. The poor had to go out on the streets to find out, which made them angrier - some attacked TV stations and newspapers - and probably accelerated Chávez' restoration, which happened early last Sunday.
The first Latin America media coup collapsed about 48 hours after it began, doomed by popular rage and, for the first time, the almost universal condemnation of the region's governments, who, in another first, forced a prematurely gleeful U.S. to tone down and back off on Chávez, at least for now.
<http://www.thegully.com/essays/venezuela/020421_venezuel_media_coup.html> -- Yoshie
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