From: "Art Heitzer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [milw.peace] re Venezulan media rights situation & US coverage
Date: Sun, 3 Apr 2005 13:35:09 -0500
Impt. info re a brewing battle, ... Pls. consider forwarding to others. Art
Published: Saturday, April 02, 2005
Bylined to: Philip Stinard
Venezuela's Media Minister Andres Izarra replies to the Washington Post
The Venezuelan Minister of Communication & Information has replied
to Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl, who stated in an article
published March 28 that in Venezuela, journalists are persecuted and the
press is censored.
Translated by Philip Stinard
Diehl also spoke of the Law of Social Responsibility in Radio &
Television as a punitive instrument that won't permit the independent
exercise of journalism.
In Andres Izarra's response, we find a story of rights violated in
the United States, and attacks against the freedom of information in that
country. In conclusion, the press is freer in Venezuela than in the United
States.
The following is the letter (translated) in its entirety:
Mr. Jackson Diehl
The Washington Post
Washington DC USA
Mister Diehl:
It's impossible to believe that a journalist at a newspaper as
important as the Washington Post is so badly informed as you appear to be
in your article "Chavez's Censorship: Where Disrespect Can Land You in
Jail," published March 28.
You can believe, if you wish, that Venezuela used to be "the most
prosperous and stable democracy in Latin America" (with 80% of the
population in extreme poverty, civil strife, and military uprisings), put
you can't write, without lying, that in Venezuela, journalists are
persecuted and the press is censored, because there isn't a single case
that supports what you say.
You say the truth when you affirm that "some newspapers and
television stations openly sided with attempts to oust the president via
coup, strike or a national referendum." Before being Minister of
Information and Communication, I worked as news director for RCTV, an
important private TV station in Venezuela. Immediately after the coup of
April 2002 against President Hugo Chavez, when hundreds of thousands of
Venezuelans took to the streets demanding the return of their elected
president, RCTV and other private channels decided not to report on this
civil uprising, preferring to broadcast cartoons and old movies. Since I
couldn't bring myself to participate in this censorship, I resigned.
As journalist Duncan Campbell reported for the (London) Guardian,
"The five principal TV channels gave publicity spots to those who convened
the demonstrations that supported the coup." Moreover, the principal media
owners in Venezuela assured Dictator Carmona, "We can't guarantee the
army's loyalty, but we can promise the media's support" (see "Coup and
Counter-Coup," The Economist Global Agenda, April 16, 2002).
The private media promoted all of the campaigns to discredit
President Chavez and his policies. For example, during the petroleum
industry sabotage of Christmas 2002-2003, more than 13,000 political
propaganda advertisements were broadcast in a two month period in order to
"animate an economically devastating and socially destabilizing general
strike directed at overthrowing Chavez. (These ads) energetically promoted
opposition leaders, while at the same time defaming the President and
ignoring news that favored him" (see COHA Investigation Memorandum. The
Venezuelan Media: More Than Words in Play," Council on Hemispheric Affairs,
Press Memorandum 03.18, April 30, 2003). However, despite all this, the
openly conspiratorial media were not persecuted, neither then, nor now.
You are lying to your readers, Mister Diehl, when you say,
"Beginning this month journalists or other independent activists accused by
the government of the sort of offenses alleged by Izarra can be jailed
without due process and sentenced to up to 30 years," because you are
confusing the law that protects children from obscenity in the broadcast
media with the laws on national security and the President's security,
which are more strict in the United States.
US Code, Title 18, Section 871, "Threats against the President and
presidential successors," prohibits any offense or threat made against the
President of the United States. Examples include July 2, 1996, when two
people were arrested by the secret service for shouting insults at
President Clinton ("You suck and those boys died...") on the occasion of an
attack against a military installation in Saudi Arabia in which 19 US
soldiers died; or a minister who was arrested for saying "God will hold you
to account" to President Clinton, concerning his decision not to prohibit a
certain kind of abortion.
US Code, Title 18, Section 1752(a)(1)(ii) declares that it is a
crime to intentionally enter a restricted zone during a presidential visit,
and it has been used to arrest more than 1,800 demonstrators during the
Republican Convention in August of 2004, despite the fact that the
demonstrators were several blocks from President Bush's location; it was
also used to arrest a gentleman for carrying a sign against war on October
24, 2002, during Bush's visit to Ohio; also arrested was a dead soldier's
mother for wearing an anti-war t-shirt during a speech by First Lady Laura
Bush in New Jersey; and a couple in West Virginia was arrested for wearing
anti-Bush t-shirts during a rally.
You know, Mister Diehl, that the Patriot Act together with an
Executive Order give President Bush the power to determine when a person
represents a threat to the United States. If the person is a US citizen, he
can be detained for an indefinite length of time without rights, be
declared an enemy of the state, and even lose his citizenship. If the
person is not a US citizen, he can be detained without any rights and be
brought before a secret military tribunal without anyone, not even his
family members, finding out. If a foreigner in the US says that "Bush is
the Devil," he can be imprisoned and end up in Guantanamo.
Your interest in having people believe that in Venezuela,
journalists are threatened like foreign agents, is understandable due to
the number of agents that act as journalists, in both Venezuela and the US,
to diffuse opinions concocted by the US State Department:
Declassified documents from the State Department (from the NGO
National Security Archives) concerning the US Office of Public Diplomacy,
managed by Otto Reich during the 1970's, demonstrate that the Washington
Post was one of the newspapers used by the US government to spread its
black propaganda against the Sandinista government. Washington Post
journalist Marcela Sanchez publicly stated that in the months before the
August 2004 presidential referendum, in which President Chavez was
reaffirmed, (Roger) Noriega and others in the State Department visited the
Washington Post's editorial board in order to influence its reporting on
that topic.
Or have you forgotten, Mister Diehl, that journalist Maggie
Gallagher, who collaborated with the Washington Post, was accused of
accepting money in exchange for supporting one of President Bush's proposed
Constitutional Amendments?
I can't imagine, Mister Diehl, how you came up with the terms
"without due process" and "summarily," which you repeat in order to give
the false impression of a dictatorial Venezuela that only exists in your
imagination and in that crazy quilt of scraps that is your article. Surely,
it will sound "ridiculous" to you, but now and for the first time in
history, the press is more free in Venezuela than in the United States. Is
that what bothers you, Mister Diehl?
It is not President Chavez' fault that the Bush administration can
control the globalized world with the same methods and the same men as in
the 1970s. It's not my fault if the Washington Post of Katherine Graham ...
which was an example for the world in the Watergate case ... now acts as if
it had been bought by the Nixon Family.
Instead of your incomplete, cartoonish, and malicious portrait of
Venezuelan media and laws, I would have preferred to see, from a
respectable "independent newspaper," a balanced analysis of our informative
landscape. But I think that it's more likely that we'll find out, in the
not-so-distant future, that you too, Mister Diehl, receive money from the
State Department.
Andres Izarra
Minister of Communication and Information
Respuesta del Ministro Andr�s Izarra
al diario Washington Post
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