Zero Hour for Venezuela's RCTV
by George Ciccariello-Maher
The expiration of Venezuelan broadcaster
<http://www.rethinkvenezuela.com/downloads/RCTV.htm>RCTV's
public concession draws near: at 11:59pm on
Sunday, May 27th, RCTV's concession will expire
without renewal, and its space on channel 2 will
be handed over to the newly-founded
<http://www.rnv.gov.ve/noticias/index.php?act=ST&f=2&t=46906>Venezuelan
Social Television (TVes), which will begin
broadcasts at 12:15am on May 28th. This
sovereign decision of the Venezuelan government
not to renew RCTV's concession has prompted
claims that freedom of speech is somehow under threat in Venezuela.
But many discussions of freedom of speech rely on
a fundamentally flawed assumption: that existing
media outlets in some way embody "freedom." The
debate surrounding RCTV is no exception. It is
this flawed assertion that has been openly
embraced by the Venezuelan opposition and equally
openly challenged by those who reject efforts to
paint the non-renewal of the broadcasting
concession for Venezuela's RCTV as an issue of
free speech at all
(<http://www.counterpunch.org/maher01122007.html>see
my previous comments here).
Decades spent under the hegemonic shadow of the
discourse of "civil society against the state"
has led us to assume that all that is not under
state control is free, thereby conveniently
obscuring the unfreedom of economic, specifically
market forces. So for the non-renewal of RCTV to
be a free speech issue at all, one would have to
make the ultimately doomed argument that RCTV,
under the direction of Marcel Granier and media
conglomerate "1 Broadcasting Caracas" (1BC),
somehow represents an expression of the people's
freedom rather than the freedom of its small group of shareholders.
The Oligarchy and the Media
Don't get me wrong, these shareholders are a fine
bunch, and among the purest specimens of the
rancid oligarchy that has controlled Venezuela
since the colonial conquest. 1BC was founded in
1920 by William H. Phelps Jr. (then under the
name Phelps Group), whose father emigrated to
Venezuela from the United States. Phelps Jr.
would marry Alicia Tucker, thereby giving rise to
an
<http://www.aporrea.org/medios/a34490.html>oligarchic
family tree of colossal proportions with 1BC and
RCTV at its center. RCTV's broadcasting
concession would pass from Phelps Jr. to his
children Johnny Phelps and William Phelps Tucker,
and the latter's wife Katherine Deery de Phelps,
and finally on to Johnny Phelps' daughters Dorothy and Patricia.
Current 1BC stockholders reflect this dense
tangle of blood and wealth: the principal
stockholder is Peter Bottome (son of Deery,
son-in-law of Phelps Tucker), as well as Alicia
Phelps de Tovar (daughter of Johnny),
U.S.-educated Mavesa grease magnate Alberto Tovar
Phelps (son of Alicia), Guillermo Tucker
Arismendi (related through Phelps' wife
Katherine, as well as to one of the heads of the
conglomerate controlling Globovisión). And then
there is current 1BC president Marcel Granier,
who entered the picture by marrying Dorothy
Phelps, and to whom it now falls to convince
Venezuelans that the conglomerate (which also
controls radio stations, record stores, and an
airline) is in some way "democratic." To
emphasize the power that the Phelps wield in
Venezuela, one need only note that Johnny Phelps'
other daughter Patricia is married to Gustavo
Cisneros, Venezuela's most powerful media magnate and direct competitor of 1BC.
Together, 1BC's RCTV and Cisneros' Venevisión
control 85% of publicity investment, 66% of
transmitting capacity, and 80% of the production
of all messages, information, and media content
in the country, according to a recent White Book
on RCTV issued by the Ministry of
Communication. As a journalist in the
opposition-controlled newspaper El Universal
argued a few years back: "On what moral basis can
they come out in defense of free speech and
competition when these are at risk, when they
themselves propose to monopolize them?" If
Venezuela relies on the likes of Granier and
Cisneros to defend free speech, then the
situation is indeed as bad as the opposition claims.
The Last Gasp of the Opposition
In the aftermath of Chávez's landslide December
victory, the opposition is running out of
options, and they know it. The path of the coup
and the bosses' strike failed in April and
December of 2002, respectively, and despite
widespread claims that Chávez is a "dictator,"
the electoral path too has failed on eight
separate occasions. While some, like former
presidential candidate and governor of Zulia
Manuel Rosales' Un Nuevo Tiempo party (which
comprises some recent defectors from Primero
Justicia), call for the creation of a centrist
coalition and a "new majority," others are more
realistic. Realizing that they cannot win, but
using the pretext of unfair elections,
organizations like Antonio Ledezma's Alianza
Bravo Pueblo and sectors of Acción Democratica
have repeatedly advocated abstention and open
resistance to the regime (a call embodied at
present in the heroic-sounding "National Resistance Committee").
Now, catching the scent of an opportunity, the
Venezuelan opposition has thrown their full force
behind the mobilizations in defense of
RCTV. These efforts focus, unsurprisingly, on
the international stage, where the opposition has
courted European and North American public
opinion. Representatives of the European Union,
the Organization of American States, and even the
Pope have jumped on the pro-RCTV (and hence
pro-"free speech") bandwagon. Domestically,
however, the opposition's strategy has been a
mixed
bag.
<http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=2281>Opinion
polls show that the RCTV question divides
Chavistas, and this is clearly why the opposition
finds it so alluring as an issue. But when the
opposition threw its weight behind the "mother of
all marches" last Saturday, the results were pathetic.
The march featured an all-star lineup: Rosales
himself spoke, along with Granier as well as a
number of RCTV personalities, the most
reactionary of which is Miguel Angel "Little
Granier" Rodríguez (see below). The speakers
duly pronounced upon the massive nature of the
mobilization, and a boom camera swept across the
group, transmitting misleadingly narrow crowd
shots. When interviewed leaving the march, many
participants would parrot claims about the size
of the march: "The entire pueblo turned out!" one
clearly upper-middle class protestor exclaimed
while walking eastward toward the wealthiest zone
of Caracas, "We should have marched on the highway."
To provide some necessary context: the Venezuelan
opposition has indeed marched on the Francisco
Fajardo highway on several occasions, notably
during the run-up to the 2002 coup, the 2004
referendum, and the recent presidential
elections. That is to say, this is an opposition
that has indeed been able to mobilize on a mass
scale in the past. But if this past Saturday's
march had "taken" the highway, the results would
have been even more pitiful than they looked on a
four-lane city street in Chacaito.
Mario Silva, host of Chavista evening program La
Hojilla, showed helicopter video footage of the
march at its height, at which point it hardly
filled a small city block
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74podajOorY>see
the footage yourself here). While this footage
would suggest that fewer than 10,000 turned out,
the Venezuelan opposition press and its
international allies didn't shy from claiming
that "tens of thousands"
(<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6673513.stm>BBC,
<http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSN1923370120070519?feedType=RSS&rpc=22>Reuters,
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070519/ap_en_bu/venezuela_media>AP)
participated. To the contrary, the only thing
"warming up the streets" last Saturday, to adopt
a colloquial expression, was the sweltering sun.
A Doomed Strategy
What explains this massive failure of the
Venezuelan opposition to mobilize even a fraction
of what they were able to mobilize in past
years? Clearly, given their emphasis on RCTV's
non-renewal, they felt it would be a hot-button
issue: Why were they so wrong? The answers lie
in the nature of RCTV itself. Firstly, while
most surveys show a clear majority opposing the
non-renewal of RCTV's broadcast concession, they
show an equally clear and comparable majority
supporting Chávez and his government. While this
explains in part the opposition's attraction to
the issue (it's not everyday that they get a
chance to divide Chávez's support base), it also explains their failure.
RCTV's programming is best known for an emphasis
in soap operas, or novelas, programs which are
largely aimed, by virtue of their content and
time-slot, at lower-middle-class segments of
society. The popularity of these novelas is
largely responsible for the cross-spectrum
support for RCTV. But it is one thing to favor
RCTV enough to support it in a poll. It's quite
another to take to the streets alongside a
largely discredited and reactionary opposition to
actively defend it. Moreover, given that these
trashy and sexy novelas are a sort of guilty
pleasure among some Chavistas, we might expect
them to be much less likely to defend RCTV in public.
But this inability to divide Chavistas is not
enough to explain the poor turnout at Saturday's
march, since the issue is further complicated by
the opposition's misjudgement of their own social
base. They seem to have overlooked a simple
fact: most middle and upper-class Venezuelans
don't watch VHF programming at all! With their
televisions permanently tuned to cable or
satellite broadcasts, many wealthy Venezuelans
would hardly even notice if RCTV were to
disappear from the public airwaves. And since
RCTV's broadcasts on cable and satellite will
almost certainly continue, there will be
absolutely no effect on those wealthy Venezuelans
who currently watch RCTV-produced novelas via
third-party cable or satellite stations anyway.
When All Else Fails. . . .
Given their utter failure to mobilize significant
support for the renewal of RCTV's broadcast
license, it has become clear that the opposition
has effectively put all of their eggs in one
(poorly-conceived) basket. By tying their
fortunes so tightly to those of RCTV, the
opposition runs the risk of drifting further into
irrelevance after the concession expires on
Sunday. Their only hope appears to be that the
Supreme Court accept one of their appeals, which
would possibly delay the expiration of RCTV's
concession. But this, too, is very unlikely, as
the court already dismissed one such appeal last week.
As a result, desperation has begun to set in,
along with the threats of violence to which the
Venezuelan opposition is so prone. Speaking from
Miami alongside Patricia Poleo (currently under
investigation in Venezuela for planning the 2004
assassination of Danilo Anderson, the prosecutor
investigating the bloodshed of April 11th 2002),
"Little Granier" Rodríguez issued a thinly-veiled
threat to President Chávez: "thinking of his
personal security," Rodríguez argues that the
non-renewal of RCTV's broadcast concession would
"put the President at great risk."
"Little Granier" continues: "Look in the mirror
during Pinochet's last days, look in the mirror
of Peron's widow, look in the mirror of Slobodan
Milosevic, and I hope you aren't crazy enough to
institute the death penalty in Venezuela, because
then you would need to see yourself in Saddam
Hussein's mirror, they all met their end for
crimes against humanity." Coming from a station
that broadcast, with some sympathy, the various
defenses of Pinochet during the thankfully late
dictator's funeral, this statement is ironic at
best and utterly cynical at worst.
Echoing this, Primero Justicia leader Julio
Borges that the government could see blood in the
streets if the decision is upheld. Such threats
go hand in hand with the ever-present threat of
disruptive guarimbas (violent roadblocks) and
even attacks on civilians to provoke a situation
of chaos. Últimas Noticias has reported that
several have been arrested in recent days,
charged with plotting destabilizing violence, and
given that several submachine guns and sniper
rifles were confiscated, we can't be entirely
sure that these were merely empty threats. And
this is an opposition that is quickly running out
of options, so any and all strategies, including
"strategies of tension," will soon be on the table.
TVes: Democratizing the Media
If the opposition is good for anything at all
(something which isn't entirely clear), it's good
for radicalizing the Bolivarian Revolution. This
is because regardless of what may have been the
government's initial vision of the new channel 2,
opposition efforts to attack the non-renewal of
RCTV's license as an undemocratic attack on free
speech have forced the government to emphasize
that the new TVes is all about the
democratization of the airwaves. In recent days,
the future shape of TVes has become a bit
clearer. Lil Rodríguez, an Afro-Venezuelan
woman, Últimas Noticias journalist, and host of
Telesur's cultural program Sones y Pasiones, was
sworn in as director of the TVes Foundation. As
Rodríguez put it: "TVes will be born in a week
with a name, with dreams, with a bit of the road
behind it but an entire highway ahead. She
[TVes] is a woman, and she has her ovaries on straight."
While there remains some question as to what
autonomy TVes will enjoy in practice, Minister of
Communication Willian Lara argues that, "we
wouldn't be so stupid as to make TVes a clone of
[state-run] VTV, Vive. . . ." In an effort to
assure this, the law regulating TVes provides the
directorial committee with a role which is
fundamentally administrative: rather than
actively producing programs, TVes is meant to be
merely a conduit through which independent
cultural production reaches the airwaves.
As Lil Rodríguez puts it, TVes will be "a space
in which popular resistance will be what guides
our destinies." Moreover, the importance of the
new channel transcends a political undermining of
the opposition and even the deepening of media
democracy, as important as both of these are. As
Rodríguez describes it, TVes "will be a useful
space for rescuing those values which other
models of television always ignore, especially
our Afro heritage," in short, a weapon against
the white Eurocentric self-image that has long
prevailed in the media, devaluing Venezuelan
history and culture and thereby justifying dependent development.
Should we believe the Venezuelan government that
the new TVes will be an experiment in democratic,
community-run media? If we take our cue from
those with the most to lose (i.e. those who
suffer most from media monopolies), then the
answer is yes. This Sunday, mere hours before
RCTV's concession expires, the
<http://www.medioscomunitarios.org/>National
Association of Free and Alternative Community
Media (ANMCLA), representing hundreds of
community media outlets, is convoking a march in
defense of the non-renewal of RCTV's
license. Deeming their position as "neither
private, nor the state," the march celebrates the
non-renewal as "a step forward against golpismo
[coup-ism] and toward the socialization of the media."
But it is merely one step, and ANMCLA urges the
government to go further: to expropriate the
private media magnates of their transmitters and
equipment, to hold coup-plotters responsible for
their actions, and above all to move beyond
statist conceptions of the public media. As they
argue: "The new channel 2 that will soon go on
the air will surely be better, closer to the
people, with less violence and perversion. . .
. But in order for it to really become the TV
that we desire, for it to really be our
television, it will be necessary to establish and
exercise direct popular control over the channel,
as well as over the media as a whole." While
ANMCLA "will be on the streets to celebrate the
execution of this measure [against RCTV] and the
opening of new perspectives," they see the
gesture as "a point of departure for an entirely
new era of struggles for the socialization of all
the media, through popular protagonism, toward the construction of socialism."
In all honesty, even a state-run station would be
more "democratic" than one directed by the
economic oligarchy that has ruled Venezuela for
the past 500 years. But the vision expressed by
ANMCLA and others is infinitely more radical and
more suited to the entirely new kind of socialism
that is being built in Venezuela.
Do RCTV and Marcel Granier represent
"freedom"? The response from independent media
producers is blunt: as a media activist from
Caricuao's Radio Perola, one of the ANMCLA
signatories, puts it: "Freedom of expression is
the expression of freedom, not the voice of
privilege." The historic concession granted to
RCTV is a direct expression of the economic
privilege of Venezuelan and international elites,
now so insistently and opportunistically masquerading as "free speech."
As a recently-popularized slogan puts it: "RC Te Vas" -- "RCTV, You're Gone."
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<http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/cm280307.html>George
Ciccariello-Maher is a Ph.D. candidate in
political theory at the University of California,
Berkeley. He lives in Caracas, and can be reached at gjcm(at)berkeley.edu.
----------
Comment | Trackback | <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/cm260507p.html>Print
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Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
Director, Programme in 'Transformative Practice and Human Development'
Centro Internacional Miranda, P.H.
Residencias Anauco Suites, Parque Central, final Av. Bolivar
Caracas, Venezuela
fax: 0212 5768274/0212 5777231
http//:centrointernacionalmiranda.gob.ve
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
