[NYTr] Venez: RCTV, Far from Silenced, Continues to Stir the Pot
 
Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2007 17:52:08 -0500 (CDT)

Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 

[The AP story below is especially misleading, since it minimizes RCTV's
broadcasting on Globovision, and does not explain that the license
not renewed was only for public airwave broadcasts. Their ability
to broadcast via cable and satellite (and to sell programming to other
stations such as Globovision) has not been affected. -NY Transfer]

excerpted from VIO Venezuela News Roundup - Jul 5, 2007

[RCTV is maintaining access to audiences in Venezuela, the Associated
Press reports today, by selling programming to other networks and
taking advantage of its continuing right to air on cable.  The
opposition-affiliated channel rallied support from viewers after it
lost broadcasting privileges in May due to legal violations, adopting
the cause of free speech in a bid to regain licensing.  Globovision,
another of Venezuela's opposition channels available on the open-access
airwaves, airs RCTV newscasts.  Venevision is a third major opposition
television network in Venezuela, and the New York Times reports that it
softened its anti-Chavez editorial line in 2004 after a chief
executive, the media mogul Gustavo Cisneros, met with Presidents Chavez
and Jimmy Carter.  The decision to reduce editorial bias, Cisneros
explains, followed his realization that, as a news station, "we can't
be part of the story or play a role in politics." -VIO]

AP via The Washington Post - July 5, 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/05/AR2007070500034.html

Venezuelan TV Station May Air on Cable

By Fabiola Sanchez
The Associated Press

CARACAS, Venezuela -- An opposition-aligned TV station forced off the
air by President Hugo Chavez is considering taking its programming to
cable, the channel's top executive said.

Radio Caracas Television, which went off the air on May 27 after Chavez
refused to renew its license, might seek to reach viewers via cable or
satellite, station executive Marcel Granier said Wednesday.

"I hope that this month we have news about coming out through other
paths," he said.

Chavez and his supporters accuse RCTV of supporting a failed 2002 coup,
violating broadcast laws and regularly showing programs with excessive
violence and sexual content. RCTV denies wrongdoing.

Another station highly critical of the government, Globovision, has
begun broadcasting some of RCTV's newscasts.

Granier said it is difficult for RCTV to know whether it will be
allowed to broadcast on cable in Venezuela, citing what he called
"persecution" by the government.

"The government has done everything within its power ... to keep us
from going on the air," Granier said.

He said the channel's priority is still to return to viewers as a
regular channel on the open airwaves.

Granier also said RCTV will ask prosecutors to investigate the
circumstances surrounding a Supreme Court decision that ordered the
temporary seizure of the station's transmitting equipment. He has
called it state-sanctioned "theft."

The equipment is being used by a new state-funded public service
channel that replaced RCTV.

"We know that the absence of the rule of law makes it nearly impossible
to receive justice in Venezuela. However, we will make the
complaint ... and later take that complaint before international
courts," Granier said.

The government did not immediately respond.

Chavez has defended his decision not to renew RCTV's license, calling
it a move to democratize the airwaves.

                                  ***

The New York Times - July 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/05/world/americas/05venez.html

Media Mogul Learns to Live With ChC!vez

By Simon Romero

CARACAS, Venezuela ? Three years ago, the media mogul Gustavo A.
Cisneros was a leader of Venezuela's opposition and his television
network, VenevisiC3n, regularly lambasted President Hugo ChC!vez.

So antagonistic were relations that Mr. ChC!vez accused him of
conspiring to topple him. Government agents raided Mr. Cisneros's
ranch, fishing camp and offices.

The tensions were resolved only after former President Jimmy Carter, a
longtime friend of Mr. Cisneros, brokered a meeting between the men in
2004 before a referendum to determine whether President ChC!vez should
be recalled from office.

Today, as more details of that encounter emerge, Mr. Cisneros, who sits
at the helm of a family fortune estimated at $6 billion, has become a
target of the same opposition he once championed. VenevisiC3n, critics
say, is now positioned to benefit from Mr. ChC!vez's recent decision to
push the station's main rival, RCTV, off the public airwaves.

Mr. Cisneros, 62, in a rare interview here, bridled at such charges.
"If you go off the air, then democracy loses," he said, defending his
reconciliation with Mr. ChC!vez and pointing to fears that VenevisiC3n
could yet suffer the same fate as RCTV, which was forced to stop
broadcasting in late May.

"We decided that we needed to pull through," said Mr. Cisneros, citing
advice on the matter from Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican writer, who is an
outspoken critic of Mr. ChC!vez. "And the way to pull through was to
say, 'Enough, we can't be part of the story or play a role in politics
but we have to report the story every day.' "

Gone, Mr. Cisneros said, was VenevisiC3n's "Fox News approach."
Executives replaced morning talk shows with astrology programs and gave
priority to nightly soap operas over critical news programs.

By the time of the presidential election last December, the shift was
an about-face from VenevisiC3n's previous coverage. VenevisiC3n devoted
84 percent of its political coverage to Mr. ChC!vez's positions and only
16 percent to the opposition, according to a European Union report on
the elections.

That 2004 meeting, as well as the subsequent softening of VenevisiC3n's
coverage of Mr. ChC!vez, has been interpreted by critics of both the
president and the media mogul as an example of how the moneyed elite
bends to Mr. ChC!vez's will.

Mr. ChC!vez, who has built an array of state-controlled broadcasters in
the last three years, crows at such changes. Referring recently to the
June 2004 meeting with Mr. Cisneros, Mr. ChC!vez boasted of Mr.
Cisneros's acquiescence to his authority.

"He wore a tie and told me, 'I put the tie on because I want to tell
you that I recognize you as president of my country,' " Mr. ChC!vez said
in comments broadcast on Teves, the new state-owned broadcaster that
has taken over RCTV's signal.

Both men deny that any deal was reached. But what else happened at the
meeting, which lasted about four hours and was held at Fort Tiuna, a
military garrison here, has been shrouded in mystery.

A spokeswoman at the Carter Center in Georgia said Mr. Carter was
unable to comment on the meeting, which he mediated after being flown
to Caracas on Mr. Cisneros's plane.

Jennifer McCoy, director of the Americas program at the Carter Center,
said the meeting was part of a broader effort by Mr. Carter to ease
tension between Mr. ChC!vez and private media groups

Mr. Carter put Mr. ChC!vez at ease by discussing their shared military
background, according to people briefed on the meeting. (Mr. Carter had
attended the United States Naval Academy; Mr. ChC!vez is a former
lieutenant colonel in the Venezuelan Army.)

At the meeting, according to Mr. Cisneros, Mr. ChC!vez compared his
social programs to those of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Mr. ChC!vez, he said, batted away the assertion that the political
climate in 2004 was marked by violence and attacks against reporters
and media owners. The only television channel that had been shut down,
he said, was the state broadcaster, during the 2002 coup that he had
previously accused Mr. Cisneros of backing, a claim Mr. Cisneros denies.

After the meeting, the referendum in August 2004 did not lead to a
recall of the president, enabling him to tighten his hold on political
institutions and the media. Critics see VenevisiC3n's subsequent shift
in editorial policy as part of a wider trend to avoid confronting Mr.
ChC!vez.

"Some companies bow to authoritarian regimes," said Marcel Granier, the
president of RCTV, which has been reduced to airing its broadcasts on
YouTube in recent weeks. "This happened in Germany with the Krupps,
Bayers and Thyssens."

In recent comments about the meeting, the president said Mr. Cisneros,
whose other companies range from breweries to the Leones baseball team
in Caracas, understood he could coexist with the socialist-inspired
transformation of society that Mr. Chavez says he wants.

"There are others who furiously launch themselves in attempts to
overthrow a government," Mr. ChC!vez said.

As Mr. ChC!vez acknowledged, Mr. Cisneros's strategy at VenevisiC3n, a
national network developed in the 1960s in a partnership with ABC by
Mr. Cisneros's father, has uncovered rifts within a once cloistered
elite that is being shaken by Mr. ChC!vez's policies.

For instance, Mr. Cisneros and Mr. Granier are married to cousins,
descendants of William H. Phelps, an American businessman and
ornithologist who settled in Venezuela more than a century ago.

But Mr. Cisneros and Mr. Granier rarely speak to each other now, both
men said in interviews. They have pursued different strategies as Mr.
Cisneros pushed into markets in the United States and Latin America
while Mr. Granier focused on growing RCTV in Venezuela.

Still, Mr. Cisneros, who has moved his family outside Venezuela and
lives mainly at homes in New York, Spain and the Dominican Republic,
rejected claims that VenevisiC3n stood to benefit from luring
advertisers lost by RCTV.

Pointing to laws that limit the advertising networks can sell, Mr.
Cisneros said he expected next year's revenue to climb no more than 5
to 6 percent, after accounting for annual inflation of more than 20
percent.

"There's no advantage to us whatsoever in having RCTV go away," said
Mr. Cisneros. "Having President ChC!vez as our main television
competitor is not in our interest."

Mr. Cisneros said Venezuela's president maintained leverage over
private media groups, including VenevisiC3n.

Mr. Cisneros's case in point: the government renewed VenevisiC3n's
license in May for only five years, setting it to expire before Mr.
ChC!vez's third term as president ends in 2012.
       
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