05/06/2014
Once upon a time, there was a privately-run news channel that served as the sole television base for the Venezuelan opposition. It is true that, abstractly speaking, its radical commitment to a cause could be deemed unusual.
But that militant stance is justified in a country where the Government managed to concentrate a real battery of state-run TV stations that practiced a biased and propagandistic kind of position, even more than the channel in question.
And there are two things to take into consideration: one, those channels, for being from the State, should remain open to all Venezuelans as happens in civilized countries, and, two, they do such a bad programming that, despite their plurality and budgetary abundance, all have poor audiences. The other privately-run channels remain as informative political eunuchs, fearful of their future.
The owners of Globovisión, who once had sworn to be patriots capable of withstanding any attack from the repressive “gorilla government,” were courageous at first, but that particular day we are talking about, apparently remembered they were businesspeople in the end, and that the enemy had already very fearsome weapons so they decided to sell the channel for a fair amount of money to some government loyalists (who, according to Clodovaldo Hernández, a journalist supporting the chavismo movement, have a criminal record rather than experience in media). They probably thought to themselves that “we better stay rich than immolated” – and that was it for Globovisión.
The new owners from the so-called “Bolivarian bourgeoisie” tried to make believe the channel’s editorial line was going to remain intact, so longtime faithful advertisers and audience would stick with it. And even some journalists bought it at first, while others abandoned ship from the beginning (even its most renowned anchormen did), and others started leaving the place because they could not stand the bad smell around the hallways of the channel or were simply fired by the new administration.
That because the “hidden hand” of censorship started to emerge little by little. So far, the “toll” has risen to fifteen, including top executives, producers, broadcasters and others. One of these days we will make a detailed list of the gone staffers.
The channel deteriorated pretty badly. But it turns out that appeared an outstanding journalist with a primetime talk show (Shirley Varnagy), who with legitimate eclecticism and singular acuity during her brilliant interviews gained a sizable audience.
She interviewed Tyrians and Trojans as she further extended the range of “interviewable” people – a good thing for our current sad TV programming, by the way – and did not save any troubling or politically incorrect questions for herself. Guess what? She just quit Globovisión.
And the reason is particularly sordid. She was conducting an interview last week with the one and only Mario Vargas Llosa (yes, the famed Peruvian writer and Nobel Prize winner), something that is deemed a luxury for this ill-fated news channel, until some “breaking news” suddenly interrupted the talk show –for good and with no credits or special thanks to such renowned interviewee.
And this “breaking news” (it was two reports as a matter of fact) were to be broadcast only for a few minutes during the regular newscast anyway. The reason: the author of “The Time of the Hero” (Vargas Llosa) made an opinion about his recently deceased colleague Gabriel García Márquez, who was well-known for his preference for left-wing governments but never paid minimal attention to the Revolution of Hugo Chávez, and then started elaborating on the Chávez administration and the mess of a country he left after he died.
Unfortunately, objectivity and democracy did not go together this time. It is obvious that the order to apply censorship here was blunt, surely coming straight from the Miraflores presidential palace, and the anchorwoman from the newscast (the irreplaceable Gladys Rodríguez) inevitably had to do as told.
Fortunately, Varnagy behaved like a professional as usual at the opening of her next talk show. A very despicable act as you can see, dear reader. Perhaps you would be better informed of what is happening in this muzzled country if you resorted to the Internet rather than the public airwaves.
source
Once upon a time, there was a privately-run news channel that served as the sole television base for the Venezuelan opposition. It is true that, abstractly speaking, its radical commitment to a cause could be deemed unusual.
But that militant stance is justified in a country where the Government managed to concentrate a real battery of state-run TV stations that practiced a biased and propagandistic kind of position, even more than the channel in question.
And there are two things to take into consideration: one, those channels, for being from the State, should remain open to all Venezuelans as happens in civilized countries, and, two, they do such a bad programming that, despite their plurality and budgetary abundance, all have poor audiences. The other privately-run channels remain as informative political eunuchs, fearful of their future.The owners of Globovisión, who once had sworn to be patriots capable of withstanding any attack from the repressive “gorilla government,” were courageous at first, but that particular day we are talking about, apparently remembered they were businesspeople in the end, and that the enemy had already very fearsome weapons so they decided to sell the channel for a fair amount of money to some government loyalists (who, according to Clodovaldo Hernández, a journalist supporting the chavismo movement, have a criminal record rather than experience in media). They probably thought to themselves that “we better stay rich than immolated” – and that was it for Globovisión.
The new owners from the so-called “Bolivarian bourgeoisie” tried to make believe the channel’s editorial line was going to remain intact, so longtime faithful advertisers and audience would stick with it. And even some journalists bought it at first, while others abandoned ship from the beginning (even its most renowned anchormen did), and others started leaving the place because they could not stand the bad smell around the hallways of the channel or were simply fired by the new administration.
That because the “hidden hand” of censorship started to emerge little by little. So far, the “toll” has risen to fifteen, including top executives, producers, broadcasters and others. One of these days we will make a detailed list of the gone staffers.
The channel deteriorated pretty badly. But it turns out that appeared an outstanding journalist with a primetime talk show (Shirley Varnagy), who with legitimate eclecticism and singular acuity during her brilliant interviews gained a sizable audience.
She interviewed Tyrians and Trojans as she further extended the range of “interviewable” people – a good thing for our current sad TV programming, by the way – and did not save any troubling or politically incorrect questions for herself. Guess what? She just quit Globovisión.
And the reason is particularly sordid. She was conducting an interview last week with the one and only Mario Vargas Llosa (yes, the famed Peruvian writer and Nobel Prize winner), something that is deemed a luxury for this ill-fated news channel, until some “breaking news” suddenly interrupted the talk show –for good and with no credits or special thanks to such renowned interviewee.
And this “breaking news” (it was two reports as a matter of fact) were to be broadcast only for a few minutes during the regular newscast anyway. The reason: the author of “The Time of the Hero” (Vargas Llosa) made an opinion about his recently deceased colleague Gabriel García Márquez, who was well-known for his preference for left-wing governments but never paid minimal attention to the Revolution of Hugo Chávez, and then started elaborating on the Chávez administration and the mess of a country he left after he died.
Unfortunately, objectivity and democracy did not go together this time. It is obvious that the order to apply censorship here was blunt, surely coming straight from the Miraflores presidential palace, and the anchorwoman from the newscast (the irreplaceable Gladys Rodríguez) inevitably had to do as told.
Fortunately, Varnagy behaved like a professional as usual at the opening of her next talk show. A very despicable act as you can see, dear reader. Perhaps you would be better informed of what is happening in this muzzled country if you resorted to the Internet rather than the public airwaves.
source
No comments:
Post a Comment