Last Updated:  Tuesday, 1 April, 2003, 09:44 GMT 10:44 UK
Nick Higham BBC media correspondent

Imagine a world in which Tony Blair hosts a television programme called Hello, Prime Minister from locations around the country every Sunday on BBC One and on every BBC radio station.

Imagine this programme, in which he lambasts his political opponents and cries up the government's achievements for three or four hours at a time.

Imagine he also commandeers airtime on ITV and Channel 4 and Five at peaktime, sometimes two or three times a week.

And then imagine a world in which news coverage on those same commercial channels is routinely hostile to the government - while the BBC, of course, is a government mouthpiece, its programmes preceded by video vignettes in which Union Jack-waving workers and peasants march across the screen in slow motion to the accompaniment of stirring music.

It is of course unthinkable - in Britain, but not in Venezuela.

I have just returned from my first visit to Latin America, and I found it frankly staggering.

Venezuela is the most deeply polarised country I have ever been to.

Deposed

Since 1998 its president has been Hugo Chavez, a populist swept to power on a promise to do something, anything, for the two-thirds of Venezuelans living on or below the poverty line.

Last year he was briefly deposed in a coup (until the military switched sides to reinstate him).

Last December the middle classes, whose own standard of living has been plummeting, began a two-month general strike to try and unseat him.

They fear he is trying to "do a Castro" and turn Venezuela into a kind of Cuba, proudly independent and desperately poor.

The strike succeeded only in paralysing the economy, which enjoyed what the economists call "negative growth" of nine per cent last year and is predicted to shrink by a further 20% this year.

Throughout, the media have played a shamelessly partisan role.

Chavez thumps the tub every Sunday in his programme Ola! Presidente.

Economy

In the edition I saw (number 144) he was broadcasting from a new workers' housing development somewhere in the provinces, taking time out to attack the invasion of Iraq.

Venezuela, whose economy depends on oil exports, thinks America's purpose in the Gulf is to smash Opec and drive down the price of oil.

In 1998 Chavez was the first head of state to visit Saddam Hussein in Baghdad since the Gulf War.

Dr Marcel Granier, chief executive of RCTV, which along with its rival Venevision is one of Venezuela's two main commercial channels, maintains that TV coverage of the 1998 election was relatively impartial and that government spokesmen are still given airtime in his station's news programmes.

But in Granier's view the government are "a gang of felons" with little belief in democracy and the rule of law.

Given his shameless use of state TV and radio, Granier says Chavez has no right to complain if commercial TV channels are biased against him (Granier does not concede that they are, though other observers disagree).

Resents

RCTV's Todos Intimos, at 9pm each night, is currently one of the top-rating telenovelas or soap operas which dominate the ratings in Venezuela - which may be why Granier so resents what he calls Chavez's frequent "confiscation" of RCTV airtime during Todos Intimos's transmissions.

With the country's major newspapers all lined up against Chavez, the president himself feels beleaguered, railing against middle class "saboteurs" out to destroy his populist revolution.

The result: there is nowhere ordinary Venezuelans (or visiting foreign journalists, for that matter) can turn for reliable, impartial coverage of affairs.

Like most Latin American countries Venezuela's history is one of dictatorship: a lasting democracy was only established in 1958.

Civil society has had less than half a century to take root. Television's inability to stand back from the fray is a reflection of Venezuela's wider social failures: almost certainly, it is also making things worse.

To use a metaphor appropriate to a petroleum-based economy, Venezuela's broadcasters aren't pouring oil on troubled waters, they are fuelling the flames.

This column also appears in the BBC's publication Ariel.

Commander Bond (Written on 01-04-2003 @ 07:57 a.m. by Daniel Dykes)

Die Another Day has opened to its last territory of the films international run, Venezuela.

The film opened in number one position in the country taking US$177,000 across 65 screens. The opening take made Die Another Day Fox International's second biggest opener in Venezuela, and also made the film the fifth highest all-time debut in the region.

The earnings from the region has pushed Die Another Day's international take to US$264.5m, which means the film has surpassed MGM's expectations of US$420m world-wide by reaching US$425.4m.

If you'd like to discuss the take please visit this thread of the Die Another Day Forums. Thanks to Mourning Becomes Electra for sending in the news.

Dispatch

WASHINGTON -- The number of journalists in jail worldwide rose in 2002, with China remaining at the top of the list for keeping reporters behind bars, according to a study released yesterday in Washington by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

While incarcerations rose 15 percent to 136, deaths fell. The survey on press freedom found that 19 journalists were killed in the line of duty in 2002, down from 37 a year earlier because of fewer armed conflicts.

During the past 10 years, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said 366 reporters had died while carrying out their work. While many were killed in crossfire, the vast majority were "hunted down and murdered, often in direct reprisal for their reporting", the study said.

The most deadly countries for journalists last year were Colombia, the Palestinian territories and Russia, with three deaths each. Two deaths were reported in both Pakistan and the Philippines and one each in Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Nepal, Uganda and Venezuela.

As for incarcerations, the organisation said China put an additional five journalists in jail, bringing its total number to 39. China has been the top jailer of journalists four years in a row. -- Sapa-DPA

Oregon Magazine Robert W. McChesney & John Nichols 

The liberals, or whatever they are calling themselves today (in addition to Democrats), are shaping up for a new assault on America. They've listened to the gripes of the public and hope to co-opt those complaints for their own purposes. Their focus will be the commercial media, especially  television. To the public, TV shows are often silly, or too violent, or they set a bad moral example for our youngsters;  the endless commercials are annoying, and news reporting is often biased and incomplete. Those are the complaints. 

To understand why the liberals are interested in these complaints, consider how they have in the past taken our concerns and irritations and created from them anti-American movements. For many decades citizens were active in improving and conserving the quality of our environment. Singly and in groups they began taking steps to preserve our waterways, forests and air quality.  During the seventies and eighties radical Leftist front organizations launched  the environmental movement, with lobbyists in Congress petitioning for greater and greater government control over the uses of private and public land, assuming authority as 'the experts,' acquiring massive government grants to fund their activism,  and eventually almost replacing citizen activism. 

Another example was civil rights. Few Americans were comfortable with institutionalized discrimination against the nation's black citizens.  Martin Luther King Jr,. along with many other citizens black and white, brought the issue to a head, and pressured our politicians to end the apartheid laws.  The Civil Rights Act was passed in Congress and the nation moved giant steps toward ending racism in America.  But the radical Left within the Democratic  Party seized the opportunity to alter the course of this development by playing on another of our concerns: after generations of being held back, would blacks be able to integrate fully and catch up in education and employment?  Before we had opportunity to even consider the tremendous progress blacks had already made despite discrimination, in areas such as their higher rates of employment than whites, higher rates of marriage, their substantial rates of property and business ownership, the Democrats convinced blacks to accept not the end of apartheid but a reformed apartheid in the shape of State-subsidized dependency -- welfare, public housing, and university  and job preferences. 

In these cases and others the public yielded to the Left's co-option of cultural progress.  Changes brought about through citizen involvement usually moves forward in faltering steps, with a lot of questioning about goals, consequences and legalities.  On the other hand, the Left never falters;  its untested solutions are presented and promoted aggressively and confidently, organizations are formed swiftly to help shape government regulations and to gain access to government funding. Citizens hesitantly step aside, allowing these juggernauts to forge ahead.  Usually we're only too thankful to let someone else do the work. 

A funny thing has happened over the past fifty years, though. The bright hopes for full integration and participation of our black citizens has become instead a massive movement of divisivenessness, engendering suspicion, anger, and resentment on the part of both races.  Environmentalism has become a tool for social engineering rather than a genuine commitment  to the preservation of our environment for our use and enjoyment. The Left may not again find us so gullibly acquiescing to their radical solutions. 

In their book Our Media Not Theirs,  McChesney and Nichols propose to solve our dissatisfactions with the media,  television and newspapers, too,  by placing them under the ownership and management of the government, funded entirely by taxes.  They attempt to frame this government take-over of the media as essential to the survival of our democracy, but the attempts are weak and unconvincing. 

Though they insist that every citizen should have a voice in what is offered on TV (and newspapers and magazines), they present no method by which this could be accomplished other than to suggest that most programming would focus on narrow local issues and interests.  Decisions about the presentation and content of national and international news presumably would be made by government bureaucrats. Expensive entertainment programs would avoid violent cop shows, insipid sit-coms and soap operas, or crude reality shows.  They would instead be uplifting and educational. 

Under the authors' plan, "media users" (currently called "consumers") would have access to programs that reflect "the best judgement of media workers, not the surreptitious bribe of a commercial interest."  Media workers, whoever they might be, would give us their best shot at providing programs that are good for us, rather than leaving us to the tender mercies of the  advertisers who will give us precisely the programming we want if only we'll buy their products. In a contest between government 'media workers' educating us, and commercial media anxious to learn what most appeals to us and trying to provide it,  most of us would choose to endure the commercials. Logically, commercial media seems more "ours" than publicly owned media. 

There's a thread of resentment hinted at throughout the book, resentment that the authors' opinions and desires are being ignored, and they consider it their best bet to be heard if the government has control and forces the rest of us to listen, to not be distracted by our own, to them, petty interests.  Consider who wrote forewords to the book: Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich and Ralph Nader.  Outside of academia and those who believe in massive government control of everything, who listens to them? 

Most astonishing in the book are the exhortations that Americans have a lot to learn about improving our media from other countries -- such as East Timor, New Zealand, Venezuela -- countries whose movement toward government funding and control of the media is making good progress. 

The book is a not very coherent diatribe against all private property ownership -- including copyright and patents -- which is in fact the very basis of American liberties and prosperity.  The authors suggest that in our efforts to reform the media we should connect with other organizations and movements such as the unions, minorities, the feminists, and other special interest groups.  They pooh-pooh the importance of the internet and the rising star of Fox News. They also insult America's President Bush as the "moronic child of privilege."  The authors seem to have little use for conservatives, or anyone to the right of Robert Fisk.  The book will appeal most to those who enjoy blaming big business and global free markets for their personal problems as well as the world's ills. The authors are confident of success in ridding the media of commercialism, citing the opening doors in Congress from such representatives as Ernest Hollings, Jesse Jackson Jr. and John Conyers, very liberal Democrats all.. 

McChesney and Nichols want the media to become the new "issue" for us, as the environment and civil rights have been before, and then to leave it to them to guide the way. But their record has not been a happy one for us; powerful Leftist organizations coupled with government ownership and regulation have increased the nation's ills, not reduced them.  Much better that we muddle along, getting information and making our individual voices heard over the internet, in public meetings, making changes through our vote and through our very powerful 'wallet vote.'  We've learned our lesson about the Left's 'solutions'; we'll  willingly shoulder the burden of shaping the media to our own liking. 

Peggy Whitcomb 

Posted: April 1, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern <a href=worldnetdaily.com>WorldNetDaily.com

Saddam Hussein, though the object of widespread hatred, is certainly not without friends and supporters in the United States. Foremost among them would be those people marching in our major cities and university campuses who call themselves "anti-war activists."

Few comments draw quicker howls of righteous indignation than to call these so-called "anti-war" protestors "anti-American." To suggest that someone is anti-American falls somewhere on the outrage scale below an expression of an undying devotion to the musical talents of Barry Manilow.

OK, I like Barry Manilow's music. So there. I also think that most of the anti-war protestors are, indeed, anti-American. There. I've said it.

For you to attack my position here, and indeed for me to defend it, we have to establish just what I believe "America" to be. The concept of America goes far beyond territorial limits and the definition of an American is not covered solely by a birth certificate or an address. America is more than a territory or a geographical boundary. America is a society, a culture and a way of life.

America is an institution where the individual is sovereign and individuality is respected and admired. In America a person is free to follow his dreams, exploit his talents, go the extra mile and then sit back to enjoy the rewards of those efforts.

In America, justice occurs when a person gets what he deserves, not when he uses the power of government to plunder the wealth of another. In America, people admire self-sufficiency, not dependence; personal strength, not weakness; faith, not cynicism; and courage, not cowardice.

Americans prefer the chaos and uncertainty of economic and social freedom to the security of a paternalistic government. In America, the accumulation of wealth through hard work and good decision-making is admired, not reviled. Accomplishment is rewarded, not penalized.

Americans believe in freedom, and are willing to sacrifice their fortunes and their very lives to protect that freedom – and to bestow the blessings of freedom upon those who live in horrendous tyranny under a brutal and dangerous dictator.

As I see it, then these appeasement protestors are, for the most, par anti-American.

Watch them. Listen to them. Read their signs. These are people who revel in collective, not individual action. They show no talent for independent thought. They chant their trite slogans like sheep bleating in a tightly packed flock. They carry their mass-produced signs showing the mindless graffiti of the left. Like any herd animal, if you separate one from the flock you'll find them ripe for the intellectual kill. Separated from the collective support mechanism of the protesting mobocracy, they quickly exhibit their complete lack of knowledge and their aversion to the hated practice of logical thinking.

"No war for oil," they bleat.

You ask, "If we wanted to fight a war for oil why wouldn't we just go to Venezuela? It's so much closer and the people there are already fighting for a change!"

No answer – just that dumb slack-jawed stare of a leftist in headlights.

"Give peace a chance!"

"Peace? You mean the kind of peace where the children of dissident parents are kidnapped and returned with their eyes gouged out? The type of peace where those who speak ill of the great and wonderful dictator of Iraq have their tongues cut out and are hung from lampposts in Baghdad to bleed to death? Is that the kind of peace you're promoting?"

Though there are exceptions, they are few. The overwhelming majority of the so-called anti-war demonstrators in this country are leftists. The money that pays for the accoutrements of a good appeasement demonstration; the stages, sound systems, permit fees, security and medical facilities, come generally from leftist organizations, many with direct ties to Marxist and socialist organizations.

Many of these demonstrators are Democrats. They are driven by their hatred for George W. Bush and their bitterness over the loss of a close election. They fully realize that a sudden withdrawal of coalition forces from Iraq would serve to preserve and strengthen Saddam Hussein and his Baathist goons, and would be a certain death sentence for tens of thousands of Shiites and Kurds seen as supportive of the coalition invasion.

On some level, they might actually care about the future of the Iraqi people, but on a higher level they care about returning leftists to their rightful position of power in Washington, a Democratic victory in 2004. They fantasize over a defeat of the Republicans more than victory over the Republican Guard.

So, spare me the formulaic indignation over the "anti-American" label. It fits all too well.

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