Venezuela frees the airwaves of coup-plotting RCTV

On May 28, the broadcast license of Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV) expired. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has said the government will not renew RCTV’s license, effectively ending the station’s reign on the airwaves as a coup plotting and counterrevolutionary propaganda machine. A new public station, TVes, has taken over that small section of the airwaves that the money-driven RCTV used for 54 years.

The worldwide corporate media, especially that in the United States, has tried to distort the government’s sovereign right to deny RCTV’s license by turning it into an international human rights issue. This imperialist media has given enormous publicity and exaggerated the size of demonstrations of a few thousand Venezuelan reactionaries. They have also downplayed the massive celebrations greeting the new public station—still a small opposition voice to the dominant private media.

Venezuela’s Foreign Affairs Minister Nicolás Maduro said May 28 that 95 percent of the country’s TV stations still belong to private companies, as well as 94 percent of radio stations and 98 percent of newspapers. The wealthy private owners are uniformly hostile to the revolutionary Chávez government.

RCTV was an active participant in the imperialist sponsored April 11, 2002, attempted coup against democratically elected President Chávez. During the days leading up to the coup, RCTV intentionally reported false information and lies meant to destabilize the Chávez government.

RCTV’s repeated false news reports broadcast on April 11, 2002, of Chávez supporters firing into unarmed crowds were cited by many of the coup leaders as the reason for their participation in the attempted overthrow. Those news reports have since been completely discredited and have been proven to have been intentionally planted in an effort to stir up support for the coup.

While the coup was underway, RCTV broadcast nonstop coverage and interviews with the coup leaders, lauding them as heroes of the Venezuelan people even as they attempted to illegally oust the president whom the vast majority of Venezuelans had freely voted for.

One of the leaders of the coup, Vice Admiral Víctor Ramírez Pérez, prematurely proclaiming success on the night of April 11, 2002, said, “We had a deadly weapon, the media, and now that I have the opportunity, let me thank you.” RCTV gave no news coverage to Chávez’s reinstatement as president after the coup failed, opting instead to run old U.S. movies and cartoons.

The corporate media in the U.S. has attempted to frame the Chávez government’s decision not to renew RCTV’s license as a “free speech” issue, claiming the non-renewal is an attempt to silence opposing viewpoints. But the active role RCTV played in attempting to overthrow a democratically elected president would certainly be grounds for immediate termination of broadcasting privileges in almost any other country. It is not hard to imagine the severity of penalties the U.S. Federal Communications Commission would enact on a television station that actively attempted to overthrow the U.S. president.

The Chávez administration followed all the appropriate procedures laid out in the Venezuelan Constitution regarding broadcast license renewal. RCTV should consider itself lucky that it was allowed to broadcast for the remaining length of its 20-year license.