Telesur is on the air

The Bolivarian revolution of Venezuela has broken the imperialist monopoly on worldwide television reporting. On July 25 it launched Telesur, a television channel capable of reaching all of Latin America.

Until the launch, corporate-controlled media had a hammerlock on international news reporting. Big business giant Time-Warner owns CNN in the U.S. The British government, which certainly serves the interests of the ruling class, not the workers, controls the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC). And right-wing stations Univision and Telemundo have the monopoly in the Spanish-language countries of the Western hemisphere.

In announcing the creation of Telesur, its new president, Andrés Izarra, asserted: “Telesur is an initiative against cultural imperialism and against imperialism in any of its expressions.” Izarra resigned his position as Venezuelan Minister of Communication and Information to avoid any conflict of interest in heading up the new initiative. (venezuelanalysis.com)

Aram Aharonian, the new channel’s director, linked Telesur’s task to Bolivarian goals by saying: “We are convinced that there is no way to change reality unless we first see it as it is.”

Aharonian also noted the importance of community media as “truly horizontal spaces of information and steps forward in democratization.”

But he stressed that alone this media was insufficient: “We could have hundreds of community media, but if 93 percent of the audience is controlled by a monopolistic structure, we will advance very little in the direction of democratization.”

Present at the announcement of the launch was the Telesur advisory board of distinguished intellectuals from Latin America, the U.S. and Europe. These included Pakistani-British filmmaker and writer Tariq Ali; Nicaraguan poet and former Sandinista Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal; Uruguayan journalist and historian Eduardo Galeano; editor-in-chief of the French political journal Le Monde Diplomatique, Ignacio Ramonet; U.S. founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman; African American actor Danny Glover; Jamaican American civil rights activist and singer Harry Belafonte; and Argentinian Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel, among others.

U.S. efforts to counter Telesur’s free flow of information have begun. Conservative U.S. Rep. Connie Mack, a Republican from Florida, has proposed a propaganda broadcast aimed at Venezuela similar to that of Radio and TV Marti directed against revolutionary Cuba.

Mack argued this “free press” is necessary in order to guarantee privatization and capitalist development in Venezuela. On July 20, Mack’s bill, an amendment to the Foreign Relations Authorization Act of 2005, passed in the House by voice vote. (venezuelanalysis.com)

But international support for Telesur is broadening.

Arabic language news network Al-Jazeera is open to a “strategic alliance” with Telesur, according to Telesur president Izarra. (english.aljazeera.net)

And the governments of Argentina, Cuba and Uruguay are co-sponsoring the channel together with Venezuela.

In April 2002 the big-business-owned radio and television stations in Venezuela actively promoted a U.S.-instigated coup attempt against democratically elected President Hugo Chávez. But through the Bolivarian process, hundreds of thousands of poor and working class people had begun to question corporate control. Spreading the truth about what had happened by word of mouth and a few small community radio stations, they poured into the streets and smashed the coup.

Now the establishment of Telesur promises a voice for the people of Latin America that can step into the ring of international reporting and slug it out with the bought-off media.