Reply #4: DU Reader, what a find! [View All]

Don't know if you were reading a couple of weeks ago, but "El Nacional" was held up to us as a legitimate journalism source. What a crude joke!

So glad to see this article. It's tremendous,and provides more insight into these pathetic bustards who have been brandished about by our visiting right-wing coup supporter as God's Gift to Journalism and Human Rights.

From the article:

In September, our Community TV station, Teletambores, has produced various reports about the struggle for land in the state of Yaracuy. The farmers complain of harassment, torture, numerous assassinations and “disappearances” committed by local police in service of the opposition that is opposed to a moderate agrarian reform proposed by President Chávez. Some of these reports were broadcast by VTV, the only public television station, and a while later by Zalea TV in Paris, that defends, in France, the Freedom of Audiovisual Speech. The farmers bitterly complain that none of the large commercial media has reported the repression. Clearly, the media falls silent when there are massive assassinations of farmers… because its owners belong to the same economic groups as the plantation owners. Even worse: those “media” outlets widely justify the bloody repression by calling the farmers without land who are planting on the first acres resulting from the agrarian reform “terrorists,” and, “invaders trained by the Cubans,” etcetera.

The disproportion between the public show by these “media” outlets in the cases of very opportune “attacks” and their hiding of massive Human Rights violations is impressive.

If the Community Media has one vital task, it is to reinvent the idea of information, because the commercial, monopolistic TV stations – sub-copies of United States television – have destroyed that very concept. It’s as if no International Convention of Journalism ever existed. It’s “anchors” interrupt their brief news items during the programs to sell all kinds of products – shampoo, fashion clothes, miracle creams – without any type of transition. The “news reporters” are reduced to parrot a unilateral and obsessive form of political propaganda. They are absolutely racist (you won’t see a black anchorperson, for example) when the population is, in a large part, of African origin. What’s more, they’ve always looked with scorn upon the popular neighborhoods where 80-percent of the population lives, describing them as the ultimate bastions of hell, of vice, of delinquency, and calling for an iron fist against their inhabitants.

It’s an old trick of History that private-sector communication businesses pass themselves off as “information media.” This permits them to invoke “freedom of speech” when they see their economic interests threatened. From there, their fevered search for international and “super-objective” allies. The “super-objectivity” displayed by the letters authored by “Reporters Without Borders” gives the campaign by the commercial media great efficiency in circulating around the world, for example, among other Human Rights organizations who believe “Reporters Without Borders” without question.
(snip/...)http://www.narconews.com/Issue25/article10.html