Richard Gott on RCTV

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

The battle over the media is about race as well as class

The protests in Venezuela are motivated by more than a TV station. The 
oligarchy fears it is losing its right to run the country

Richard Gott in Caracas
Thursday June 7, 2007
The Guardian

After 10 days of rival protests in the streets of Caracas, memories have 
been revived of earlier attempts to overthrow the Bolivarian revolution 
of Hugo Chávez, now in its ninth year. Street demonstrations, 
culminating in an attempted coup in 2002 and a prolonged lock-out at the 
national oil industry, once seemed the last resort of an opposition 
unable to make headway at the polls. Yet the current unrest is a feeble 
echo of those tumultuous events, and the political struggle takes place 
on a smaller canvas. Today's battle is for the hearts and minds of a 
younger generation confused by the upheavals of an uncharted 
revolutionary process.

University students from privileged backgrounds have been pitched 
against newly enfranchised young people from the impoverished 
shantytowns, beneficiaries of the increased oil royalties spent on 
higher education projects for the poor. These separate groups never 
meet, but both sides occupy their familiar battleground within the city, 
one in the leafy squares of eastern Caracas, the other in the narrow and 
teeming streets in the west. This symbolic battle will become ever more 
familiar in Latin America in the years ahead: rich against poor, white 
against brown and black, immigrant settlers against indigenous peoples, 
privileged minorities against the great mass of the population. History 
may have come to an end in other parts of the world, but in this 
continent historical processes are in full flood.

Ostensibly the argument is about the media, and the government's 
decision not to renew the broadcasting licence of a prominent station, 
Radio Caracas Television (RCTV), and to hand its frequencies to a newly 
established state channel. What are the rights of commercial television 
channels? What are the responsibilities of those funded by the state? 
Where should the balance between them lie? Academic questions in Europe 
and the US, the debate in Latin America is loud and impassioned. Here 
there is little tradition of public broadcasting, and commercial 
stations often received their licence in the days of military rule.

The debate in Venezuela has less to do with the alleged absence of 
freedom of expression than with a perennially tricky issue locally 
referred to as "exclusion", a shorthand term for "race" and "racism". 
RCTV was not just a politically reactionary organisation which supported 
the 2002 coup attempt against a democratically elected government - it 
was also a white supremacist channel. Its staff and presenters, in a 
country largely of black and indigenous descent, were uniformly white, 
as were the protagonists of its soap operas and the advertisements it 
carried. It was "colonial" television, reflecting the desires and 
ambitions of an external power.

At the final, close-down party of RCTV last month, those most in view on 
the screen were long-haired and pulchritudinous young blondes. Such 
images make for excellent television watching by European and North 
American males, and these languorous blondes are indeed familiar figures 
from the Miss World and Miss Universe competitions in which the children 
of recent immigrants from Europe are invariably Venezuela's chief 
contenders. Yet their ubiquity on the screen prevented the channel from 
presenting a mirror to the society that it sought to serve or to 
entertain. To watch a Venezuelan commercial station (and several still 
survive) is to imagine that you have been transported to the US. 
Everything is based on a modern, urban and industrialised society, 
remote from the experience of most Venezuelans. Their programmes, argues 
Aristóbulo Istúriz, until recently Chávez's minister of education (and 
an Afro-Venezuelan), encourage racism, discrimination and exclusion.

The new state-funded channels (and there are several of them too, plus 
innumerable community radio stations) are doing something completely 
different, and unusual in the competitive world of commercial 
television. Their programmes look as though they are taking place in 
Venezuela, and they display the cross-section of the population to be 
seen on cross-country buses or on the Caracas metro. As in every country 
in the world, not everyone in Venezuela is a natural beauty. Many are 
old, ugly and fat. Today they are given a voice and a face on the 
television channels of the state. Many are deaf or hard of hearing. Now 
they have sign language interpretation on every programme. Many are 
inarticulate peasants. They too have their moment on the screen. Their 
immediate and dangerous struggle for land is not just being observed by 
a documentary film-maker from the city. They are being taught to make 
the films themselves.

Blanca Eekhout, the head of Vive TV, the government's cultural channel, 
launched two years ago, coined the slogan "Don't watch television, make 
it". Classes in film-making have been set up all over the country. Lil 
Rodríguez, an Afro-Venezuelan journalist and the boss of TVES, the 
channel that replaces RCTV, claims that it will become "a useful space 
for rescuing those values that other models of television always ignore, 
especially our Afro-heritage". With time, the excluded will find a voice 
within the mainstream.

Little of this is under discussion in the dialogue of the deaf on the 
streets of Caracas. For the protesting university students, the argument 
about the media is just one more stick with which to hit out against the 
ever-popular Chávez. Yet as they mourn the loss of their favourite soap 
operas, they are already aware that their eventual loss may be more 
substantial. As children of the oligarchy, they might have expected soon 
to run the country. Now fresh faces are emerging from the shantytowns to 
challenge them, a new class educating itself at speed and planning to 
seize their birthright.

Just a few weeks ago, Chávez outlined his plans for university reform, 
encouraging wider access and the development of a different curriculum. 
New colleges and technical institutes across the country will dilute the 
prestige of the older establishments, still the preserve of the wealthy, 
and the battle over the media will soon be submerged in a wider struggle 
for educational reform. Chávez takes no notice of the complaints and 
simply soldiers on, with the characteristics of an evangelical preacher: 
he urges people to lead moral lives, live simply and resist the lure of 
consumerism. He is embarked on a challenge to the established order that 
has long prevailed in Venezuela and throughout the rest of Latin 
America, hoping that the message of his cultural revolution will soon 
echo across the continent.

· Richard Gott is the author of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution

rwgott@xxxxxxx