Reply from NC

Like you, I think it was both wrong in principle, and a mistake in practice, to shut down RCTV.  And I agree with Western critics who say "it could never happen in our free and democratic societies." There's a good reason for that.  Suppose that a military coup backed by, say, China, overthrew the government of the US, eliminated the presidency, dispersed Congress, threw out the Supreme Court, and dismantled every other democratic institution.  Suppose that CBS helped prepare the ground for the coup and enthusiastically supported it all the way through.  Suppose the coup was overturned by a popular uprising.  It's correct that CBS's license would not have been revoked five years later (technically, fail to be renewed).  The reason is the owners and managers would have been lined up before firing squads right away.

For those who uphold far higher standards than those of the West, it's entirely legitimate to criticize the closing of RCTV.  Although, to quote some recent observations by Robert McChesney and Mark Weisbrot,

"The vast majority of Venezuela's media are not only in private hands, they are constitutionally protected, uncensored, and dominated by the opposition. RCTV's owners can expand their cable and satellite programming, or take their capital and launch a print empire forthwith. Aggressive unqualified political dissent is alive and well in the Venezuelan mainstream media, in a manner few other democratic nations have ever known, including our own."

And as they also point out, the standard reporting that "Chavez claims..." is dishonest, because as the media know, the evidence is strong.

This is not the first such illustration of such Western hypocrisy.  You can find another case discussed in my book Necessary Illusions, the case of La Prensa, in Nicaragua.  The government was subjected to very harsh condemnation in the US, and the West generally, for repression of La Prensa, the largest and richest newspaper in the country.  In late 1989, I was asked by my friend Fr. Cesar Jerez, rector of the Jesuit university, and by the independent left analyst Orlando Nunez, to spend a week in Nicaragua reviewing the contents of La Prensa.  It happened to be a very sensitive moment.  The US has escalated its attack on Nicaragua in the build-up to the elections, in radical violation of its commitments at the peace accords, hoping that the population would be intimidated into voting for the US candidate. The media here cooperated by scarcely reporting the escalation.  The facts are reviewed in NI, including the contents of La Prensa, which was openly calling for the overthrow of the government and supporting the attack on the country by a foreign-run terrorist army.  I also compared Nicaragua's record with that of Israel, under vastly less threat, right at the same time.  Israel's record was far worse.  I picked Israel because it was being upheld right then as a model of how a democracy guarantees freedom of press under threat.  I also reviewed the US record (under much less threat), merely reviewing the ample and familiar evidence that it was far worse.

Such topics are off the agenda in enlightened discourse.

But to repeat, for those who really do believe in freedom, the state repression is both wrong in principle and a tactical mistake, in my opinion.

NC