VHeadline Venezuela News reports: No big surprise, but 'Mundo Hispano' (Hispanic World) writer Eloy Pardo, in an interview with TeleSur vice president Aram Aharoni, extracts an admission that "Telesur has been taken over by inept, counter-revolutionaries in the widest sense of the word!"
According to Aharoni, the biggest problem is that, in a highly competitive market, the satellite channel -- which was set up as a counter-balance to USA hegemonic CNN Espanol -- "has failed to represent the transformations taking place in Latin America, socially, politically and economically."
It's now three years since TeleSur was launched. Aram Aharoni was the original thinker behind the foundation of the channel with Venezuelan financing, seen from its inception as yet another media outlet that would swiftly be brought under the control of Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez Frias. The 'Chavista'-control suspicion was, of course, exacerbated by the appointment of Venezuela's then Minister of Communications (MinCI) Andres Izarra as TeleSur president with his bag-man Yuri Pimentel as vice-president at TeleSur just the same.
Izarra, of course, inhabits a parallel universe back again at MinCI, while Pimentel has proved disastrous as the president of Venezolana de Television (VTV) ... but while both retain a stranglehold over TeleSur, they left behind them a payroll of otherwise unemployable Chavista 'revolutionaries' each with his or her own ambitions to get lucrative employment in (USA) Stateside television at the earliest possible opportunity.
Aharoni was a professional participant in all TeleSur editorial decisions until last December, which is perhaps why he now argues that things are not working as they should, with internal and external factors working against the original ethos of TeleSur i.e. to become a pan-South American alternative to CNN Español and others like Spanish-language Univision across the United States. NOW he's critical of perceived Statism and lack of democracy at TeleSur as well as an editorial fixation on Latin America's left.
SURPRISE, SURPRISE!
Aharoni admits that TeleSur has little social impact, making it marginal ... but he goes on to say that Telesur is indeed revolutionary inasmuch as it attempts "to break with more than 500 years of Latin America being viewed exclusively through foreign eyes. Now Latin Americans can view their world on a TV channel that truly represents the interests of the region ... winning back self-esteem for Latin Americans, to recover our historical memory and know where we're coming from and where we're going to ... otherwise our fate will always be imposed from the outside."
"Some people have tried to convince us that our alternative should be synonymous with marginal ... that popular social movements on the left should have small weeklies or small community radio stations ... that we have to be marginal ... but to be a true alternative to the United States' hegemonic message we have to be mass-distribution and mass-audience. The problem is that there has been an assumption that Latin Americans have no alternative..."
"CNN en Español is an excellent TV channel, designed to fully comply with its mission to misinform or report whatever they want. The mistake is to copy them, believing that to be competitive we must emulate the ways of the enemy."
"Telesur knows that in a few years everything has changed ... today, CNN en Español broadcast images that are not always related to the US State Department's view ... they have covered the indigenous ceremonial inauguration of Evo Morales and speeches by Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega at the UN. Why? Because CNN knows that if they do not give the people the option, they will go to TeleSur to watch instead!"
"The left has always thought that everything is about money to be able to produce something ... today, production costs have gone down a lot. So the problem is mental ... we continue to be dominated conceptually, even behind the revolutionary slogans there is the belief that ot (money) will resolve everything. But the challenge is to inform and educate. The idea must be to work collectively and combat individualism."
"In Latin America we have no concept of teaching citizenship. We speak of social movements but with 'gringo' concepts of communication that continue looking at Latin America with foreign eyes. Some believe that transmitting a single-minded discourse by Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro is 'alternative' ... but what is needed is a permanent cross-over in all programming, we need to promote the collective working model rather than to follow the USA fixation on stars and competing individualities."
"A new television channel is useless if you do not have new content and formats ... what people need are documentaries, films, culture, entertainment in the best sense of the word, soap operas or sports, with a Latin American perspective. Besides that, our satellite distribution is in the hands of 'the enemy' ... we have a potential audience of 100 million but we have only 100,000 viewers."
"The problem is that neither the message or the signal arrives and we need to anchor television on interesting productions, reversing, for example, the concept of reactionary soap into a progressive soap opera ... information should be a priority ... with TeleSur it is a mistake to base everything on news ... I do not know if it is because of mediocrity or sabotage, whichever way it is a conceptual mistake."
"What is missing is a high level of awareness ... it is supposed to be a multi-Latin American company but still it is not. It is a Venezuelan company, controlled by people who are more interested in managing budgets, not projects. It has to do with an internal struggle that is going on in the Venezuelan government ... TeleSur has gone backwards a lot in the last year with a very confusing Venezuelan believe that technology solves everything. But technology does not solve anything by itself. What is essential is to train professionals and to be consistent in proposals and trajectory."
"What we lack in TeleSur are people who work coherently with television, its a question of how and who comes to work? The friends of some ... a very bad method! If we do not understand this, if we do not understand that it is NOT through propaganda that we will defeat the enemy, we will not know how otherwise to fight a battle of ideas."
Today, social movements may be more or less reformist, temporary administrators who yield no real power. They have a timid approach to taking decisions that has led some governments to so nothing against speculative capital. Capitalism has failed in Latin America, not socialism. The last neo-liberal experience left 300 million Latin Americans in total exclusion, people who have no documentation, no right to education, health or nutrition. The question is whether the Bolivarian Revolution can be accomplished through television ... the answer is that it will not change process, but that it will contribute to it."
"TeleSur should be plural, offering varied approaches so that people can draw their own conclusions and decide their own future. TeleSur must have permanent respect for the people!"
"In Latin America have thousands and thousands of university graduated journalists who have a great ability to drive taxis, but they're totally divorced from the reality of the technological world and the social reality of their own countries ... these are people who take five years of college education before they move into television. But today, a social communications degree is useless! To be a good social communicator you must embrace the idea of helping to inform and educate citizens ... to make them believe they are a power. There are many morons who believe that employees are still the power ... as journalists they are useless ... they can only repeat slogans!"
"Social communicators should be open-minded ... NOT xenophobic, closing doors to others ... the concept of exclusion is so fashionable in the minds of so many communicators. I am Uruguayan and I have lived here for twenty years. I understand the society here in Venezuela, but I did not give up my Uruguay citizenship. On April 13, 2002, after the coup against Chavez, when the people in Caracas went onto the streets to demand the return of the President. 640 private radio stations and 47 television stations refrained from giving that information ... they churned out music and cartoons ... but the old technology of word-of-mouth, the Internet, SMS, managed to go beyond all that. They (the people in power) believed that if television does not say it, it does not exist. But television didn't say anything and it still existed."
"Understanding pluralism does not mean giving podium to the enemy, but to give a podium all positions that are closer to what the people want, a national thing, integration. TeleSur is not being destroyed from the outside, but from the inside, by people who do not understand the real meaning. There are people at TeleSur with minds like CNN who would go running to CNN if they called them. In TeleSur there are people who are being kept apart probably because they believed it was more than just a job, people who are worth so much more but they are prevented from going on air ... TeleSur must be completely cleaned from the inside out since it has been taken over by inept, counter-revolutionaries in the widest sense of the word ... people who seem to recite revolutionary slogans but do not have the faintest idea what they are. People who do not think for themselves! If revolution is a slogan, it is nothing."
Aharoni does NOT see much long-term future for TeleSur if it does not change from its present limitations as an international television branch of the Government of Venezuela instead of a multi-nation company ... he says it is "immoral" that the Venezuelan Information Minister (Andres Izarra) is still the channels chairman and manages it at his own discretion. "He (Izarra) signs the checks. What autonomy then does TeleSur have? There is confusion that they want to manipulate ... there was talk of a conspiracy against the project, but in reality the conspiracy was against the proposed multi-plural, diversity that TeleSur (originally) was intended to be!"
"Already Chavez must realize that Telesur is NOT working ... he reads the reports they send ... we have 100,000 viewers a day but he speaks of 50 million. Certainly we do not have them!"
What then are the solutions? TeleSur must dispense with 250 employees ... "it's the only way to change television,"Aharoni says. "It is a channel with some 450 people, but the level of expertise is -10. Senior officials believe that information is static not dynamic. Asking permission from a Minister is not the model. Mistakes have been made..."
"When we founded TeleSur, I said I would commit two or three years to it and that younger people from all over Latin America should gradually take over ... but the first thing the minister and chairman of the channel did was to surrounded himself with Venezuelan bureaucrats!"
Asked if, as TeleSur vice president, he can not remedy things, Aharoni confessed "I am vice president of a board that is not convened and that can never be changed since the minister (Izarra) wants the ministry as the only shareholder in charge. I am not interested in this way of management, I am interested in the project ... years ago, they said we were crazy to want to make a Latin American television, the dream of so many. We demonstrated that it was possible. Maybe not, since we have now realized that the enemies were not only outside."
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Venezuela is facing the most difficult period of its history with honest reporters crippled by sectarianism on top of rampant corruption within the administration and beyond, aided and abetted by criminal forces in the US and Spanish governments which cannot accept the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people to decide over their own future.
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