Yes! We're talking about the launching into orbit of a 8,000 watt communications satellite... Or is it just some more MinCI baloney?

VHeadline editor & publisher Roy S. Carson writes: While being in the shadows of the mainstream media's saturation coverage of the United States presidential election, it may generally have escaped the notice of readers around the world, that Venezuela entered the space age last week with the launching of an 8,000-watts Chinese-built "Simon Bolivar" VENESAT-1 communications satellite bearing a price-tag of some US$406 million.

• A spokesperson for the Ministry of Science & Technology in Caracas assured that the blast-off from China will "guarantee the autonomy, independence and sovereignty of Venezuelan telecommunications to put an end to United States hegemony in the field."

Apparently some 50% of the near-space technology floating around up there is under "USA domination" and are owned principally by "big corporations" which commercialize new-age technology reaping in huge profits!

President Hugo Chavez Frias, of course, was not tardy in launching his own television "cadena" (mandatory broadcasts on all free-to-air TV and radio channels) to enthuse greatly over Venezuela's "great step for mankind" ... which, of course, on a local level it may well have been although I believe it is many decades since any of Chavez' North American counterparts paid a visit to Cape Canaveral to seize airtime on NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN and FOX to bully-pulpit a communications satellite launch as a political achievement ... especially with, at the time, just over three weeks to go to important local and regional elections in which he (Chavez) is clearly losing his support base.

I guess the supposed national fervor (?) could perhaps be compared with something akin to Trinidad & Tobago's enthusiastic support for their national bob-sleigh team in the 1994 Winter Olympics ... BUT ... in the aftermath of sour-grapes from the presidency and the MinCI propaganda ministry, the real rocket should be given to the plethora of thin-skinned political party politruks who seemed to think that there was an OBLIGATION placed upon the media to give screeds and screeds of pagination and hours of audio-video broadcasting to the launching AND especially the President's politicizing of what would otherwise have been recognized as quite an achievement for a supposedly Third World country like Venezuela.

I somehow don't believe for a second that Chinese television will have gone into such wall-to-wall raptures as mandated from government-controlled Venezuelana de Television (VTV) and forced down the tubes of all the other Venezuelan public airwave broadcasters.

The "cadenas" in themselves are a subject of much debate, although they're quite obviously a hang-over from Venezuela's early broadcasting traditions. Certainly, circa the Febroary 1989 Caracazo bloodbath and both before, during and after the two coup d'etat attempts against then-President Carlos Andres Perez (CAP) in 1992, the "cadenas" on Venezuelan television were quite frankly a pain in the neck. Personally, I could never understand why the Venezuelan people could so blandly accept a presidential broadcast cutting in on their favorite TV soap opera for CAP to rant for upwards of an hour on matters that would scarcely get 30 seconds on the nightly news anywhere else in the civilized world. But they did!

Things changed though when Chavez came to power in 1999 ... NOT the "cadenas" of course ... but both the frequency and the length of the mandatory broadcasts. Some sectors of the community ... right from the birth of US cable and satellite networks, of course ... had had the clear advantage of being able to switch over to CNN en Espanol or elsewhere for relief from the political verbology and after the closure of Radio Caracas Television (RCTV) free-to-air broadcast licence a couple of years ago, even more have flocked to "free from cadenas" channels, especially with the rebirth of RCTV as a cable and satellite alternative.

But the piqued MinCI propagandists pique was further exacerbated by the response they received from the very mainstream opposition media they had so indignantly chided in the pro-government media on Thursday last week ... for, in Friday editions, the opposition media took their infantile hullabaloo to task by pointing out that the government's efforts to publicize the technological advance as a series of political brownie points for Chavez' United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) -- by erecting huge TV screens on downtown official government buildings -- had attracted legions of pickpockets and thieves to plunder victims among the crowds that stood and watched "the show."

Former communist guerrilla, economic planning & coordination minister in the pre-Chavez government and now editor-in-chief of the TalCual tabloid daily, Teodoro Petkoff, led the Friday chorus also cloned in the broadsheets "El Nacional" and "2001" ... immediately sending the thin-skinned party political politruks into further frenzy accusing the opposition media of seeking "to undermine the achievements of the Venezuelan government, continuing its media war against one of the most important events in the history of Venezuela!"

Yes! We're talking about the launching into orbit of a 8,000 watt communications satellite...

• El Nacionalhad noted that "as people standing by, the crooks were mingling with the crowd making hay while the shone" and "it was only at the end of the transmission that the victims, mostly women, realized that they'd been robbed!
  
• 2001 reporters reported that many wallets had been stolen, watches and that thieves had used knives to cut handbags, and to steal money from the people pushed together in the crowds."

Very cheekily ... as it is accustomed to be ... TalCual printed a front page headline in Chinese alluding to the fact that the satellite that bears the name of the Liberator Simon Bolivar is indeed Chinese built, with Chinese technology and was launched from Chinese territory ... being somewhat thankful that the electronics aboard the satellite are not dependent on Venezuela's dilapidated national electricity grid, which could well have done with at least part of the investment given to the Chinese to provide Chavez' latest technology toy!

MinCI propaganda Minister Andrez Izarra emerged from his father's political shadow to claim that the mainstream opposition media was being "rather mean" ... pontificating that "there is always time for the truth ... the media in Venezuela has a duty to report truthfully!"

Yes, indeed, Andres ... but the true intent of press freedom such as you claim to exist in Venezuela (at least for the pro-government media) is that it is the editorial responsibility of the publisher or broadcaster to decide of a party political PR jippo is "news" ... unless, of course, it is your ambition to impose YOUR conditions on the selfsame media that you claim is free to enjoy Venezuela's carefully guarded constitutional freedoms.

Or is it just some more MinCI baloney?

Roy S. Carson
vheadline@gmail.com

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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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