FreeMediaVe
Posted On: Aug 18th 2009This is my first “political” post in my blog, I thought it would never get to this but this is an issue that really concerns me and should really concern the rest of the world.
In the past couple of weeks something quite scary happened in my home country of Venezuela, the government suddenly decided on August 1st to close down 34 radio stations, just like that, closed. As the ministers and president said, we decided to make “extinct” the concessions of the radio stations. Their reason was that they were not strictly abiding the telecommunications law, which for them is simply informing the public about the great labors of the government, any critique is forbidden because, of course, they are just fantastic.
What really ticks me off is the arrogance of this government and the hypocrisy behind “Chavismo”, where it’s mandatory to hate the Empire and capitalism, but it’s ok to drive a Hummer and use Armani suites.
The minister even had the balls to say this beautiful piece of work; “To our friends everything, to our enemies the Law”.
Now, in a society where the public is supposed to own the airwaves, where does this leave the public? We already lost all but one TV stations, now comes radio, which is the most popular source of information and entertainment for Venezuelans. So does the public really own the airwaves, or government control makes us believe this?
If the airwaves were ours, we would each have the right to transmit our opinions and tastes on them, and to my understanding, we should each be our own radio stations. But already a couple of years ago the Venezuelan government decided to create a uniform radio, every station had to have a high percentage of local traditional Venezuelan music so that completely made every station the same. No more specialty stations, no jazz station, or rock or classical. Yes, the people now own the airwaves; we can choose to listen to the same thing on every turn of the dial, because personal taste is for the elite.
This, of course, comes back to freedom of speech. When this happened, twitter went like crazy! Just like in Iran with the elections, people were angry, they needed to express themselves. Twitter is the new radio wave, so now, the government is figuring out how to limit the use of that, because of course, we need that, we need to know what is good and bad, Empire/bad, Hummer/Awsome!
