World news from a new point of view

Caracas, Venezuela —  Aram AHARONIAN is getting used to all the prickly questions from foreign journalists. About whether the new public Telesur satellite TV channel is “anti-American.” About whether Telesur’s news broadcasts will be a mere mouthpiece for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the biggest Latin boogeyman of U.S. foreign policy this side of Havana. About whether the 24-hour Spanish-language channel is styling itself as a South American Al Jazeera.

His oft-repeated answers: no, no and sort of -- but not really.

A short, stocky man with a gray ponytail and a glint in his eye, Aharonian has been fielding such queries since being named Telesur’s director general. Chatty and engaging, the veteran Uruguayan journalist patiently lays out his case for why Latin America badly needs an alternative to CNN en Espanol, BBC, Fox News and other TV news purveyors based in places like Atlanta and New York.

“Today we know much more about Chechnya than what’s happening on the corner, in Colombia or in Central America, because all the information that the North generates comes into focus about subjects that interest the North,” says Aharonian, 59, at Telesur’s temporary offices in this densely packed capital’s center.

In the centuries since the Spaniards invaded the New World, Aharonian continues, Latin Americans have been “trained to see ourselves with foreign eyes.... Now, 513 years later, we are recovering the possibility of seeing ourselves with our eyes.”

Telesur, which is short for Nueva Television del Sur (New Television of the South), intends to counter what Aharonian calls the “hegemonic” worldview of its U.S. and European counterparts. Much foreign reporting on Latin America, Aharonian contends, is myopic and rips information out of context.

By contrast, he says, Telesur will offer newscasts, hard-hitting documentaries on hot-button topics like infant mortality and indigenous people’s rights, and other original programming from a uniquely pan-Latin perspective. About half the programming will be nonjournalistic, which might include anything from cooking and music programs to Latin films. The channel is being launched with a relatively modest $2.5 million in start-up money, 70% from the Venezuelan government and the rest from the governments of Argentina and Uruguay, with Cuba lending technical support.

It’s unclear how deeply Telesur might be able to penetrate Latin America’s already crowded TV landscape, particularly with its newscasts. Both CNN and CNN en Espanol are widely available throughout Latin America -- CNN en Espanol reaches about 15 million households. Fox also continues to expand there, a spokeswoman said. Precise counts of cable and satellite TV users in an area as vast and varied as Latin America -- where piracy of both services is not uncommon -- are difficult to obtain.

In Venezuela, television news sources include the government-run, pro-Chavez Canal 8, and 10-year-old Globovision, Venezuela’s only all-news channel, which has been highly critical of the president. But as Chavez has consolidated his power since a 2002 coup attempt against him, some radio and television stations that once excoriated the government have either toned down their criticisms or gone off the air.

Fears about media freedom

It’s a tense time for Venezuela’s private media, some of whom charge that Chavez is trying to strangle dissent by backing new laws that restrict broadcasting content.

Andres Velasquez, a federal legislator and former Venezuelan presidential candidate, says that in theory a new public television channel such as Telesur would be welcome. But he fears that the new station will turn into a Chavez propaganda machine. “Taking into consideration that the Venezuelan government is the major financier, this is going to be a disaster,” says Velasquez. “The media are absolutely harassed by the current regime.”

Ana Cristina Nunez, attorney for Globovision, says new government regulations will require that channel to dedicate three hours daily to children’s programming and an additional 5 1/2 daily prime-time hours to programming dictated by government-appointed producers. The channel also is required by law to carry live feeds of Chavez’s speeches and even his birthday celebration.

Chavez supporters and others argue that guidelines such as these, and others restricting language and the portrayal of government officials, are necessary because much of Venezuela’s private media has behaved irresponsibly in the past, blatantly backing the president’s opponents and helping to foment the attempted coup.

All nations, Aharonian says, have media “regulations” or “regulatory frameworks for distinct activities, for the press, for business, for whatever it is.”

He and the station’s other overseers and supporters insist that state-sponsored Telesur will be editorially independent of the Venezuelan government. And, they assert, it won’t have to kowtow to the economic interests of the powerful multinational corporations that dominate Western big media.

Two continents of content

The station’s content will flow in from across the hemisphere; besides its main Caracas studio, the channel plans to operate bureaus in Buenos Aires; Montevideo, Uruguay; Brasilia, Brazil; La Paz, Bolivia; Bogota, Colombia; Havana, Mexico City and Washington, D.C.

When Telesur is up and running, its staff will number about 60. Already, its ranks include Colombians, Argentines, Uruguayans, Venezuelans, Mexicans and Cubans. Its journalists may not look or sound much like the stentorian-voiced, designer-dressed, high-cheekboned newscasters favored by their Western rivals: One Telesur correspondent, Ati Kiwa, an Arahuaco Indian from Colombia, will appear on camera in her tribe’s traditional white robes.

It’s all part of what Aharonian describes as Telesur’s effort to reflect the Latin world’s disparate cultures. “This is a project that has to aid in the process of the integration of Latin America toward diversity and pluralism, in every sense -- the cultural diversity, the ethnic diversity, the diversity of opinions,” says Aharonian, who has lived in Venezuela for the last 19 years.

In less regionally stressed-out times, Telesur might have drawn scant attention beyond Venezuela and its closest neighbors. But this oil-rich country of 25 million is a political lightning rod in Latin America.

The same could be said of its left-leaning, populist president. Chavez’s willingness to spend billions in oil revenues on literacy and antipoverty programs has endeared him to the poor. His popularity rating stands at around 70%, and last summer he defeated a recall referendum. But he has angered many middle- and upper-class Venezuelans who consider him a reckless demagogue.

And Venezuela’s relations with the United States are anything but placid. They have deteriorated badly since the 2002 coup attempt, which the CIA knew about in advance, and the Bush administration has branded Chavez the worst threat to hemispheric stability after Fidel Castro. Chavez, in turn, claims that the U.S. is plotting to kill him and invade his country.

The U.S. media’s generally negative coverage of Chavez has created “a matrix of opinion” that could be used to justify U.S. military intervention in Venezuela, says Daniel Hernandez, a political scientist and analyst in Venezuela’s ministry of communication and information. Though the Bush administration adamantly disavows such a course of action, Chavez has used the scenario to galvanize followers, suggesting that the U.S. wants to control Venezuela’s oil.

This war of words may be droning in the background come July, when Telesur plans to begin formal broadcasting in Venezuela and throughout Latin America. But when he is frequently asked whether Telesur will be an anti-American channel, Aharonian responds that Telesur isn’t anti-anything.

“This is a proactive channel, not reactive,” he says. “There is nothing more odious than to make something reactive, because you don’t have the possibility of having your own agenda, rather you’re responding to the agenda of another. We are going to have a totally different agenda.”

Others question just how much of a separate agenda Telesur can pursue. Globovision’s Nunez says the country’s state-owned media have “always tended to be very politicized” by whichever regime was in power. “What we see now, I think, is only political propaganda in favor of the government.”

“In this country there is not only freedom of the press but rather it has had an atrocious libertinism,” counters Aharonian. “And I’m not speaking only of private television; I’m speaking of television. Things are said in the press that in other countries the person who says them is put under arrest, because it’s unethical, because it’s

Nunez says Globovision reporters don’t have access to many government officials and don’t get invited to some government news conferences. She says that some of its journalists and camera crew members have been attacked by Chavez supporters.

On one occasion, Nunez says, hand grenades were thrown into the station’s offices. (No one was hurt because the incident happened at night, Nunez says.) In response to the alleged attacks, Globovision has brought a case against the government before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Chavez has called the channel’s president a “horseman of the Apocalypse.”

The National Assembly has passed guidelines regulating the broadcasting of images or words that the government deems too violent or vulgar, defamatory of public officials or threatening to national security. The government says such words and images are permitted under certain criteria, including when they are “crucial for the story.” It also says the rules “help the parents of families” to limit media content “considered inappropriate for children and adolescents.”

Still, Communications and Information Minister Andres Izarra, who will serve as Telesur’s company president, recently declared that “the press is freer in Venezuela than in the United States.” (The ministry declined The Times’ requests for an interview, citing its dissatisfaction over a Times article on the country’s new media laws.)

Coping with business matters

Abdel GUERERE, an economist who has worked extensively in film and television, says that Telesur faces three principal challenges. The high price of oil has permitted the government to invest money in the new channel. But over the long haul, Guerere says, Telesur must develop stable funding sources while upholding its program quality.

Telesur also is confronting a high level of established competition in CNN, Fox, Telemundo and other news channels.

Most important, Guerere says, is whether Telesur can operate as a public service channel rather than as a government propaganda outlet. “Because typically ... [government propaganda channels] don’t have a link with the audience,” Guerere says. To be a true medium of communication, he continues, a channel must cultivate the “confidence, the loyalty, of its public.”

Aharonian is undaunted by that final challenge. “What I can tell you is that we are totally convinced that there is not going to be official interferences,” he says. “If there is any instance of interference, we are all going to go.”

And if Venezuelan viewers don’t like what they’re seeing on Telesur, he continues, they still possess the ultimate weapon, the same one available to any U.S. couch potato. “If you don’t like it,” Aharonian says, “click and change the channel.”

*

Contact Reed Johnson at C[email protected].