By IPS Correspondents
CARACAS, May 20 2002 (IPS)

The objectivity of the media in Venezuela has been seriously questioned in the wake of last month’s brief overthrow of President Hugo Chávez.

The local media, especially the national TV networks, provided constant, ongoing coverage of the events of Apr 11 and 12, when Chávez was ousted and detained by the military high command, and a transitional government was set up to replace him.

However, they remained curiously silent on Apr 13, when the coup was overturned by a faction of the armed forces opposed to the interruption of the constitutional order amidst massive street demonstrations by the president’s supporters, said university Professor Eleazar Díaz Rangel, the director of the daily newspaper Ultimas Noticias.

While demonstrators poured into the streets to call for Chávez’s return, the main private TV stations aired game shows and soap operas instead of news coverage, and Venezuelans who wanted to find out what was happening in their own capital had to turn to news broadcasts by international stations.

A flurry of workshops, seminars and conferences on the role of the media have been held since the short-lived coup.

Díaz Rangel was speaking last Friday at a seminar organised by the School of Social Communication of the Central University of Venezuela (UCV). Similar conferences have been held in recent weeks in cities like Maracaibo and Barquisimeto.

The professor said the media’s active political role predated the Chávez government, and was fuelled by the same discrediting of the traditional parties that paved the way for Chávez’s election in 1998.

“The editors with whom I spoke in the course of my research in the mid-1990s found themselves with a power that they had not sought,” said Díaz Rangel.

The power of the media and the political consequences of biassed or unbalanced news coverage will be studied by the Venezuelan branch of Media Watch Global, a media watchdog organisation that emerged at the World Social Forum early this year in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

The local branch of Media Watch Global was presented last Wednesday in Caracas by the director of the French newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique, Ignacio Ramonet, along with Latin American and European journalists who helped promote the initiative.

“News is a public good, and citizens have the right to be informed. This is not a project that is hostile towards the media. What the citizens ask of the media is that the rules of democracy be followed,” said Ramonet.

Media Watch Global set up a team of academics, activists and reporters to decide on what actions are to be taken in Venezuela to fight for fairness and accuracy in reporting. They will also produce a study on the role played by the media during the April coup and counter-coup.

Venezuelan journalist Andrés Izarra, who resigned last month as news manager at Radio Caracas Televisión, one of the country’s two main TV stations, spoke at the presentation of the local branch of Media Watch Global.

On Apr 13, faced by the choice of obeying instructions to keep silent regarding expressions of support for Chávez, “which to me was unacceptable, or resign, I decided to leave immediately,” said Izarra.

According to the reporter, who previously worked for United States-based TV news networks, his team had information about what was occurring and testimony from people close to Chávez. But he was given orders that there was to be “zero ‘Chavismo’ on the screen” – in other words, no coverage of demonstrations by the president’s supporters or interviews of anyone who backed him.

Izarra said that was the second time that the station’s directors “took a hard-line political stance.” The first, he added, was “during the 1998 elections, to oppose Chávez’s candidacy.”

The reporter, who is not one of the president’s sympathisers, said his stance was based on a question of ethics, and that his criticism of the lack of objectivity and balance was also aimed at the state TV channel, “which should be put at the service of everyone, and should not only be pro-government.”

The director of the Catholic University’s School of Communication, Max Romer, said Thursday that “the response that was missing last month was balanced news coverage by the public, private and community media. Over a month later, we still do not see that balance.”

Romer was addressing the final conference of a series of workshops organised by the Institute of Communication Research held over the past few weeks.

At the conference, the director of the UCV School of Social Communication, Asalia Venegas, said “the media have engaged in questionable political conduct that distorts their role.”

But reporter Pablo Antillano, who took part in several of the workshops, maintained that the criticism should not focus exclusively on the owners and directors of the local media outlets.

“In the past few months, and I have thousands of examples because I am carrying out a study, biassed practices have been observed among journalists,” including “the irregular use of sources, the taking of political stances, and a lack of rigor in the search for information,” said Antillano.

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