Press Censorship: With Rare Exceptions, Hugo Chávez Gets Yet Another Pass

One of the exceptions is Marcel Granier at OpinionJournal.com on Wednesday:

Remote Control
Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez sets his sights on the media.

CARACAS–The president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, has verbally announced his decision to shut down Radio Caracas Television (RCTV)–our TV station, the oldest in Venezuela as well as the one with the largest audience.

So continues a long series of attacks against journalists, employees, management and shareholders of many independent media companies. The aim of all this is to limit the citizens’ right to seek information and entertainment in the media of their choice, to impede public access to those media where they might express or encounter criticism of the government or their proposals for reform, to stifle the pluralism of opinion in news and talk programs, and to cut off the free flow of information and debate in Venezuela. Instead, the Chávez government seeks to install a system that it has described, without apparent irony, as the “communicational and informative hegemony of the state.”

America’s formerly Mainstream Media is apparently too busy fawning over Chávez’s cynical heating-oil ploys to notice or care about threats to their fellow professionals in Hugo’s Workers’ Paradise. Oh, and don’t miss Joseph P. Kennedy II’s tortured defense of accepting the oil.