New Latin American Television Network to Counter Distortions of U.S. Monopoly Media

A new public broadcaster for Latin America was launched on July 24, the birth date of the Venezuelan-born Latin American patriot Simon Bolivar, who fought for continental independence from colonial oppression. The television channel, Telesur, is aimed at showing the region through the eyes of Latin Americans and will be funded by the governments of Venezuela, Argentina, Cuba and Uruguay. Programming will include regional and international news, documentaries, sports, movies produced by Latin American filmmakers and other cultural programs.

Venezuela is providing the largest share of funding for the channel (51 percent). In making the announcement of its creation, Venezuelan Communication and Information Minister Andres Izzara (who resigned his position two days after the launch of Telesur to take up the post of president of the channel) told reporters it “is an initiative against cultural imperialism and against imperialism in any of its expressions.”

Uruguayan journalist Aram Aharonian, a well-known Latin American political commentator told a Panamanian interviewer that the new channel provides a much needed counterbalance to the coverage of Latin America that is currently delivered by American or European Spanish-language networks, produced by the monopoly media in countries which have oppressed the people of the region for centuries.

“For 513 years in Latin America we have been trained to see ourselves through the eyes of others,” Aharonian said. “Many times, to impose their policies and their interests, they have invaded us or imposed military governments upon us. Today it seems that the media dictatorship has been substituted for those military dictatorships, permanently bombarding us with the same messages in the news, in advertising and in popular culture.

“For this reason, we say that Telesur is a strategic project: it’s the first to assume a massive commitment to present a Latin American vision of Latin America. We’ve begun to see ourselves through our own eyes, we’ve begun to tear down the fences of these media estates. We have just begun.”

Aharonian said Telesur is already working on being able to offer Portuguese-language programming for Brazilian viewers as soon as possible and will then begin exploring programming in other Latin American languages, including some of the indigenous languages which different governments in the region have long tried to extinguish.

The board of directors of the new channel includes prominent personalities from the region as well as media activists from around the world, including the Nicaraguan poet and activist Ernesto Cardenal, the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, Chilean journalist Manuel Cabieses, Venezuelan writer Luis Britto, Mexican journalist Carmen Lira, Venezuelan filmmaker Román Chalbaud, the editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, Ignacio Ramonet, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, the U.S. journalist Saul Landau, the actor Danny Glover, the singer Harry Belafonte, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel and the British writer Tariq Ali.

Reaction from the monopoly U.S. media to the creation of Telesur was swift and ranged from openly hostile to condescending. An article in Newsweek dubbed the network the Al Jazeera of Latin America, while positing that the involvement of “leftist” governments in the region in its creation and funding means its journalistic objectivity will suffer. A columnist with the Chicago Tribune was more openly hostile, writing that “the station could become a propaganda tool for the region’s re-emerging left” in a column titled “Will Truth go south on Telesur News?”

It is worth noting that both Newsweek and the Chicago Tribune, along with every privately-owned television or radio station or mass circulation newspaper in the U.S. failed totally to provide any objective coverage of the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Instead they either reiterated or presented as accepted fact the Bush administration’s lies about Iraq’s alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction or the involvement of Saddam Hussein and his government in the September 11 terrorist attacks.

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