Full quote: "...we hold a truth that is spread out while we’re facing a lie that is packaged and delivered very well" --Nelson del Castillo, Secretary General, FELAP

Wow, that says it all, about the 1%-er Corporate Media vs the people!

I've wondered how the people of Venezuela--and those of other Latin American countries who have managed to vote themselves "New Deals" have communicated political information and have gotten themselves so well organized despite the horrible Corporate Media, which, at least in Venezuela's case, is even worse than ours, and I presume is similarly bad in other LatAm countries.

The big media monopolies in Venezuela actively participated in the 2002 coup attempt, using the public airwaves to broadcast a doctored video and other propaganda in support of the coup and denying members of the Chavez government use of the public airwaves. Chavez had been kidnapped. His VP and members of his cabinet were not permitted to speak on TV. The media moguls then broadcast the coup government's announcement that it was suspending the constitution, the national assembly, the courts and all civil rights!

Talk about "free speech"! They refused to let members of the elected government speak on TV! Then they scream bloody murder--and the rest of the Corporate Media screams bloody murder with them--when the elected government tries to regulate them in ways similar to our late, lamented "Fairness Doctrine"! Oh boy, how these corporate powermongers hate fairness! They want the power to appoint presidents! And they love their power to deny "free speech" to everybody but themselves!

I still don't know how Venezuelans did it--communicated effectively to elect Chavez and put him back in power, then to defeat the USAID-funded recall election and all the other crap that was done, and to re-elect him--given this media tyranny. I'm sure that sheer determination was part of it. Venezuelans are ferocious defenders of their democracy. It's just laughable when the US State Department/CIA and their propaganda organs--the entire Corporate Media--try to paint Chavez as a "dictator"--as if the people of Venezuela would elect a dictator, rescue him from a coup attempt, re-elect him and support him in big numbers to this day! It's so absurd! But that is the power of the Corporate Media to invade your brain and make you believe something that is laughably untrue.

One thing that puzzled me is that Venezuelans are largely urbanized. In a country like Bolivia, for instance, which is largely rural and where people in urban areas still have strong ties to rural areas, I presume that the people-to-people aspects of rural life and rural communication were important in the even more astonishing election of Evo Morales (first Indigenous president of Bolivia, a largely Indigenous country with a long, brutal history of apartheid--rule by the white minority). Also, I presume that access to TV and even radio is less prevalent in Bolivia, due to poverty and also to cultural choice and cultural context--i.e., the Corporate Media have less of a captive (and enthralled) audience. Rural Indigenous in Bolivia still carry around hand-held, woven communication objects--I can't recall what they are called--that carry messages among and between tribes and communities. This ancient, traditional messaging system is still used. I don't know that they wove the message "get out the vote" into these objects and hand-carried them from village to village, but it wouldn't surprise me. Getting remote Indigenous groups to come down out of the mountains to vote is still a big deal. (I remember when ten thousand Indigenous tribespeople poured down out of the mountains for Morales' inauguration and he was invested as their leader in an Indigenous ceremony at the same time that he was inaugurated president in the political system. It was an unusual event.) Informal (people to people) communication is alive and well in Bolivia. But Venezuelans are like Europeans and like us, in that most people are glued to their TVs.

I've picked up that a critical part of the political organization in Venezuela occurred in the barrios--the cascades of shantytown housing in the hills around Caracas. Barrio dwellers presumably have fewer TVs and more connection to rural culture (people to people communication). (Unlike many urban dwellers who tend to get isolated from their neighbors, barrio dwellers live in community, by necessity, for survival, well-being and safety.) When the state TV channel was disconnected by the coupsters and the coupster Corporate Press controlled all TV/radio communications, the critical piece of information, that Chavez had NOT resigned, somehow got around. That's when a million urban Venezuelans poured out of their houses and surrounded Miraflores palace, the seat of government, demanding that their Constitution be restored and Chavez returned to his rightful office.

They didn't pour out of their houses in response to an alarm about the peril to their democracy broadcast by the Corporate Media! The Corporate Media were telling them that their democracy was over--forget it, go home! They lied that Chavez had resigned and they promoted the coup government as the only government around to keep order by suspending all their rights.

These events explain HOW IMPORTANT it is to have VARIED media--a mix of public, non-profit and private--and how important it is NOT to have Corporate Media monopolies--to bust them up, so they don't become too powerful, and to require of them--as our Fairness Doctrine did--that they operate in the public interest. Indeed, our Fairness Doctrine was designed by people who understood how dangerous TV technology could become in the hands of people intent on overthrowing democratic government. (And, of course, that is why the Reaganites got rid of the Fairness Doctrine.)

SOMEHOW Venezuelans got around this. They communicated with each other. They took action.

I shouldn't paint Bolivia as all that rural. The movement that eventually elected Morales started in a city (when Bechtel tried to privatize the water system in Cochabomba) with big demonstrations and blocking of highways. But it did involve poor people--indeed, the poorest of the poor--and rural people, as the leaders (Morales, who was head of the coca leaf farmers union, among them).

Anyway, I'm still puzzled. I've read and seen a lot of things that try to explain all this--how Latin Americans have established and defended real democracies. (The Irish filmmakers' documentary, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" is a brilliant expose of the coup attempt in Venezuela and how it was overcome. It is essential viewing if you want to understand what's happening in Latin America.) I guess my question is: How do WE do it? How do we re-establish democracy here--with our shattered communities and alienated, urban-suburban-ized, corporatized, distracted, demoralized, entertainment-crazy, brainwashed population?

Really, a population that could put Romney neck-and-neck with Obama (until recently) is sick in the head. (--if the polls are to be believed--a big if). How do you get them to see reality let alone get organized?

It's heartening to see alternative media getting organized and proliferating in Venezuela and Latin America. We could use a hundred more "Democracy Now"'s here. Aside from "Democracy Now" there is really nothing on the public airwaves that is even informative let alone intelligent commentary or wide-spetrum opinion. It's virtually all rightwing, or far rightwing, and stupid-making. Print news media are not much better. The internet, of course, is varied, but you have to seek out alternative information and opinion, while fending off the toxic stew of corporate/rightwing propaganda from almost all other media, and as to broadcast media (our public airwaves) invasive of every home in the U.S. and every automobile (try to find a non-rightwing talk show on the radio!).

Before the coup Izarra considered himself a standard successful member of the private media, until he realized what they were actully doing. Best wishes for his continued work for democracy.

Thank you for these links, and the info.