By VALERIA VIERA
“In a public hearing before the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, journalism organizations called 2011 the worst year for the Venezuelan press because of the rise in attacks against reporters and news media, reported the AFP,” according to the Journalism in the Americas Blog, under the article titled “Venezuelan journalists declare freedom of expression situation as “critical.”
Journalists in Venezuela are going through a difficult time. Freedom of expression and the citizen’s rights are being violated on a daily basis. Furthermore, television news shows are being shut down by the government. With little support and alarming things happening in the country, journalists have to be now more than ever careful in what they write about and who they address their stories to.
TV news show are being controlled by the government, because it wants to control the news they provide for the Venezuelan community, that way the information the government doesn’t want to share will stay in secret.
The article also states the fact that last year 203 violations of freedom of expression were recorded and of these, two-thirds were related to attacks and threats (many of which have gone unpunished, like it generally happens).
In The Media and the Citizen, by Boris Munoz, he let us know a little bit of the extreme situation in which Venezuela has been in: “In April, 2002, in the midst of the most intense period of confrontation between the opposition and the government, media barons actively supported a coup against Chávez by creating a media blackout. The screens of the most important private TV outlets would run only old cartoons; some of the national newspapers didn’t circulate, thus preventing the public from knowing what was going on in the country, or even about the president’s whereabouts.”
During the last three months, the government has taken programs off the air that had most manifestly criticized the government. Globovisión, the last remaining independent TV station in Venezuela was sold to government allies earlier this year. Like the article titled “Globovisión: The Latest Casualty in Venezuela’s Assault on Freedom of the Press” expresses:
“This unfortunate development shows that the threat to freedom of the press—and to all other civil liberties in Venezuela — will not go away with the death of Hugo Chávez.”