Er raunverulegt lýðræði að verða til í Venezúela?

Venezuela's Path

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Considering still another key domain of social life, media, the emerging pattern continued. A look at the daily newspapers showed that of the first 25 articles, reading from the first page forward, fully 20 were broad attacks on or highly critical of Chavez. The rest were on entirely other topics. And this was typical, day after day, I was told. The papers are privately held corporations, not surprisingly hostile toward Chavez’s inclinations. Chavez doesn’t restrict them, however, much less nationalize or otherwise take them over. The same situation holds for key TV stations. Regarding the TV stations, however, and I bet something like this will also happen with print before too long, the government has a strategy.

VIVE TV is a new station created, like Bolivarian University, by the Chavez government. We visited and enjoyed touring its facilities. The widest salary difference, from the head of the company to people who cleaned up, was three to one, but the new payment policy, being steadily if slowly enforced, was to attain equal hourly pay for all by periodically raising wages of those at the bottom until they reached parity.

VIVE has roughly 300 employees. Their equipment wasn’t like CBS, but it was certainly excellent and far reaching in its potential. The new VIVE website presents their shows, archived, for the world to see. The station’s governing body is, of course, a worker’s assembly. Workers at VIVE lacking skills are encouraged to take courses, including in film production and other topics, given right on the premises, and those facilities are also used to teach citizens from Caracas and more widely how to film in their own locales.

Indeed, the station’s mandate was to provide a voice for the people. Its shows, we were told, routinely present citizens speaking their mind, including voices from well outside Caracas, which was a first for Venezuela. To that end, VIVE undertakes lots of community training, distributing cameras to local citizens as well, so people around the country can send in footage and even finished edited material, for national display.

In some respects VIVE is like a local community cable station in the U.S., except that it is national and the élan is far, far higher, and the desire to incorporate the seeds of the future in the present structure is far, far more explicit and radical, with the employees seeing themselves as presenting to the country and the world a new kind of media that, they hope, will be a model picked up elsewhere as well.

VIVE takes no ads, “to avoid being controlled.” There is actually, on the shows, much criticism of the government, since the shows convey grass-roots opinions. But this criticism, unlike that on mainstream private stations, is honest and heartfelt, not manufactured. Rather than trying to create dissension, it is constructive.

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