While researching the previous post, I kept running into the phrase “media terrorism”. For example, Maria Augusta Calle, complained that she was a victim of “Media Terrorism” because Raul Reyes’ laptop tied her to FARC in this Miami Herald article;

In a speech delivered in March in Venezuela, Calle said she is the victim of a “media strategy.”

She spoke at the ”media terrorism” conference organized by Chávez to counter the Inter American Press Association gathering in Caracas at the same time.

”They say that this lady has a FARC mandate to close down the Manta base,” Calle said, speaking of herself in the third person.

“The objective is to warn the Ecuadorean government that it cannot make the changes in peace. The objective is to scare us.”

Doing a little more research, I found this article from Venezuelanalysis, the radically Leftist US new website that slavishly parrots Hugo Chavez’ lines;

Journalists, communications specialists, and other participants in the Latin American Meeting against Media Terrorism in Caracas last weekend demanded that political leaders in the region put the issue of media terrorism on the agenda of all international forums and meetings in which they participate, according to the “Caracas Declaration,” the final collection of the resolutions produced at the conference.

Endorsed by participants from 14 countries, the Caracas Declaration denounces the role of the private media in the toppling of democratic governments across the region, and asserts that “media terrorism is the first expression and necessary condition of military terrorism that the industrialized North employs in order to impose its imperial hegemony and neo-colonial dominion on humanity.”

Information should be conceived as a right to be collectively provided, rather than as merchandise or a commodity to be sold, conference participants resolved, iterating a collective commitment to the “ethical exercising of our profession, devoted to the values of real and effective democracy, and to the veracity that is deserved by the diversity of thought, belief, and culture.”

Get that? Private independent media is dangerous for democracy. And it’s supposed “journalists” who are decrying private media. So what do they figure is the alternative?

As a solution to this problem, ANMCLA proposed changing the Telecommunications Law so that a “public system of communication, not state-run and not private, in the hands of popular communities, forms a structural part” of national communications.

Also, 33.3% of the radio and television frequencies in Venezuela and a third of the government’s publicity budget should be conceded to community-based and alternative media, with the other two thirds divided equally between state-controlled and private media, ANMCLA advocated.

Finally, ANMCLA said a new tax should be levied on private media that would help pay for the expansion of alternative media. It also declared that the means of communication should be managed by an assembly of local community representatives, rather than a few government functionaries.

It’s always money. The way I figure it, a bunch of no-talent hacks who can’t get hired by the private media are trying to get the government to create jobs for no-talent hacks who can’t get hired by the private media. How paranoid and deranged is a government, or a movement of journalists, that sees an independent press as dangerous to democracy. In Latin America, the media actually does their job and reveals the damages that the Bolivarian Revolution of Chavez and his stooges will inflict on the people and the people vote for freedom every time. The Left doesn’t like that so they have to change the rules.

If these pencil-necks at Venezuelanalysis thought president Bush was contemptplating the same things in this country that Chavez actually does in Venezuela, they’d be storming the White House.