Is The U.S. Headed To A Chavez Type Crackdown On Media?

Oh no! It turns out that the United States is becoming Venezuela and nobody noticed .... except the Fox News' editorial page, that is. Thank heavens for that.

"Could a Chavez style media crackdown by coming our way?" asks Steve Forbes, President and Chief Executive Officer of Forbes and the Editor in Chief of Forbes magazine. Magic 8 ball says: outlook not so good.

Indeed, here are some other questions that we can ponder with the same level of urgency. Could Mickey Mouse stub his toe while eating peanuts at the dentist's office? Could a thousand points of light blind the Loch Ness monster on its day off?

Citing a recent Inter-American Commission of Human Rights report detailing Venezuelan constraints on freedom of expression, Forbes compares Venezuela's use of the punitive power of the state to punish people for their political opinions with, wait for it, the campaign for media reform (and net neutrality) led by the organization Free Press. The two have nothing to do with each other.

First, let me say a word on Venezuela. In full disclosure, I cut my teeth as a foreign correspondent there, and even did some reporting on the country's polarized media. The political environment is vociferously contentious, the opposition and Chavez supporters can barely agree on the time of day much less a common national narrative. The extreme polarization of the nation's media allows each side -- the opposition and Chavistas -- to attack the other for distorting reality. The problem is that on the government side, as the Inter-American Commission points out, the attacks include criminal prosecutions for expressing political opinions.

But Forbes connects Chavez's abuses to the media reforms championed by Robert McChesney and Free Press. This is laughable, but worse, it perpetuates a common mis-characterization of the human right to free speech, by framing efforts to fight the pervasive and undemocratic corporate control of U.S. media as of a piece with abusive governmental control of the speech of political opponents.

In the United States, our constitution requires that Congress "make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech or of the press." What's not spelled out in this language is a clear definition of the freedom of speech. Is freedom of speech the right to speak or does it also include the right to be heard?

Human rights law -- and lots of other national societies -- think it does. Indeed, under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the freedom of expression "includes freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds." How can we receive ideas of all kinds if the media landscape is dominated by organizations like Fox News and speakers like Steve Forbes?

As Free Press points out, journalism is in crisis in this country (trust me, it's hard to get a job doing classic investigative reporting). Democracy depends on quality reporting and so we need some policy solutions. Some of these might take the form of government support of the kinds of speech corporate media will never give us, either because they are too busy seeking high profit margins or because their real business is selling advertising, or because they are seeking "target" audiences and not the public in general.

Indeed, in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, it seems pretty clear that a hands-off conception of free speech is undermining our democracy. Let's not confuse other ways of strangling democracy with our home grown one.

Photo credit: evelynyll

Source: Change.org