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Commercial Press Priorities

Submitted August 17, 2005 - 4:50 pm by Al Giordano
As you can see from the International Press Association's website, it's board of directors comes exclusively from the managerial and owning class of Commercial or government media apparati:

http://www.freemedia.at/cvs.htm

Their priorities are not the same as those of news readers, or working reporters, or other journalists or media workers.

Besides, there's no "beef" to their complaints: it's all speculative, about what they fear might be done under Venezuela's new media laws and Constitution. They can't point to a single Venezuelan journalist in prison or assassinated under Chávez's watch. The facts show that the Venezuelan government has let Commercial Media get away with things - like "inciting to riot" - that would have gotten them shut down in the United States or elsewhere already.

Their complaints are a smokescreen for their bitterness that these same media laws have opened up the right to broadcast to small non-profit TV and radio stations, which have, by reporting and telling the truth, ripped away the veneer of "credibility" that the Commercial Media thought it had.

We're a newspaper (Narco News) which, as everybody knows, was viciously attacked by powerful financial interests trying to shut us down. Did the International Press Association or any of its affiliates lift a finger to defend us? Nope. Even after we won, and set a legal precedent providing First Amendment protections for Internet journalists, did they cheer? No. They cried. Their monopoly was broken.

So you'll have to excuse me if I don't find them a credible source, especially when their complaints are mere speculations about what "could" happen, conveniently ignoring the true facts of what does happen.

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