Diary

Tariq Ali

The 1960s skyscrapers of Caracas seemed uglier than usual. The Hotel Gran Melia wasn’t very appealing either. The kitsch ceiling in the giant lobby was reminiscent of the Dubai School (why does oil wealth seem to result in such bad architecture?) and I wished I was staying, as I normally do, at the shabby, bare, miserable but atmospheric Hilton. I was in Caracas to speak at a conference on global media networks and to attend a meeting of the advisory board of the Spanish/Portuguese cable news channel Telesur – set up jointly by Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Cuba and now Ecuador. Intended to provide an alternative to the CNN/BBC worldview, the new channel has been a modest success, with between five and six million regular viewers. The privately owned channels devote hours of coverage to US Congressional results or a murder on a US campus: Telesur announces these events briefly and devotes the rest of the bulletin to live coverage from Nicaragua, where elections are taking place, or from Ecuador, where a referendum that will lead to the drafting of a new constitution has been won by the new government.

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Vol. 29 No. 12 · 21 June 2007 » Tariq Ali » Diary (print version)
Page 35 | 2094 words

Letters

From Sean Coleman

Perhaps sharing a podium with President Chávez has skewed Tariq Ali’s take on the recent closure of RCTV (LRB, 21 June). Despite the familiar charge that Bush has the ‘luxury’ of ‘uncritical news channels’, no channel in the US has been taken off the air because of its criticism of him and then replaced, the next day, by one broadcasting pro-Bush songs. The fact remains that Chávez, as Reporters Without Borders put it, ‘silenced Venezuela’s most popular TV station and the only national station to criticise him’, and replaced it with a pro-government propaganda outlet. The closure met with near universal condemnation across South America and among human rights groups. Polls indicated that up to 80 per cent of Venezuelans opposed the revoking of RCTV’s licence. Demonstrators protesting at the shutdown were dispatched with tear gas and rubber bullets. In considering all this Ali’s intervention is to warn ‘against an obsession with the power of the media’. Chávez, he tells us, ‘won six elections despite near universal media opposition’. If RCTV was so powerless, why bother to silence it?

Sean Coleman
Dublin

From David Elstein

Tariq Ali perpetuates some broadcasting myths: ‘Thatcher refused to renew Thames TV’s franchise, and it had merely shown one critical documentary. Blair sacked Greg Dyke.’ Thatcher abolished the Independent Broadcasting Authority after it failed to suppress Death on the Rock, only for it to be replaced by the very similar Independent Television Commission. The new rules for awarding ITV franchises, devised by the Home Office and the Treasury, were designed to damage the system, and did so. However, Thames TV ceased to be a broadcaster because it failed to bid enough for its London weekday franchise, and failed to bid at all for the weekend one. The fatal wounds were self-inflicted. As for Dyke, he was sacked by the BBC Board of Governors.

David Elstein
London SW15

From Christine Lindey

Tariq Ali’s observation that ‘the French voted against the European Constitution without the support of a single daily newspaper or TV station’ is incorrect (LRB, 21 June). The national daily paper L’Humanité campaigned vigorously against it.

Christine Lindey
London SW1