Read New York Times reporters Dan Bilefsky’s and Michael Schwirtz’s account (10/6/08) of state censorship on the part of a recently prominent U.S. ally:
The cameras at Georgia’s main opposition broadcaster, Imedi, kept rolling November 7, when masked riot police officers with machine guns burst into the studio. They smashed equipment, ordered employees and television guests to lie on the floor and confiscated their cellphones. A news anchor remained on-screen throughout, describing the mayhem. Then all went black.
The pretext for the raid–which silenced the channel–was a government claim that Imedi was fomenting unrest when it broadcast a statement by one of its founders, Badri Patarkatsishvili, promising to topple the government of President Mikheil Saakashvili.
Now ask yourself if anything other than the U.S. government’s categorical animosity toward Venezuela explains the difference between this piece’s tepid headline of “News Media Feel Limits to Georgia’s Democracy” and the voluble corporate U.S. media outrage over President Hugo Chavez merely not renewing the broadcasting license of Venezuelan TV station RCTV after it aired similar calls that led to an actual real-life coup.
See FAIR’s Media Advisory: Coup Co-Conspirators as Free-Speech Martyrs: Distorting the Venezuelan Media Story (5/25/07)
