Telesur
Telesur is a Latin American terrestrial and satellite news television network headquartered in Caracas, Venezuela, and sponsored by the governments of Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.
First proposed in 2005 and subsidized by Venezuela, Telesur was launched under the government of Hugo Chávez, and promoted as "a Latin socialist answer to CNN". It has been described as a network showcasing the diversity of Latin America and a propaganda outlet for state views under chavismo.
In Latin America, teleSUR can be seen in Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay and other territories as Aruba, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and Curaçao in DirecTV's package. In 2020, Uruguay removed its sponsorship.
In 2020, the company received the Order of Francisco de Miranda.
History
The proposed alternative Latin American television network that would become Telesur took shape on 24 January 2005, as part of the projects approved in a council of ministers of the Venezuelan government. According to The Boston Globe, the Venezuelan government provided broadcasting facilities and 70% of Telesur's funds, with other leftist governments supporting the network as well. Telesur was advertised "as a Latin socialist answer to CNN." Telesur began broadcasting on a limited, four-hour schedule on 24 July 2005, on the 222nd birthday of Latin American leader Simón Bolívar. The network began full-time broadcasts on 31 October 2005.In 2009, Venezuela subsidized the launch of the communications satellite Venesat-1, in part to amplify Telesur's programming by enabling it to avoid geo-blocking efforts by DirectTV, an American company.
The founder of Telesur was Aram Aharonian, a journalist and scholar, who left Uruguay after the 1973 coup d'état. Aharonian stated that the idea of Telesur was "to see ourselves as we truly were", stating that he sought more diversity in the media. After Aharonian resigned from his position as the network's director in 2013, he commented in a 2014 interview that Telesur "did not achieve latinamericanization and continued to be Venezuelan".
Sponsor countries
La Nueva Televisora del Sur, C.A. is a public company which has various Latin American governments as its sponsors. Its primary sponsor is the Government of Venezuela; Cuba, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Bolivia have contributed as well. Argentina was its second main sponsor, but after the victory of big tent center-right coalition Cambiemos in the elections of 2015, the new government decided in 2016 to pull out allegedly because of a "lack of 'pluralism'." In June 2016, the Argentine government announced that it would no longer support Telesur broadcasting. Argentina became the first founding member of Telesur to discontinue participation.Uruguay
On 3 March 2005 Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez signed several agreements with then-recently elected Uruguayan president Tabaré Vázquez regarding the energetic and communicational integration of both countries, one of them being the joint creation and financing of Telesur. After just under a year of signing the agreements, they had not been carried out, although the party of President Vázquez had a majority in the country's legislative branch. Venezuelan journalist Andrés Izarra, president of Telesur, confirmed in an interview in January 2006 the delay in the approval of the full incorporation of the country to the network: "There is a special situation, because although the country is a member of Telesur, until their Congress does not approve it, we can't broadcast the channel locally or receive government funding. The situation requires a political decision and we hope that the government of Tabaré Vázquez support the initiative". The president of the Uruguayan Deputies' Education Commission, Jorge Brovetto confirmed in February 2006 the country still wasn't part of the network's sponsors and asked that, until the parliament decided on a final status, Uruguay's name be removed as a sponsor from Telesur's promotions and website. In June 2006, Uruguay's Minister of Education and Culture, Brovetto, expressed worries regarding the network's editorial line on certain issues and governments in the region, and how the diplomacy of his country could be affected by it. Uruguay's Chamber of Senators approved the bill that would ratify the agreements on 8 August 2006 by votes of the legislators belonging to ruling party, but the Chamber of Deputies postponed several times the debate on the draft. Although sources close to the Congress told the press in February 2009 that the issue of incorporation to Telesur "was not a priority item in their agenda", and that the issue would not be discussed during the remainder of that year, the agreement was finally ratified on 2 June 2009.On 13 March 2020, the new government of Luis Alberto Lacalle Pou stopped funding the network as part of the country's new foreign affairs strategy of "not integrating alliances based on ideological affinities".
Impact of sanctions applied by United States
In 2018, English-language Telesur canceled "The Empire Files", a program produced by United States–based journalists Abby Martin and Mike Prysner. Martin, Prysner, and other Telesur contract journalists had their funding blocked by the application of United States sanctions against Venezuela. Academic Stuart Davis cites the cancellation as an example of how United States sanctions hamper public funding of media production in Venezuela.Journalists and staff
The channel's news agenda was originally decided by its board of directors with the aid of an advisory council, consisting of many leftist intellectuals, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, poet Ernesto Cardenal, writers Eduardo Galeano, Tariq Ali, Saul Landau, editor-in-chief of Le Monde diplomatique and historian Ignacio Ramonet, Argentine film producer Tristán Bauer, free software pioneer Richard Stallman and US actor and activist Danny Glover.Richard Stallman, who was on the advisory board that oversaw the launch of the channel, resigned on 26 February 2011, criticizing the channel's coverage during the Libyan Civil War and describing it as a pro-Gaddafi stance.
On 19 November 2006, the then correspondent of Telesur in Colombia, Fredy Muñoz Altamiranda, was arrested in Colombia on charges of rebellion and terrorism. Muñoz Altamiranda said that he feared for his life after being released due to subsequent threats. Reporters Without Borders questioned the evidence against Múñoz and called his imprisonment an "outrage" and an "abuse", arguing that the Colombian government could be acting against press freedom if the journalist had been jailed due to his work or because of past Telesur interviews with Colombian guerrillas. The Inter American Press Association also criticized his detention and asked for the respect of due process.
Telesur correspondent in Argentina, Edgardo Esteban, was awakened the morning on 11 September 2008, by the detonation of a homemade bomb of low intensity in front of his home. The journalist had received several threats because of his work on torture and corruption of Argentine military during the Falklands War. The Latin American Federation of Journalists, the Forum of Argentine Journalism and the Inter American Press Association expressed its rejection to any situations that put at risk the life of the journalist and demanded from the national and provincial authorities to work "so that intimidation against journalists will not happen again". Esteban expressed concern for his life and his family after the attack. Correspondent in Ecuador, Elena Rodríguez, has received death threats.
In October 2018, Telesur anchor Daniela Vielman resigned from the network, denouncing xenophobic treatment from employers.
Reception
In 2005, after Telesur was founded, it was described as a network showcasing the diversity of Latin America. Telesur also "won praise for its high production values and its intensive reporting about Latin America for Latin Americans". The network has leftist views representing its sponsorship nations: Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Uruguay and Venezuela.Writing in The Sage Handbook of Propaganda, Daniel Aguirre and Caroline Ávila state that Telesur was among the media outlets created and established under chavismo "that amplify the propaganda messaging that Chávez directly articulated and was later channeled by pro-government media". Joel D. Hirst, a former International Affairs Fellow in Residence of the Council on Foreign Relations, stated that the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, knowing the importance of propaganda, "embarked upon an ambitious plan to control information across the hemisphere" and began their plan with the creation of Telesur in 2005.
Political bias
Venezuela
Telesur was a propaganda tool for Hugo Chávez and his Bolivarian Revolution, with the network acting as a mouthpiece for the Venezuelan regime. According to Aram Aharonian, the founder of Telesur who was removed from the network in December 2008 by former Venezuelan Minister of Popular Power for Communication and Information Andres Izarra, Chávez "took the reins" of Telesur and used "propaganda as rolling news".In 2005, according to Connie Mack IV, a Republican from Florida's 14th congressional district who authored a House amendment authorizing Washington to create a station that would broadcast exclusively to Venezuela, Telesur undermines the balance of power in the western hemisphere and spreads Chávez's "anti-American, anti-freedom rhetoric". After the House passed the amendment, the Venezuelan ambassador in Washington, D.C., Bernardo Álvarez, stated that "in Venezuela there are 48 channels of free access to anyone with a television set and a small antenna. Only two of them belong to the government. You can also receive more than 120 channels from four continents." The chairman of the US Broadcasting Board of Governors, which runs Voice of America broadcasts in Latin America, Walter Isaacson said that the US could not be "out-communicated" by what he called enemies such as Telesur.
Critics have argued that Telesur works as a propaganda network for the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, and provides coverage that focus only on information that may benefit or harm a government, according to its political alignment. By 2019, Telesur "insistently pointed out through reports that in Venezuela there is no humanitarian emergency, scarcity or general crisis" and "dismissed the exodus of millions of Venezuelans in search of a better life". A June 2015 publication from the Legatum Institute states that TeleSUR's Venezuelan coverage "attempts to whitewash regime abuses and failures. TeleSUR focuses on exaggerated coverage of negative events elsewhere, such as racial tensions in Ferguson, Missouri, or unemployment in Spain, and sets up false comparisons, such as equating Venezuelan supermarket queues and queues for the 'Black Friday' shopping holiday in the US."