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Thursday, July 12, 2007
Today I'm going to discuss with you the recent controversy over Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's not renewing the broadcast license of a television station in that country.
All nations license the right to use their public airwaves, since the demand for use of the airwaves far outstrips the supply. In the US the Federal Communications Commission performs this function, granting terms of 8 years. In Venezuela, the term is 20 years.
Broadcasters must serve the public interest, and if not, their licenses can be revoked, or not be renewed.
And there's the rub, as Willy S. said.
We need to go over the events of the April 11, 2002 coup in Venezuela that attempted to remove Chavez from office, and the role RCTV played in that coup.
As you'll hear, Chavez was totally justified in not renewing RCTV's license based on its support of the coup. It's certainly not serving the public interest to support the overthrow of the democratically elected government of a nation.
We'll also go over what happened in Venezuela after Chavez's license non-renewal, and how the right-wing tried to exploit, if not outright create, a crisis in Venezuela.
Programming note: for the rest of the summer, Blast The Right will appear every other week.
(PS: Right-wingers, if you want to write in to me, fine, but at least do me the courtesy of listening to the podcast first. Please don't respond just on the basis of the brief preview above. Thanks!!)
For those who aren't familiar with podcasts, podcasts are a series of mp3 audio files that you download to your computer or portable music device (iPod or other) and then can listen to whenever you want.
You don't need an iPod to listen to podcasts.
Podcast software like iTunes will automatically check a podcast at intervals you specify, and download any new installments.
iTunes is free and very easy to use. http://www.apple.com/itunes/
In iTunes, if you want to subscribe to my podcast, just click on Advanced at the top right, then choose Subscribe to Podcast, and paste in the URL http://feeds.feedburner.com/blasttheright
That's the URL to use for other podcast-friendly software programs as well.
Alternatively, you can just manually download new episodes from my podcast home page as they become available. Here is a link to my podcast's home page: http://www.therationalradical.com/podcast.html
Enjoy!!
Jack Clark 9:28 PM [+]
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