Venevision Employs New Strategy in Post-RCTV Landscape

CARACAS, July 5: With its main competitor, RCTV, yanked off
the air in Venezuela, Venevision is employing a new strategy in dealing with
President Hugo Chávez, Gustavo
Cisneros, whose media empire owns the broadcast outlet, told the New
York Times.

Relations have been tense between Cisneros and Chávez in the
past. Venevision was often critical of the Venezuelan leader, who once accused
Cisneros of trying to topple him; Chávez sent government agents to raid the
media mogul’s home and offices. The tensions simmered once former U.S.
President Jimmy Carter, a friend of Cisneros’s intervened, brokering a meeting
between the two men.

According to the Times, Cisneros is concerned that
Venevision, too, could suffer the same fate as RCTV; Venevision’s license
expires before Chávez’s third term is up in 2012. “If you go off the air, then
democracy loses,” he said. “We decided that we needed to pull through. And the
way to pull through was to say, ‘Enough, we can’t be part of the story or play
a role in politics but we have to report the story every day.’”

As such, Cisneros says the network has abandoned its “Fox
News” approach, replacing morning talk shows with astrology programs and
prioritizing nightly novelas over critical news shows. The Times cites an EU report that said that in December,
Venevision devoted 84 percent of its political coverage to the incumbent and
only 16 percent to the opposition.

Cisneros has also dismissed claims that Venevision is
benefiting from RCTV’s demise. “There’s no advantage to us whatsoever in having
RCTV go away. Having President Chávez as our main television competitor is not
in our interest.”

Chávez has reportedly been boasting of his new relationship
with Cisneros: “He wore a tie and told me, ‘I put the tie on because I want to
tell you that I recognize you as president of my country,’” Chávez is quoted as
saying of his meeting with Cisneros. The comments were reportedly made on
Teves, the new state-owned broadcaster that has taken over RCTV’s signal.

“Some companies bow to authoritarian regimes,” Marcel
Granier, the president of RCTV, said in the Times report. “This happened in Germany with the Krupps,
Bayers and Thyssens.”