Venezuela’s National Telecommunications Commission (Conatel) has set its eyes on television network Globovisión, making it the second media outlet in four days to be put on notice that it must refrain from disseminating messages that disregard the country’s authorities.
In an official statement dated May 25, Conatel urged Globovisión to comply with numeral 5 of article 27 of the Law of Social Responsibility in Radio, Television and Electronic Media (Resorteme) after it broadcast a May 22 interview with a former presidential candidate.
Conatel pointed to a part in the interview in which interviewee Luis Alejandro Ratti maintained that the presidential elections of May 20 were fraudulent "full of plots, vices, accommodated and manufactured by Tibisay Lucena and Nicolás Maduro (the re-elected president)." The statement was made during an interview with journalist Dereck Blanco during the program Primera Página.
The regulatory agency also indicated that the transmission of messages of this type by Globovisión could promote misinformation, "the indiscriminate handling of the facts without any type of verification,” inciting the "disregard of legitimately constituted authorities," that could alter the public order.
The same warning, although accompanied by the opening of a sanctioning procedure, was sent to the website of independent daily newspaper El Nacional, on May 22.
At the time, the director of the newspaper, Miguel Henrique Otero, told the Knight Center, that this attempt of censorship by the Government was due in part to their coverage of high voter abstention during the presidential elections. However, according to Otero, the newspaper's lawyers still needed to clarify with Conatel the specific reasons for this procedure against El Nacional
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
