MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Venezuela Mulls Jail Time for “Media Offenses”

Minister Cabello: “The country demands” that freedom of speech “be regulated.”

The leftist Venezuelan government expressed on Friday its support for the draft legislation that contemplates jail sentences for “media offenses,” an idea denounced by journalists’ associations and media executives.

It’s agreeable that after so long, by means of a law, this can be done” in the struggle against the “poisoning” of a society where freedom of speech should not be “the most sacred of freedoms,” Public Works and Housing Minister Diosdado Cabello told state television.

Cabello directs the National Telecommunications Council, or Conatel, which this week opened “administrative cases” against 50 of the 240 private radio stations, accusing them of operating “illegally” and threatening them with having their broadcast licenses revoked and their equipment seized.

“The country demands” that freedom of speech “be regulated,” Cabello said on Friday.

Attorney General Luisa Ortega introduced on Thursday the proposed Law Against Media Crimes in the National Assembly, telling lawmakers that this is what has to be done against “new kinds of crime that result from the abusive exercise of freedom of information and opinion.”

One of the bill’s articles says that “any person who divulges false news through the media that upsets public peace... will be sentenced to prison from two to four years.”

The National College of Journalists, or CNP, warned that the approval of the bill “will put citizens a step away from being punished for having opinions and making them public.”

“The siege against radio stations that do not parrot the official slogans; the promotion of a new journalism law; the harassing of TV networks and newspapers and the criminalization of political dissidence” are all part of the “attack,” the CNP said.

In addition, Teodoro Petkoff, publisher of the capital daily Tal Cual, also critical of President Hugo Chávez’s administration, considered the text of the Attorney General’s Office as the “most savage and brutal (legal bill) that the country has known in contemporary history” and one that is unable to hide its “Hitlerian inspiration.” EFE