TeleSur goes live
Writing for Infoshop News Kari Lydersen offers up an excellent story on Latin America’s new media alternative: TeleSur Takes to the Airwaves:
But now, there is a new and controversial alternative available throughout the region, which eschews melodramatic telenovelas and glitzy entertainment for hard reporting on the destruction of rain forests, the effects of globalization and poverty issues, along with promoting Latin American traditional and contemporary arts and culture. TeleSur, short for Television of the South, was launched in July, broadcast by satellite from Caracas, Venezuela, where it shares space with the government-run Channel 8 station. It is partially funded by Cuba, and has bureaus in eight Latin American countries and Washington D.C., along with freelance contributors throughout Latin America and the US.
TeleSur’s proponents are billing it as nothing less than a major step in community empowerment on the local level and Latin American solidarity and progress on the regional level. TeleSur vice president Aram Aharonian, a native of Uruguay, said the channel “is born out of an evident Latin American need, to rely on a source that allows all of the inhabitants of this vast region to express their own values, to broadcast their own image, to debate their own ideas and transmit their own content freely and equally.”