Changing the Channel: Class Conflict, Everyday State Formation, and Television in Venezuela

• Author: Naomi Schiller
• Date: 01 May 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18758703
• Published date: 01 May 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 220, Vol. 45 No. 3, May 2018, 124–140

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18758703

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

124

Changing the Channel

Class Conflict, Everyday State Formation, and Television

in Venezuela

by

Naomi Schiller

The formation of new state television outlets in Venezuela during the Chávez era was

a process of dismantling and remaking hierarchies among social classes and between the

fields of state and community media production. An analysis of the involvement of com-

munity media producers in creating a new state television outlet in Caracas and the col-

laboration between community and state producers in the first decade of the twenty-first

century suggests that the influx of community media producers into state media projects

and vice versa was mutually transformative. Such an analysis brings to the fore what

vertical topographies of power obscure: the conflict and cooperation between different

social sectors that were central to the making of both official and unofficial media projects

aligned with the Chávez-led Bolivarian Revolution. In these joint efforts we see the state

as an unfolding process of negotiation and struggle.

La formación de nuevos medios televisivos en Venezuela durante la era de Chávez

implicó desmantelar y rehacer jerarquías entre clases sociales, así como las áreas de pro-

ducción de medios estatal y comunitaria. Un análisis de la participación de productores de

medios comunitarios en la creación de una nueva emisora televisiva en Caracas y la colab-

oración entre productores estatales y la comunidad en la primera década del siglo XXI

sugiere que el influjo de productores de medios comunitarios en los medios estatales y

viceversa dieron lugar a transformaciones mutuas. Dicho análisis pone en evidencia algo

que las topografías verticales del poder ocultan: el conflicto y cooperación entre los dife-

rentes sectores sociales fundamentales a la creación, tanto oficial como extraoficial, de los

proyectos de medios asociados a la Revolución Bolivariana chavista. Es en estos esfuerzos

que el estado se nos revela como un proceso asentado en la lucha y la negociación.

Keywords: State television, Community television, State, Social class, Venezuela

Following two decades of privatization of broadcasting in Latin America,

the 2000s found left-leaning governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador,

Nicaragua, and Argentina making significant legal changes to their respective

media systems (Waisbord, 2013). Returning to nationalist and anti-imperialist

critiques of media systems first articulated in the late 1970s debates about the

New World Information and Communication Order, leftist governments began

to overturn the media policies put in place during the neoliberal turn.1 These

changes included more equitable distribution of broadcasting rights between

Naomi Schiller is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at

Brooklyn College, City University of New York.

758703LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18758703Latin American PercpectiveSchiller / CONFLICT, STATE FORMATION, AND TELEVISION IN VENEZUELA

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Schiller / CLASS CONFLICT, STATE FORMATION, AND TELEVISION IN VENEZUELA 125

state, commercial, and community broadcasting outlets. State efforts to trans-

form the “media world” (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin, 2002) were par-

ticularly striking in Venezuela, where the powerful commercial media played

a crucial role in a 2002 coup attempt against President Hugo Chávez. On the

heels of this watershed event, the Chávez government greatly expanded the

state’s communicational capacity and legalized community media in a bid to

advance the Bolivarian Revolution and counter the power of the political and

economic elites aligned against it.2

Much of the debate about these changes focused on the dangers of the state’s

domination of the media under the governments of Chávez. Some scholars

have argued that expansion of the state’s communicational capacities and its

funding of community media undermined journalistic independence from the

state, exacerbated polarization, and strengthened the power of the executive

(Bisbal, 2009; López Maya and Panzarelli, 2013). In advancing these arguments,

these scholars depict what the anthropologist James Ferguson (2006) has called

a “vertical topography of power,” meaning a one-way flow of influence from

centralized state actors to locally grounded private and community-based

media producers. While this dominant theoretical rubric draws necessary

attention to the vast influence of official state actors, it generates significant

blind spots. Scholars who studied community media in Venezuela in the

Chávez era have made inroads in exposing what this framework obscures: the

interdependencies of state officials and popular media makers (Fernandes,

2010; Fuentes-Bautista and Gil-Egui, 2011; Schiller, 2013). What analysts have

largely overlooked is the joint construction of state and community television

by barrio-based activists, state employees, and international allies. In this arti-

cle I argue that a view of the state as a multifaceted and contested process rather

than as a monolithic actor permits us to analyze the intertwined practices of

state formation and popular organizing, the role of international activists in

this process, and the class tensions and collaboration that underlie everyday

statecraft.

Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic research between 2003 and 2010

among barrio-based community television producers at a station called Catia

TVe in Caracas and their allies at a new television outlet launched by the Chávez

government, called ViVe TV, I explore how producers in the fields of commu-

nity and state media exchange ideas and struggle over authority in their coop-

erative efforts to promote “popular communication” as a central pillar of the

Bolivarian revolutionary state. By exploring Catia TVe and ViVe’s intertwined

history and collaboration, I highlight that the formation of ViVe has been a

process of dismantling and remaking hierarchies among social classes and

between the fields of state and community media production. Rather than top-

down unitary institutions of cultural production, new state media projects in

Venezuela expose the “blurred boundaries” between state and community

(Gupta, 1995) and the ongoing cross-class competition within Chavismo (Ellner,

2013b). By exploring the class antagonisms that emerged in the efforts to

reshape state media as a central dynamic of state formation I uncover the emer-

gent and unresolved process of building a revolutionary state in the context of

Venezuela’s “gradual path to far-reaching change” (Ellner, 2013a: 8). The col-

laboration of popular community media makers, socially mobile international