Al Jazeera English covers "nouveau cold war story" in Honduras

"I arrived in Honduras one week after ousted president Manuel Zelaya returned to begin his long spell of internal exile in the Brazilian embassy. With my crew from Fault Lines on Al Jazeera English TV, I went straight from the airport to a funeral. A week later, on our last night of filming, we attended another funeral.

The first was for a 24-year-old woman, the second for a 50-year-old schoolteacher, and both active in the resistance to the coup. ... Unsurprisingly, the US mainstream media is not reporting the story of what is really going on in Honduras. The de facto government and its backers invested $400,000 (that we know of) in bipartisan lobbying, and succeeded in implanting a deeply distorted narrative of events--a nouveau cold war story starring Hugo Chávez as puppet master and Zelaya as marionette.

Meanwhile, the voice of the social movement struggling to reform its country's constitution in the second poorest nation in the hemisphere has been all but ignored." Avi Lewis, The Nation 26 Oct., 2009 http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091109/lewis with links to video of AJE's Fault Lines: 100 Days of Resistance. Regardless of what we think about the events in Honduras, the writer's language, at least in this blurb, does not position Al Jazeera English as a dispassionate, objective news source. "About Fault Lines: Looking deeper into the US and its place in the world." AJE website at http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/faultlines/ .
(Kim Elliott)

Honduras: censored Radio Globo quadruples listeners by going online

The Christian Science Monitor reports that pro-Zelaya Honduran station Radio Globo, which was closed down by the authorities, is soldiering on by transmitting over the internet at a private home, the latest example of Latin American media using new technologies and social media to find a way around govermment censors. In Venezuela, opponents of President Hugo Chávez have used Facebook and Twitter to call for rallies against him – and blogs have created a space for alternative view points that have been stifled in the local press.

Radio Globo director David Romero says the station has over 400,000 listeners online, four times its regular following. “It is frustrating the government,” he says, laughing. “They can’t stop us.”
(R Netherlands Media Network Weblog)

Full story at The Xhristian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/1001/p90s01-woam.html

Honduran troops shut down pro-Zelaya radio station

Honduran soldiers raided a radio station aligned with ousted President Manuel Zelaya and shut down its operations after the de facto government issued a decree allowing the suspension of some civil rights and media, the radio’s director said today.

“Soldiers assaulted the radio this morning, took over the station and took it off the air,” the Radio Globo director David Romero said. “There were no arrests and staff managed to escape.”
(Source: Reuters/R Netherlands Media Network Weblog)

New wave of censorship in Honduras

Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya’s reappearance in Tegucigalpa has prompted a new wave of censorship of the national and international press. The de facto government’s response to the news of his return and his appeal to the army to “turn its rifles on the enemies of the people” has been to impose an immediate curfew, keep the international press away from the pro-Zelaya demonstrations and do everything possible to silence the few independent and opposition media still operating.

“This clampdown on the media in Honduras is unacceptable,” Reporters Without Borders said. “We condemn the attempts of the de facto authorities to ensure that a serious situation goes unreported and we urge them to respect the rights of Honduran citizens, especially the right to free expression and free movement.”

The press freedom organisation added: “Deprived of news and information, the international community is not even able to find out how many people have been injured or arrested in the course of the military’s operations.”

The entire neighbourhood around the Brazilian embassy, where Zelaya and his wife have been holed up since 21 September, has been militarised with the aim of “sweeping the area clean” of demonstrators and news media,” as a police officer put it. The international media, including news agencies such as Reuters and the Associated Press have been forced to leave the neighbourhood.

The government headed by acting President Roberto Micheletti is gagging the national press, especially two pro-Zelaya broadcast media, Canal 36 television and Radio Globo, which tried to provide live coverage of the events around the Brazilian embassy including the crackdown on demonstrators.

The head of Canal 36, Esdras Amado López, said the station has not been broadcasting since yesterday when its power supply was disconnected. Radio Globo, the only broadcast media to cover Zelaya’s arrival in Tegucigualpa, said it has been forced repeatedly to stop broadcasting. Both media say the aim is to prevent them covering the dispersal of the demonstrators around the embassy.

The Spanish news agency EFE quoted Micheletti as saying on 20 September that two journalists whom he did not name had practiced “media terrorism” by announcing Zelaya’s return, which he had not at that time recognised as a reality. Micheletti added that the two journalists – clearly Amado and David Romero of Radio Globo – would receive court summonses.

Radio Progreso, a station based in the northern town of El Progreso, preferred to suspend broadcasting at around 5 pm yesterday rather than have soldiers move into its studios to supervise its operations, as happed after the 28 June coup d’état. A Radio Progreso journalist said the station did not want a military occupation and the resulting danger to its staff. He did not how long he thought the station would have to stay off the air.
(Source: Reporters Without Borders/R Netherlands Media Network Weblog)