Couch potatos of the world unite

Being an apologist for Mexico, an right-wing Houstonian once dubbed this site “Mexican Pravda”.  Pravda is still not one of the world’s great newspaper, though I assume they pay their correspondents in cash now.  Back when I was in grad school in Indiana, working for a teeny-tiny alternative paper, we were paid in Vodka for covering a Red Army tennis exhibition for them,  Ok, so I
picked this up from Pravda ,  but the same exact story ran in Forbes.

Mexico’s Supreme Court has rejected a widely criticized media law, flexing its power to confront the monopolies that control everything from the television shows to the tortillas Mexicans eat.

Many major Mexican industries – telecommunications, corn and cement, to name a few – are dominated by monopolies or oligopolies that have survived unfavorable World Trade Organization rulings and repeated government promises to topple them.

The story is no different on television, where Grupo Televisa SA and rival TV Azteca dominate the small screen and have kept competitors at bay while building business empires that hold record labels, radio stations and professional soccer teams.

Now comes the “capitalist spin”

President Felipe Calderon took office Dec. 1 pledging to do what others before him did not: Open the economy to more competition, lower consumer prices and create more jobs. So far, he has done little to achieve that goal, but the Supreme Court decisions – ratified on Thursday – could give his administration the boost it needs to take action.

I don’t see any evidence that FeCal would have acted if it hadn’t been for opposition legislators challenging the law.

Mexicans were outraged when Congress approved legislation dubbed the “Televisa Law” last year, giving away bandwidth for new television, Internet and telephone services exclusively to the two media giants without bids or compensation to the government. It also automatically renewed their existing concessions for 20-year periods, blocking competition for decades.

Incidentally, the concessions enjoyed by Televisa and TV Azteca were the same kinds enjoyed by Radio Caracas TV (RCTV) in Venezuela.  That RCTV was intimately involved in a coup attempt in 2002 against the elected government, had a lot to do with them losing THEIR special concession when it expired this year, but in Venezuela, the concession had ended, and there was no new law granting them additional “special rights” on the horizon.

But, then, opening a market to competition, if the government is “socialist” is apparently censorship.  Had the Mexican election gone the other way, the Supreme Court would probably have ruled the same way in Mexico, but we’d be making noises about censorship and interference with the capitalist market, especially with the Court specifically mentioning community TV access rights.