In today’s El Nacional there is an interview with Cesar Miguel Rondon by Milagros Socorro that shows the initial effects of the muzzle bill, which Noticiero Digital has linked to here. Rondon says that reporters that reporters have no idea of what to protect themselves or inhibit themselves due to the new law. He describes how he calls “the rebellion of the street vendors” on Wednesday was not shown on TV because reporters were not sure whether they could show it or not. As he says “we had dramatic events…the best informed people in the country did not know what was going on…The media did not know whether it could transmit the images of what was happening or not….That night we learned via the Government’s TV channel that the media could have broadcasted the images if they had wanted to”
Rondon also says that the next day, when he showed the front page of the newspapers in his TV program, he blocked the pictures of the violence the previous day, “because in that time slot we can not show explicit violence” . He also says he did not even dare describe them.
This sounds to me like censorship. If anytime something happens, the TV stations are going to have to ask the Government TV channels whether they can show something or not, it looks like censorship, smells like censorship and tastes like censorship to me. It certainly limits freedom of speech when you can’t even know what is going on in the country. It may sound like growing pains, but if the same Government that pushed the rules and sanctions through does not define the scope of how the bill will be applied, then we a have in fact a censorship board in place.
And that was exactly the purpose of the Bill.
The Devil's Excrement 
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