Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has received an award from Argentina's University of La Plata for promoting "popular communication" by giving people without a voice access to the airwaves and newspapers.
"I accept and dedicate this prize in the name of the people of your brother country, Venezuela, which has been fighting for years to shape dynamic peoples' media, free of the media dictatorship of the upper class and the United States," Chavez told the audience at a ceremony in Buenos Aires.
The large majority of mass media in Venezuela is privately owned, but Chavez has countered this by passing a law that requires all private television stations to dedicate at least 25% of their airtime to programs created by community groups, non-profits, and other independent producers.
In July 2005, Chavez helped launch a Latin American version of Al Jazeera to compete against what he saw as the controlled cable news channels, Univision and CNN. In 2006 Chávez inaugurated a state-funded movie studio called Villa del Cine to produce indigenous films and to combat the influence of Hollywood.
Chavez has also popularised alternative media by promoting social networking sites. He has his own Twitter account, and has over 1,100,000 followers. Chavez has had hundreds of "infocentres" built around the nation where ordinary Venezuelans can go to use the Internet for free. More are planned.
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