Spanish Soaps All Day?

Interesting news news....

A new pan-Latin American TV channel, Telesur, has begun its first broadcast from the Venezuelan capital, Caracas.

It is backed by the governments of Venezuela, Argentina, Cuba and Uruguay who say they want it to promote Latin American integration.

Last week the House of Representatives voted to enable the US administration to begin broadcasting its own TV signals to Venezuela.

The US plan is intended to counter what it called anti-US propaganda

Naturally, the idea of state-sponsored TV scares me (we're not talking PBS here). I can cope with using it to passify the masses in Iraq, but that's about it. This is the South American network explicitly built to rival CNN. Given the Venezuelan President's paranoia complex about the US goals to kill him or invade, I'm betting on a fiercely anti-US flavor to this station. I do wonder though...just what on Earth we're planning on broadcasting back in. (in the interest of democracy, I hope it's Baywatch) And who's paying for it.

Also interesting to be reading this on BBC, it's not there on CNN.