Bad News for Consumers of Mexican Media

The Mexican Senate had been considering a modest telecom reform, but pressure from the broadcast lobby (known as CIRT) caused the PRI to withdraw support and essentially kill the bill. (The PAN had opposed it from the beginning.) One of the more controversial proposals was to set aside space for community broadcast stations, which evidently led the CIRT to compare one of the bill's champions, Carlos Sotelo of the PRD, to Hugo Chávez. (And thus demonstrating that it's not only English-speaking folks who deploy the Venezuelan bogeyman every chance they get.) I say "evidently" because the comparison is so fatuous that I wonder if there is more driving the CIRT's comparison. Probably not; a disingenuous lobby wouldn't exactly be unprecedented.