Recently shut down by President Hugo Chavez, RCTV has found a way to continue broadcasting without a license by posting three daily programs to YouTube. According to CNN.com:

In addition, RCTV’s Colombia-based affiliate, Caracol, has agreed to transmit the evening installment of “El Observador” over its international signal. The program, which will run at midnight, could reach about 800,000 people in Venezuela.

Although this is drastically reduced from RCTV’s previous audience, its continued presence is a sign of hope for the staff.

“We’re just doing our job as journalists,” said an employee of RCTV. “As long as somebody is seeing us, we consider what we are doing to be valid.”

Thousands of people, most of them from area universities, took to the streets of Caracas in protest this week after Chavez refused to renew RCTV’s broadcasting license, which expired last Sunday. (I-Report: Watch marchers fill street to protest station’s closing Video)

Chavez accused RCTV of violating broadcast laws and supporting a botched coup against him in 2002. He replaced RCTV on Monday with a state-run broadcast station.

Glad to hear it! The Internet has been a phenomenally effective tool for the spread of pro-liberty ideals since its inception, and this is just one more perfect example of technology’s ability to allow us to reach beyond borders and outside governmental restraint. Now, we only have to hope that Google doesn’t decide to kowtow to Venezuela the way it and other search engines have to China in complying with certain censorship requirements in that country.

As of today, Venezuela’s oldest private broadcast station is closed for business, thanks to the country’s socialist leader, Hugo Chavez. According to VOAnews.com, “Venezuela’s government has refused to extend RCTV’s license, despite an outpouring of criticism from international human rights groups and press freedom organizations.” Bizarrely, Chavez announced that the station’s replacement will be a state-run channel that will, “democratize the media and enhance freedom of speech.” Such paradoxical logic is, unfortunately, common among socialist leaders and followers.

Enhance free speech by shutting down a private station and replacing it with state-sponsored media? This is the same kind of reasoning used by post-modernists to accumulate power, where meaning and truth are considered so subjective as to have no meaning– except of course for the meaning that is convenient to the achievement of their goals. Chavez, of course, lacks any originality as a socialist as well– taking a cue from Putin on the other side of the Atlantic, whose country’s journalists end up dead after too much criticism of the Kremlin.