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Naomi Klein claims that the Venezuelan government isn't really censoring when it shuts down television stations. It's ok to censor privately owned stations, says Naomi, as long as you're the government. She brushes off condemnation by press freedom groups CPJ and RSF, ignores condemnation by IPA and IPI, and casts President Chavez - who recently described opposition political broadcasts "weapons of mass destruction" - as a "defender of free speech". Never mind that Chavez controls the military - that's a mere "paradigm" to Naomi. Words and pictures are the real weapons in her world: unrestrained speech is more dangerous than an army, and thus must be controlled at gunpoint.

[Gustavo Cisneros, owner of the private Venevision network] proselytises for free trade, telling the world, as he did in 1999, that "Latin America is now fully committed to free trade, and fully committed to globalisation ... As a continent it has made a choice". With voters choosing politicians like Chavez, that looks like false advertising.

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The threat has sparked condemnations from the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders. And there is reason for concern: the media war in Venezuela is bloody, with attacks on both pro- and anti-Chavez media outlets. But attempts to regulate the media aren't an "attack on press freedom", as CPJ claimed - quite the opposite.

Venezuela's media, including state TV, needs controls to ensure balance. Some of Chavez's proposals overstep these bounds. But it is absurd to treat Chavez as the principal threat to a free press. That honour goes to the media owners. This has been lost on groups entrusted to defend press freedom, still stuck in a paradigm in which all journalists want to tell the truth and all threats come from nasty politicians and angry mobs.

We need defenders of a free press at the moment - not just in Venezuela. It isn't the only country where a war is being waged over pil, where media owners have become inseparable from the forces clamouring for regime change and where the opposition finds itself erased by the nightly news. But in the US, unlike in Venezuela, the media and the government are on the same side.

- Guardian, The media against democracy: Venezuela highlights the threat to freedom from corporate control.

More articles about Venezuelan government censorship here.