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Why do we have to learn about ourselves from a TV network from the North, like CNN?” These are questions that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has put forward at almost every forum he has addressed in the past year. And he will undoubtedly pose them once again in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, where he will be attending the fifth annual World Social Forum (WSF), taking place Jan. 26-31. Chávez has been invited to speak about Venezuela's ongoing agrarian reform programme at a WSF meeting organised by Brazil's Landless Workers Movement (MST, Movimento dos Sem Terra). The tiny Persian Gulf nation of Qatar was able to devote part of its oil revenues to the creation of Al Jazeera, the Arab television network that some have called the ”new symbol of Arab nationalism”. With a daily audience of 35 million viewers, it has come to rival such international media giants as the U.S.-based Cable News Network (CNN) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Now Venezuela, the only Latin American member of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), is heading up the creation of Telesur (short for the Southern Television Broadcasting Company), proposed as an alliance of state television networks that will include Argentina, Brazil and Cuba. Chávez is also planning to seek the involvement of Uruguayan state TV when leftist president-elect Tabaré Vázquez takes office on Mar. 1, according to Venezuelan Information Minister Andrés Izarra. Chávez has said that Telesur will be aimed at ”counteracting the media dictatorship of the big international news networks,” while Izarra describes it as ”a unified voice from the South to the rest of the world.” Telesur's director in Venezuela, Aram Aharonian, told IPS that the ultimate goal is to ”build a hemispheric audiovisual medium that will present a true reflection of the social and cultural diversity of Latin America and the Caribbean, and offer it to the world.” The Caracas-based network is scheduled to begin operations in March or April, with eight hours of programming daily, made up of news and documentaries produced in Latin America. The network will have its own correspondents, based initially in Bogotá, Colombia; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Lima, Peru; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and the U.S. city of Los Angeles. Venezuela is planning to purchase a satellite as means of achieving telecommunications independence and facilitating projects like Telesur, Izarra announced. The Chávez government has also invested 60 million dollars in modernising the state-run public network and in reviving the cultural and community television station, Vive TV. The Venezuelan government news agency Venpress has changed its name to the Bolivarian News Agency -- in reference to South American independence hero Simón Bolívar --, and there are plans to expand from a national to a regional entity. Money has been invested as well in boosting the transmitting power of the country's state radio stations, while over three million dollars annually will be devoted to developing the network of alternative and community radio stations based in low-income urban neighbourhoods and small rural settlements. ”The people participate in the 'manufacturing' of the final product, and there has been a high degree of acceptance. There are close to 160 community radio and television stations that have emerged in recent years as an alternative to the privately-owned media,” which have thrown all of their weight behind the opposition to the Chávez government, said José Ángel Manrique, general coordinator of the Venezuelan Community Media Network. Communications expert Antonio Pasquali, however, pointed to the statistics on state funding of public media. ”In 2002, France spent 3.156 billion dollars on public radio and television, Britain spent 5.7 billion, Italy 3.2 billion, and Venezuela, 13 million. That is a major gap,” he told IPS. Pasquali is a vocal critic of the Chávez government's support for state-run radio and television and radio, as opposed to a public service system under the control of independent social entities. What is urgently needed, he believes, is a third communications sector, separate from both the government and the privately owned sector. For his part, Javier Barrios, director of a Catholic educational radio network operating in low-income Venezuelan communities, told IPS that ”proposals like Telesur are an opportunity to show the world another side of Latin America, and not just the one portrayed by the North. It is a chance for those of us who live in the South to present our own realities.” However, Barrios fears that a network owned by one or a number of governments ”could reproduce on a larger scale the shortcomings and limitations of public radio and television in our own countries, which primarily focus on the works carried out by their governments.” The alternative, he said, would be ”to open these new media outlets to different ideas, with room for differing agendas and dissent.” Another communications specialist, Aquiles Esté, stressed that Telesur will be entering a highly competitive market ”where other networks and stations have already staked out a position.” Other challenges potentially awaiting the Telesur project include the sort of ”dirty war” tactics used against alternative news outlets like Indymedia, which had computer equipment and discs in its London office seized by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI). While the FBI -- which claimed it was acting on behalf of the Swiss and Italian authorities -- returned the Internet servers a few days later, the seizure affected the network's operations in at least 13 countries, in what Indymedia considered ”a civil rights violation on a global scale.” Al Jazeera itself provides another example of the kind of obstacles this ”alternative voice of the South” will face. The U.S. government puts constant pressure on Qatar to force the Arabic network to ”tone down” its news coverage, viewed as a thorn in the side of Washington's ”war on terrorism” in the Middle East.