Approximately 61.7% of the population in Venezuela – equivalent to nearly 17.7 million citizens – lives in areas with insufficient or fragile presence of local media. This was revealed by a study by the Institute of Press and Society (IPYS) Venezuela presented this Thursday, which places almost 18 million people in territories with serious restrictions on accessing proximity information.
The research covers 366 territories throughout the country and concludes that 83% of these areas have “insufficient or fragile” local journalism capacity. This limitation directly affects the right of citizens to stay informed about events in their immediate environment.
The executive director of IPYS Venezuela, Marianela Balbi, explained the causes of this phenomenon and warned about the seriousness of the current situation.
“These almost 18 million people live in territories where there are weak conditions to produce local journalism, as a consequence of 25 years of the application of a model of censorship, closure of media and very precarious conditions for the exercise of the profession,” Balbi said in statements to the Efe news agency.
The board described the situation as alarming, highlighting that it shows “the fragility of an information ecosystem and the difficulties in obtaining information.”
“This local journalism is the closest way to access information,” he indicated.
News deserts and natural disasters: the crisis in La Guaira
The report identifies the La Guaira region as one of the main “news deserts” in Venezuela. The area, affected by the earthquakes of June 24suffered a drastic reduction in its information offering: barely one in every ten local media outlets that operated in the area continues to operate.
“This reveals to us the orphanhood and situation of vulnerability in which local journalism finds itself,” said the director of the organization.
Progress against the persistent blocking of web portals
Despite the adverse environment, Balbi recognized certain progress in the situation of press freedom, such as the release of the 25 journalists who remained detained at the end of last year and the lifting of restrictions on digital sites. However, he specified that the authorities still block 84 news portals in the country.
In relation to the country’s political and electoral panorama, the IPYS representative stressed the urgency of restructuring the media environment to guarantee informed decision-making by citizens.
“The democracy that begins to be built in Venezuela must be plural, there must be diverse media and citizens must be informed when making decisions in the face of elections and in the face of a political panorama as difficult as the one that is presented,” he said.
