Here's a piece in today's Guardian which puts a different slant on this. The battle over the media is about race as well as class:

...The debate in Venezuela has less to do with the alleged absence of freedom of expression than with a perennially tricky issue locally referred to as "exclusion", a shorthand term for "race" and "racism". RCTV was not just a politically reactionary organisation which supported the 2002 coup attempt against a democratically elected government - it was also a white supremacist channel. Its staff and presenters, in a country largely of black and indigenous descent, were uniformly white, as were the protagonists of its soap operas and the advertisements it carried. It was "colonial" television, reflecting the desires and ambitions of an external power.

And the article is followed on this link by a lively debate from a variety of points of view.