Ode to the news

The kitchen of the apartment I used to live in Venezuela is a quite cozy, small place. With yellowy tiles and formic top, there is not much to write about it: a single-doored fridge, four stoves, three knocked-down chairs and a table fixed on the wall. Just a normal kitchen.

Yet, upon visiting other houses in other places I found out that there was, indeed, something quite extravagant about my kitchen: a 32" TV situated right above the sink, looking down in an angle midways between security camera and church gargoyle.

Furniture is something rarely discussed outside of IKEA. The furnishing of the house you grow up into is something you find so natural that you don’t even notice it most times: its daily applications rarely exceed that of a mere backdrop. Those house appliances and fittings are just there, gazing quitely upon your growth with an endirely indifferente gape. This is, I assume, the reason why it is so shocking to find out something so taken for granted to be so eccentric.

The black rectangle hovering over the sink of my kitchen was always there, rhapsodizing about UN resolutions and bearing bad news about some law now forgotten somewhere in the cabinet of a corrupt politician. Ever since before I was born, the TV was there: a logical sister of the TVs in other rooms of the apartment. No matter how old and knocked down they were, they had to be there.

We might have never had a dishwasher, but we needed a TV. Several of them.

Nothing would ever surprise me in the streets because everything was already narrated from the TV. Newsflashes, accounts and press conferences were always looking at me from above and beyond, with the white letters over a black background of CNN in Spanish glistering over my eyes and, as I soon came to know, my memories.

The news were so present in my life I grew incredibly close to them. By the age of ten, I already knew who Christiane Amanpour was and had already learned about James Foley’s beheading somewhere in Syria. I had already woken up in the middle of the night sweating and shivering in fear because I dreamed of terrorists taking over my school just like Boko Haram did in Chibok in 2014.

The news were so present in my life I grew a fan of them. When I was in fifth grade, in around 2017, me and my friends established a “news broadcasting service” in my school that sought, amongst other aims, to act as a comptroller agent of measures taken my the school. The overseeing function of thews was, for me, crucial: something as essential as logical as having a TV in your kitchen.

Growing up in the Venezuela of the 2010s was, definitely, an interesting quest. As social media grew larger and government-set media controls grew tighter, my day to day was signed by watching my parents try and accesss information in different ways every day. It is very likely that, for each radio station closed down, ten new Twitter accounts of media-aware citizens were created. Information always found its way.

The good part is that it did. The bad part is that it did. As we made ourselves more and more aware of what was going on around us, we started to forget what was happening inside ourselves. News required such a big effort to be accessed that we focused all of our energies in doing so, leaving us as informed as drained.

We had no other option. My mother had to wake up every day as early as possible to browse an extended array of social media platforms just to look out for any event, be it a blocked road or a political meltdown, that might impede my from going safely to school.

Most times, this safety-aware overconnection worked: after all, nothing overtly serious ever happened to me or my family. Sometimes, it did not: the smell of tear gas in the hallways of my school was not unheard of and there were always several contingency plans in case i would be left stranded somewhere.

The plans were not simple. They involved not only friends, but friends of friends and provisional allies of the like that were not necessarily the most reliable ones. Yet, all the plans that my family came up with had one essential flaw: there was no way of informing me of what had happened.

And, for me, information was as essential as safety. Even though I might not have had the maturity necessary to properly understand what was going on, I had the need to. Understanding my surroundings could only be achieved through news.

The news that I grow up being denied access to. In the picture that heads this article, I am standing next to a traffic barrier with the letters “RCTV” on it, meaning Radio Caracas Televisión. Once Venezuela’s biggest broadcasting company, it was closed down in 2007 after much government-spearheaded efforts to limit its contents.

The photograph was taken a few days after it closed down. It never opened again, but the struggle for information would not end there.

It would keep staring down at me, glaring and angling over myself with the persistance and ominosity of a TV in the kitchen of a normal apartment.