- Headquarters:
- Caracas
- Areas Of Involvement:
- broadcasting
- television
teleSUR
La Nueva Televisora del Sur (known as teleSUR) is a Latin American TV news channel in Spanish. Since 2005, the channel has broadcast news and featured programs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from its studios headquarters in Caracas, Venezuela. In addition, it features several digital platforms in Spanish, English, and Portuguese. The TV channel is available throughout the American continent as well as in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. The channel can be freely accessed by terrestrial, cable, satellite, and digital television.
The channel aims to promote Latin American integration as an alternative source of information to mainstream networks. This entry provides an overview of teleSUR and then explores its origins, ownership, and membership; programming and content; and distribution and audience.
Overview
The emergence of teleSUR has aroused significant interest due to its uniqueness of being the first regional television channel purely financed by more than three Latin American states. In addition, the insertion of a joint-state-financed regional channel was a unique development in a television market characterized by the strong presence of concentrated private media groups. When teleSUR was founded, the regional news television market was led by CNN en Español, which broadcasts mainly from the United States. The emergence of teleSUR is part of the 2005 worldwide boom of 24-hour state-funded news channels, including Russia Today and France 24.
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The launch of teleSUR fostered the expectation that this network marked a shift in the historical lack of public media in Latin America, where most of the television channels developed by the state have been operating as governmental and/or commercial rather than public media. Despite being praised for offering a novel perspective on Latin American current affairs, teleSUR is sometimes criticized for being the media arm of the Venezuelan government and, to a certain extent, of other sponsoring countries, by providing a platform for 21st-century socialism.
The first broadcast of teleSUR was on July 24, 2005, with four daily hours of programming. Since November 2005, the channel has featured 24/7 programming from its studio headquarters in Caracas. Originally, teleSUR headquarters were in the building complex where the Venezuelan public TV channel Venezolana de Televisión ran its operations. After February 2012, teleSUR began to broadcast from new studios in its own building in the capital. In July 2014, it launched an interactive digital news website with exclusive audiovisual content in English, some of which was then retransmitted in Spanish.
The channel includes hosts from a wide network of Latin American countries, with operations in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. Abroad, the channel has correspondents in China, Egypt, Russia, Spain, Syria, and United States. Besides its television news channel, teleSUR operates a news web portal and several social network accounts on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube. Moreover, some of these digital initiatives (e.g., the news portal) are available in different languages, including English and Portuguese.
Origins, Ownership, and Membership
The ownership of the channel is public, created on January 28, 2005, in Caracas, Venezuela, under the domain of the Communication and Information Ministry of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. The channel was officially named La Nueva Televisora del Sur C.A. (teleSUR) by the Extraordinary General Assembly of Shareholders on April 20, 2006. The company was created with an initial start-up investment of $2.5 million (U.S.), but it also sought shareholder participants. TeleSUR’s initial capital investment was funded by Venezuela, Argentina, Cuba, and Uruguay. Bolivia was added as a shareholder in 2006. In 2007, teleSUR acquired two new shareholding members, Ecuador and Nicaragua.
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In December 2010, the Argentinean branch of teleSUR was opened in Buenos Aires. In July 2012, the position of Representative of the Argentinean State on the Strategic Board of teleSUR was created. By that time, Cuba and Argentina were the only two formal members, apart from Venezuela, that had regularized their financial situation (investment on shares) at the board of teleSUR (in December 2011 and May 2012, respectively). In 2016, however, Argentina announced that it was withdrawing its stake in the channel and would cease funding of teleSUR. In later years, other states withdrew their participation. Today, Venezuela remains the primary owner and financial backer of the channel. In addition, Cuba and Nicaragua are both active sponsors of teleSUR.
Programming and Content
The programming of teleSUR is mainly composed of news programs and includes news bulletins almost every hour. It also broadcasts featured programs such as in-depth interviews, debates, documentaries, investigative stories, and shows related to culture, music, and health.
In general, the programs last 30 minutes, while a few of them last one hour (e.g., Conexión Global and Edición Central) and only one lasts two hours (El Mundo Hoy). The flagship program of teleSUR is its news bulletin teleSUR Noticias, with approximately 13 broadcasts per day, besides emissions for any breaking news and/or developing story of interest. The featured programming is headed by Dossier, an opinion program about international news and events, which is broadcast three times every weekday and twice every Saturday. The news programming schedule also includes Conexión Digital, news analysis through social media and news portals; Impacto Ecónomico, focusing on economic news; Temas del Día, about the more relevant world news story of the day; Síntesis, a weekend program on the more relevant news in Latin America and the world during the week; and Telesur Lenguaje De Señas, similar to the channel’s flagship program but also featuring sign language for deaf viewers. As well, there are popular sports news programs: Deportes teleSUR; Nuestramérica Deportiva, specializing in sports news within the American continent; and Goles al Bate, focusing on football and baseball.
The featured programming consists of journalistic, opinion, and in-depth analysis programs, including Dossier; Documentaries; Mesa Redonda Internacional, in which experts analyze current affairs; Cruce de Palabras, based on conversations and interviews with leaders of resistance; Realidades, which provides political, economic, social, and cultural context analysis of Latin American peoples; Reportajes teleSUR, an in-depth investigative program of current affairs; Entre Fronteras, news about the migration phenomenon; Atomun, about science and technology; Congénero, on female and gender stories; Guía tu Cuerpo, a health and prevention program; Zona Verde, about ecology and sustainability; Mestizo, on Latin American art history; and Maestra Vida, a biography program.
Content and programming on teleSUR focus on news and stories about Latin America, as well as the world, stressing how the latter relates to or impacts the region. Moreover, the channel emphasizes reports on regional summits, elections, conflicts, and social movements that are generally excluded, marginalized, or only superficially covered by mainstream media. Consequently, teleSUR often manages to obtain firsthand information from a representative network of nongovernmental organizations, political parties, unions, intellectuals, human rights defenders, and minorities, among others.
In the past, teleSUR has been recognized for its exclusive live news coverage of the liberation of two of FARC’s (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia’s) hostages in Colombian territory in January 2008; the coup d’état against the president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, in June 2009; the attempted coup against the president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, in September 2010; and demonstrations in support of Muammar al-Qaddafi during Libya’s Arab Spring in 2011.
Of course, teleSUR has content-sharing agreements with other television networks including Russia Today, China’s CCTV, and Iran’s IRIB, in addition to those established with local public media from Latin American countries. Most of these agreements are limited to the interexchange of audiovisual content to avoid dependence exclusively on mainstream news agencies.
Distribution and Audience
TeleSUR is mainly distributed as a free satellite signal. Another way to watch teleSUR is on cable television, despite the fact that some cable companies within Latin America have refused to include the free channel as part of their cable package offerings. This has been especially true in those countries where there is a high concentration of ownership of cable television, such as Argentina, or dominance of the market by one cable operator, such as the duopoly of Televisa-Azteca TV in Mexico.
Moreover, teleSUR is distributed as a free terrestrial channel in its sponsoring countries, but this kind of distribution is generally limited to urban areas due to the telecommunication infrastructure and market conditions of each country. Some sponsoring countries of teleSUR have retransmitted its programs on local public channels. The news website of teleSUR and its social media accounts represent another free way to watch its live programming via streaming and content already broadcast on demand.
Regarding teleSUR’s audience, exact numbers are not available. The average audience of teleSUR has been estimated at between 5 and 6 million viewers, while its potential reach is 550 million viewers in Latin America, 50 million in United States, and an additional million in western Europe and North Africa.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society.