Chavez Raising Pressure on Defiant Venezuelan TV Network Globovision

At Globovisión, station director Alberto Federico Ravell is equally adamant. He calls Chávez a dictator and indirectly criticizes television broadcasters that have muted negative coverage of the government.

"Our editorial line is not for sale," he said. "We are not going to get out of the role of being journalists."

In an environment that free-speech advocates describe as openly hostile, Globovisión's reporters are often jostled in public and authorities limit their access to news conferences or ignore their queries.

Alejandro Gómez, a Globovisión cameraman, said he had recently found a good vantage point high above the notoriously violent Yare Prison, southeast of Caracas, to film a disturbance in the yard. "We had tremendous images," he said.

But National Guard troops, leveling rifles at him, forced him to erase the footage. "It was a condition for letting me go," he said.

The government has defended its actions by portraying Globovisión's directors as subversives who will stop at nothing to see Chávez ousted.

"The media terrorism in Venezuela is a permanent practice by a big part of the private media," Izarra said, adding that "messages of hate," some inserted subliminally, had been detected in e-mails and in entertainment programming.

The government's wrath against Globovisión has roots in a 2002 coup that briefly deposed Chávez. Globovisión and three other anti-government stations called for protests, gave free commercial airtime to anti-Chávez organizations and aired positive coverage of opposition leaders. The stations celebrated Chávez's ouster along with the coup leaders and then blacked out coverage of a counter-coup that put him back in power.

Seven years later, the government has yet to prosecute Globovisión's owners or editors. "It's clear there's a role the private media played in the coup," said Lauría, of the Committee to Protect Journalists. "But there are no judicial sentences against them."

On a recent day, talk of the government's bid to silence the station was secondary at Globovisión as editors focused on the day's news, which included the Air France plane crash and the inauguration of El Salvador's new president.

Briceño, the reporter locked out of the news conference earlier in the day, appeared to take the incident in stride. At 26, she is already accustomed to such treatment. But she said she worries about the future.

"What is in play is whether we can freely practice journalism," she said. "There is free expression. You can say what you want. But it is a free expression that is supervised and limited -- and that has consequences."