By ROGER HERNANDEZ
from NorthJersey.com

I know Sean is purposely pissing off the administration by cuddling up with the likes of Chavez and Castro. He’s also passionate about these topics and is a damn good writer - JS

Sean Penn spent last week playing journalist in Venezuela. He was in the company of Hugo Chavez, a man with such abiding respect for journalism that he tries to shut down any news operation critical of his move toward tyranny.

Chavez did manage to shut down RCTV, the country’s oldest and most popular television network, by denying the renewal of its broadcast license. RCTV then switched to cable. And now Chavez is trying to close it down there, too.

But for now RCTV is still in operation, even if with a greatly reduced audience and under threat. Its status is indicative of where Venezuela is under Chavez: a nation whose democratic forces sometimes win and sometimes lose in a struggle to prevent a president from governing with unrestricted powers and without public challenges to his policies.

How much of that is going to end up in whatever story Sean Penn writes?

Penn claimed that he was in Venezuela to take in what was going on and then write about it. Nothing wrong with that, ostensibly. It’s what journalists do. He even tried to play I’m-not-a-movie’star.

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