In this dissertation, I examine Bolivarian media during the Presidency of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias (1998--2013), leader of the Bolivarian Revolutionary project. Analyzing both ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) and opposition discourses, I consider the importance of consolidating a counter-hegemonic media presence as well as state media policies and the transnational and global political infrastructure of the Caracas-based, multi-state satellite TeleSUR (Television of the South) television network. I also textually analyze the practices of some of TeleSUR's programs to demonstrate the way in which the network contributes to the hyperbolic and ubiquitous presence of Chavez in the media and its use of cultural programming to define the focus of a Global South cultural agenda. I suggest that TeleSUR is part of an emergent model of national media systems, which in the context of neoliberal globalization, resists the global media hegemony of the West in new transnational maneuvers through new alliances with regional and global actors across Internet, cable and satellite platforms and its promotion of ALBA. One of the geopolitical goals of the TeleSUR initiative is to build an enduring regional and global infrastructure through these media platforms to challenge the Global Northern media monopoly on many fronts, resulting in what I argue is an incipient Global South "nation-building" project, imbricated in regional, national, transnational and local identities. But to build this infrastructure, the Bolivarian state is using an antiquated, bureaucratic anti-imperialist rhetoric at a time when the world is made up of a heterodox assemblage of political actors and declining U.S. hegemony. I argue, then, that there is a need for a rethinking of the "media imperialism" thesis of communication studies, one congruent with the vagaries and vicissitudes of global imbalances and shifting power blocs.