As the years wear on, it takes longer and longer to win. With enough patience, in Caracas and other large cities, you eventually do. But drive to the smaller towns and cities where most Venezuelans live, and you find yourself playing for hours on end. It’s not, to tell the truth, a very fun game.

This is the world of President Hugo Chávez’s “communication hegemony.” Starting in 2007 the Venezuelan government decided to do something about the country’s raucous private media, which for years had put up a robust challenge against what many of us saw as the government’s rising authoritarianism.

To some extent, you could almost sympathize with Chávez. Particularly during the hyper-confrontational, coup-strewn years of 2001-04, Venezuela’s private media often went over the top. For a two-month stretch in December 2002 and January 2003, private television stations joined a general strike, and the opposition media ran hardcore anti-Chávez propaganda around the clock, forfeiting their journalistic obligations almost completely. For those of us who were concerned about the integrity of journalism in Venezuela, it was painful to watch.

The government’s solution to the problem was not to nurture a non-partisan media that might elevate the level of discussion in Venezuela’s fledgling public sphere. It was to supplant unhinged antigovernment propaganda with extremist propaganda of its own and use the power of the state to keep dissenting voices off the air for good.

Over the last five years, the government has expanded its media footprint from a single national TV channel and a single radio network to a vast broadcast operation, including six nationwide TV networks, an international news channel, a news agency, three newspapers, four radio networks, 36 “community” TV channels and 244 “community” radio stations — “community” being a euphemism for local but government-financed and -controlled.

The government has also gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that alternative voices can’t be heard. In 2007, it took the unprecedented step of refusing a broadcast license to the country’s most popular TV station after the station’s management refused to muzzle itself. In July 2009, it shut down 34 radio stations that had dared question the government’s propaganda line.

New laws with nebulous definitions now ban entire categories of speech — like messages that “could sow panic” in the population — but are used only to sanction news outlets that are too critical of the government.

As recently as 2008, Human Rights Watch was saying that Venezuela enjoyed “vibrant public debate in which anti-government and pro-government media are equally vocal in their criticism and defense of Chávez.” But in a new report, the organization details just how far the government has gone toward freezing dissent.

The results are depressing. After one broadcaster was fined over $2 million for reporting live from the site of a bloody prison riot, there seems to have been no further live reporting on the country’s chronic prison crisis. And what about investigations into corruption by high-ranking officials? No sane editor would even think of it. These days, if a private station wants to have any staying power, it sticks to music, relationship advice or sports.

Venezuela’s broadcast media today is a wall of breathless pro-government propaganda, punctuated now and again by a baseball game or salsa tunes. No wonder my little road-trip game lasts longer and longer.