“Sound the alarm in the hills, slums and towns to defend our revolution from this new fascist attack,” President Hugo Chávez said in a nationally televised speech this week as his government was under siege by student protests over his decision to take a dissident television network off the air. “We are waiting for you.”

With such chilling threats of retribution, Mr. Chávez seems prepared to harden his treatment of both the protesters and any media organizations that oppose him, even as the demonstrations ebbed somewhat on Thursday.

Analysts say such statements reflect a savvy reading of Venezuela’s polarized politics that has enabled him to withstand acute challenges to his government, like the general strike that paralyzed the economy in 2002. Protests then were larger, and a plunge in oil exports wreaked economic havoc, but Mr. Chávez emerged stronger than before.

“Chávez cannot appear to be weak among his own people, or to be another Allende,” said Steve Ellner, a political scientist at Oriente University in eastern Venezuela, referring to Salvador Allende, the Chilean socialist toppled in a 1973 coup.

Opponents say the decision is evidence that Mr. Chávez’s definition of the enemy has been enlarged to include news media outlets that are critical of his government. Otherwise, say detractors like Teodoro Petkoff, the editor of the small opposition newspaper Tal Cual, Mr. Chávez would have also decided not to renew the licenses of Venevisión and Televen, networks whose coverage similarly supported the 48-hour coup in 2002. Those networks have become far less critical of Mr. Chávez, while RCTV has maintained its criticism.

Indeed, watching television here this week has become a lesson in how Mr. Chávez is extending his control beyond political institutions to include the broadcast media. It is a marked shift from the early years of his presidency, when he faced vitriolic criticism from most news organizations, which were owned by the country’s moneyed elite.

With Chávez loyalists controlling the National Assembly, the Supreme Court and the federal bureaucracy, and with RCTV off the air, coverage of the protests by every television broadcaster except a small cable news network, Globovisión, fell into ideological step with the coverage by Mr. Chávez’s expanding state-controlled broadcasting interests.

Venevisión, the largest private television network, showed soap operas during many of the protests, largely ignoring them. And Venezolana de Televisión, or VTV, the main government network, paid relatively little attention to the protests, instead interviewing government officials and pro-Chávez student groups at smaller counterprotests.

Mr. Chávez also urged legal action against Globovisión this week, the only remaining network that is explicitly critical of him. Relying on analysis by semioticians of video broadcast in recent weeks by Globovisión of the shooting of Pope John Paul II in 1981, Mr. Chávez said the images were an attempt to incite an assassination attempt against him.

“Yesterday’s news,” Mr. Petkoff, the editor of Tal Cual, wrote in an editorial on this latest assertion by Mr. Chávez that he is the target of an assassination plot. “A cartoon rerun. Paranoia and manipulation.”

CARACAS, Venezuela (CNN) — Radio Caracas Television, the station silenced by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, has found a way to continue its daily broadcasts — on YouTube, the popular video Web site.

Although the station is officially off the air, CNN’s Harris Whitbeck said its news department continues to operate on reduced staffing, and the three daily hour-long installments of the newscast “El Observador” are uploaded onto YouTube by RCTV’s Web department.

In addition, RCTV’s Colombia-based affiliate, Caracol, has agreed to transmit the evening installment of “El Observador” over its international signal. The program, which will run at midnight, could reach about 800,000 people in Venezuela.

Although this is drastically reduced from RCTV’s previous audience, its continued presence is a sign of hope for the staff.

“We’re just doing our job as journalists,” said an employee of RCTV. “As long as somebody is seeing us, we consider what we are doing to be valid.