I know nothing of the issue, so please educate me, but isn't Maduro the one who currently controls all media and just shut down his people's acces to the internet? Sounds pretty dictator-y to me.
As far as I understand it, he is democratically elected, but the government doesn't have much in the way of checks and balances. The stuff about the protesters wanting a military strongman sounds like biased propaganda.
What exactly do the protesters want, then? Other than Lopez to be president.
As far as I can tell, they want law and order because of the rising (and terrifying) levels of violence, and they don't want their Bolivars to lose all of their value.
Pretty traditional stuff. Foreign investors can't wait for Maduro to be toppled, because that means the shop is open again. The protesters are going to have an unlimited source of monetary support and friendly foreign press.
>the government doesn't have much in the way of checks and balances
Controlling much of the media was already the case before Maduro. The ruling party does not nor did it control all of it though. And it's not Maduro directly deciding everything. Maybe those were not ideas you had, but they are common misconceptions to many, just wanted to clear those up first.
So the things that have happened for many years now in broad strokes are that the state sponsored media was political. Besides what you expect it wanted the mind share of the older more conservative folks and would promote ideas like there was too much obscenity etc. Another thing was that independent media was also political and so attacked by the state directly and by harassing employees and owners.