CARACAS -- Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said Friday that he will propose legislation aimed at ridding the media of "sensationalism."

"They will call me a dictator, that doesn't matter to me," he said during a public event in the central state of Miranda. "I will make very strict norms to end sensationalism and the campaign and propaganda that feeds on the blood and death it promotes."

The leftist president accused the "bourgeois press" of undermining efforts to combat a wave of violent crime that claimed anywhere from 12,000 to 25,000 lives last year.

"They are betting on the failure of the plan for national peace I am trying to get under way," Maduro said.

"It is not about being a dictator, it's a matter that a head of state much assume his responsibility when an entire country clamors for peace and they (elements of the media) come out to delight in death and promote it," he said.

The president also complained that the owners of several major Venezuelan news outlets live outside the Andean nation.

"The owner of (Caracas daily) El Universal lives in Miami, in New York. He never comes to Venezuela, truly. It should be prohibited for people who don't live in Venezuela to own communications media. Seems like a good idea to me, we need to study it," Maduro said.

After public threats from President Hugo Chavez, El Universal publisher Andres Mata moved his family to New York for safety.

The Venezuelan Government dominates the television airwaves -- where there are now no Opposition TV channels -- but leading broadsheet newspapers like El Universal and El Nacional and the Latin American Herald Tribune remain some of the few bastions of fair and balanced journalism left in the country where the Government has "communicational hegemony."

Newspapers are also threatened by the lack of paper. The newspapers El Impulso and Correo de Caroni have paper only enough paper for the week, according to their directors. El Sol de Maturin, Antorch, Caribe, La Hora and Version stopped operating in August 2013 and El Guayanes and El Expreso closed earlier this month. Miguel Henrique Otero, editor-in-chief of El National, said that the newspaper only had enough paper reserves to last until the end of February.