Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean, Press Freedom

MEDIA-ARGENTINA: “Subtle” Means of Censorship

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Feb 13 2006 (IPS) - Discriminatory use of government advertising, phone calls by public officials to exert pressure on journalists, editors and media owners, delays in passing a “sunshine law” on public access to information, and refusal by government officials to give interviews or press conferences.

These are new hurdles to freedom of speech in Argentina, according to journalists and civil society groups concerned about the use of “subtle” methods to restrict access to information and freedom of the press.

“As time goes by and democracies are consolidated, the mechanisms of pressure on the press have also become more sophisticated, which is why people talk about indirect, subtle censorship,” Roberto Saba, the executive director of Argentina’s Association for Civil Rights (ADC), told IPS.

The ADC and the Open Society Justice Initiative – a programme of the New York-based Open Society Institute that promotes rights-based law reform, builds knowledge and strengthens legal capacity worldwide – produced the report “Buying the News: A Report on Financial and Indirect Censorship in Argentina”.

The main mechanism of control mentioned by the report is the abusive use of official advertising, a problem that has also been observed by the civil society association Poder Ciudadano (Citizen Power), and by the Argentine chapter of a 2005 report by the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA), an association of newspaper owners from Latin America and the Caribbean.

“In some provinces, there is a large proportion of official advertising in the media,” said Saba. In the southernmost province of Tierra del Fuego, for example, 75 percent of all ads are paid for by the provincial government, which distributes the available budget in accordance with the preferences of the administration de jour.

Dependence on advertising from the national government is not as heavy. Nevertheless, the same suspicions exist with respect to the way it is distributed by the Secretariat of the Media, which answers to the cabinet chief.

“The distribution of the advertising is highly discretional, and there is no transparency or objective rules for regulating it,” said Saba. This lack of objectivity makes it possible for an official to put a financial stranglehold on small media outlets, he added.

After resorting to legal action to obtain the information from the government, Poder Ciudadano reported that the state had 88 million pesos (around 30 million dollars) available for publishing ads in the media in 2005, but that 75 million had already been disbursed in the first half of that year alone.

The report pointed to the lack of objective criteria for assigning government advertising. For instance, Página 12, a national newspaper that is printed in Buenos Aires and has a limited circulation, receives proportionally more advertising than newspapers with a larger circulation like Clarín, which prints six times more copies.

The report suggests that by this means, the administration of centre-left President Néstor Kirchner acknowledges publications that are more closely aligned with the government.

Last year, IAPA expressed its concern over what it described as “the discriminatory use of government advertising to reward and punish media outlets” without regard to any criteria or rules for objective distribution.

This form of “indirect censorship” is not mentioned in any other country-by-country report by IAPA with the exception of the Costa Rican section, which mentions the case of the withdrawal of advertising from the daily newspaper La Nación after coverage that was critical of the government.

The problem is also noted by many journalists. A survey carried out by the Argentine Journalism Forum (FOPEA) among 282 reporters from Buenos Aires and 17 other provinces found late last year that 50 percent of the reporters interviewed consider dependence on government advertising as one of the most serious problems they face.

Seven out of 10 also said they noticed “influence from the commercial department” on editorial decisions in the media outlets where they work.

But civil society groups and journalists’ associations also complain of other forms of coercion. Among the most frequently mentioned by those interviewed for the ADC report were the phone calls made by ministers and other high-level officials to protest over newspaper articles or reports broadcast on TV or radio.

“Some officials justify these calls by claiming that they are made to correct erroneous information, but given their effects in terms of self-censorship, these kinds of calls should be denounced as unacceptable,” said Saba.

Many of the respondents maintained that this practice has become particularly common under the Kirchner administration. Radio and television journalist Nelson Castro told the researchers that public officials regularly contact reporters “not to make corrections but rather to complain about coverage that is critical of the government.”

Some reporters interviewed for the study said the calls ceased only after the practice was made public by journalists renowned for their independent editorial stance. However, the complaints then began to be channeled to the owners of the media outlets in question instead of the journalists themselves.

In addition, government officials began to contact the media before events were reported, as a means of influencing coverage of more controversial issues.

For its part, the FOPEA survey revealed that 52 percent of the journalists interviewed said they had received calls of this kind. Of that total, 48 percent said the media organisation they worked for went ahead with the story in question, while the other half indicated that the articles were either scrapped or modified, or that the reporter involved was subjected to some sort of reprisal.

The journalists consulted for the ADC report also accused the federal government of influencing the selection or veto of reporters chosen to accompany Kirchner on “Tango 01”, the presidential jet, when he sets out on tour. There are no seats designated for particular media organisations, but rather for certain journalists, they say.

In the meantime, access to public information is not regulated, and is restricted in numerous ways. There is a bill before Congress that has already undergone repeated modifications and has still not been adopted.

Some of the journalists contacted by the ADC reported that there are ministers and other government officials who meet with them in secret, because they have been prohibited from doing so by presidential order.

The IAPA report, meanwhile, stressed that Kirchner has not given a single genuine press conference during the entire time he has been in office, nearly three years. “This lack of openness is an obstacle to guaranteeing the veracity of information,” stated the regional association.

FOPEA also highlighted the fact that news briefings in Argentina have turned into “monologues”, with no opportunities for journalists to ask questions. It has become common practice for government officials to call reporters together to make announcements, after which they refuse to take questions and simply end the proceedings.

In a similar vein, a statement issued last November by FOPEA and the Association of Foreign Correspondents protested the “tight management of information” by government delegations attending the 4th Summit of the Americas held in the Argentine resort city of Mar del Plata that month.

More than 200 journalists represented by the two groups criticised the extremely limited contact between the delegations and the media. There were only three press conferences, and one of them, given by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, consisted of a single question and an answer that lasted for over an hour.

“This marks a trend towards the isolation of government leaders and contempt for the work of journalists,” the two associations declared.

Overall, 39 percent of the journalists surveyed by FOPEA believe that the Kirchner administration has exercised greater pressure on the media than any other since the return to democracy in 1983, while another 25 percent said the pressure it exerts is similar to that of previous governments.

In this regard, Saba noted that the arbitrary allocation of official advertising was also seen during the presidency of Carlos Menem (1989-1999), although the main weapon used by the Menem administration to influence the press was the threat of legal action against journalists who criticised government officials.

He added, however, that this form of pressure was abandoned following a case that went all the way to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and led to the repeal of Argentina’s criminal defamation law, which means that journalists can no longer be charged or jailed for criticising public officials.