by Mark Weisbrot
For at least a month now in Ecuador there has been a battle over regulation of the media. It has been in the front pages of the newspapers most of the time, and a leading daily, El Comercio, referred to the fight as one for “defense of human rights and the free practice of journalism.” This was in response to the government’s closing down of a major TV station, Teleamazonas, for three days beginning December 22.
International organizations such as the Washington-based Human Rights Watch and the Committee to Protect Journalists joined the Ecuadorian media in denouncing the government’s actions, with the latter calling it “nothing but an attempt to intimidate the media into silence.”
But as is generally the case when private media monopolies are challenged by progressive governments, the view presented by these powerful corporations and their allies in the United States is one-sided and over-simplified. Ecuador, with a democratic left government, is facing the same challenge faced by all of the left-of-center governments in the region: the private media is dominated by heavily monopolized, often politically partisan, right-wing forces opposed to the progressive economic and social reforms that the electorate voted for. All of these governments have responded to that challenge.
In Argentina, a new media law seeks to break up the media monopoly held by the Clarín Group, which according to press reports controls 60 percent of the media. The Brazilian government created, for the first time in 2007, a federally-launched public TV station. The Bolivian government, which faces perhaps the most hostile media in the hemisphere, has also expanded public media. What all of these governments are doing — although they would not put it that way — is trying to move their media more in the direction of what we have in the United States. That is, a media which is heavily biased toward the interests of the wealthy and the upper classes, but nonetheless adheres to certain journalistic norms that limit the degree to which the media is a direct, partisan, political actor.
In the case of Ecuador, it is worth looking at the details of why Teleamazonas’ broadcasting was suspended for three days. The government found that it had, for the second time in a year, violated a rule that prohibits the broadcast of false information that can lead to social disturbances. In the first offense of this type, for which the station was fined $40, it had broadcast a false report indicating that the government’s electoral commission had a “clandestine center” where voting results were manipulated. The second offense, committed in May, was a false report stating that, as a result of proposed exploration for natural gas on the island of Puná, the people there would not be able to fish for six months. Since most of the labor force on the island makes their living from fishing, the false report actually did lead to social disturbances. Both of these reports were found to have no basis in fact. It is also worth noting that social disturbances in Ecuador are often more serious than in the United States: eight of the last ten presidents did not serve out their terms of office.
MRZine for more