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Latin American press to blame for some of its shortcomings


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By Claudio Campuzano
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

May 15, 2000

Governments in several Latin American countries took steps last year to bring their media laws up to international standards. But as the Latin American press continued to expose wrongdoing, its very strength rendered it vulnerable to a new kind of harassment: defamation campaigns. This is the opinion of the Committee to Protect Journalists in its recent annual report on the state of press freedoms worldwide.

“While Latin American reporters have become extremely good at exposing wrongdoing, they cannot count on the courts to investigate, prosecute, and ultimately punish the people whom they expose,” says COJ’s Marylene Smeets.

“In most countries, the judiciary remains notoriously weak, and is often unable or unwilling to investigate cases brought to its attention. As a result, journalists who expose corruption become sitting ducks. Since negative press coverage is one of the few effective sanctions against criminal behavior in Latin America, discrediting the press is an excellent way for criminals to avoid accountability.”

Smeets notes that “this fact accounts for the growth of a new kind of attack against Latin American journalists that uses the trappings of journalism to mislead the public and defame or even endanger reporters. The most dramatic case was Peru, where an avalanche of government--backed tabloids filled with defamatory articles about leading independent journalists was launched with the sole intention of undermining public confidence in that segment of the press that dared criticize actions by president Alberto Fujimori at the time when he is seeking reelection for an unprecedented third term. In Guatemala, journalists were attacked and smeared in a mysterious radio program. And a group of powerful Panamanians unleashed a public defamation campaign against the leading daily La Prensa and its editor, Gustavo Gorriti, after the paper published reports linking the attorney general to drug traffickers.

According to the CPJ, “in all three of these countries journalists have struck back by using their investigative skills to expose the origins of the campaigns. Peruvian journalists uncovered overwhelming evidence that the country’s intelligence services were behind the defamation campaign. Journalists in Guatemala documented the fact that the radio program had been bankrolled by a presidential advisor. And in Panama, journalists responded by stepping up their investigative efforts against the shadowy figures behind the defamation campaign.”

In all these countries, points out the CPJ, “anti-press defamation campaigns flourished because local judiciaries were weak and because the legal framework regulating relations between society and the press was undeveloped. But a few countries took measures to address these deficiencies, aided and supported particularly by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

“Violence also remains a concern, particularly in Colombia, where five journalists were killed in the line of duty in 1999”, says the CPJ, noting that “reporting on drug trafficking and the official protection that allows it to flourish is risky in other countries as well.”

However, the Committee to Protect Journalists has also some criticism for Latin American journalists. Noting that there is “growing awareness of the desperate public need for accurate and balanced information,” for “Latin American journalists the next challenge will be meeting higher professional standards.”

The issue of the need for accurate and balanced information is not directly related to the freedom of the press and to the risks journalists face when covering stories that governments and other powerful forces would want to remain uncovered. The source of this issue, rather, is a growing trend among even well-established and supposedly independent publications—and not just those that are openly militant politically—in Latin America to fight for market share by sensationalizing its coverage of all kinds of news, particularly foreign news.

This is more noticeable among large-circulation newspapers that have their own correspondents abroad, particularly in Washington and European capitals, as opposed to those smaller-circulation ones that have to depend on wire services reports that are not generally biased.

Home-base editors of those larger newspapers appear to encourage their own correspondents abroad, either actually or tacitly, to file reports on important events in the countries in which they are posted in terms that fit with already established views held by their newspapers about them.

One prime example of this trend is Clarin, the Buenos Aires-based newspaper that has by far the largest circulation of any newspaper in Latin America and whose influence transcends Argentina. Its correspondents in Washington and New York often write stories on political, economic and social developments in the United States that either emphasize the most sensational parts of them to the detriment of substantial information or even distort views held on those developments, in many cases by a biased selection of quotes from the people involved in them.

One ongoing example of this misleading coverage is the reporting on the current U.S. presidential campaign by Clarin and other leading Latin American newspapers, which could not be recognized by any journalist here in the United States as reflecting its reality. Other recent examples of this distorted coverage include events such as the joint meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, held some weeks ago in Washington, and the World Trade Organization summit meeting in Seattle last December—issues of great importance for all Latin Americans. Worse even, the reporting leading to those events — even by specialized Latin American business publications — was so misleading that Latin Americans were stunned when both meetings failed to achieve their declared objectives as a result of being engulfed by heavy public protests, as had been anticipated by most media around the world.

Claudio Campuzano (claudio-campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com

May 15, 2000


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