But don’t expect outrage from big “press freedom” advocates

By Joe Emersberger (originally for Telesur )

Even before Mauricio Macri’s recent efforts to get Telesur off Argentina’s airwaves, the newly elected president had been tilting Argentina’s media landscape in his favor.  What will Reporters without Borders (RSF), Human Rights Watch (HRW), and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) say about Macri’s moves against Telesur? These big “press freedom” advocates have all had plenty to say when left governments (mainly Ecuador and Venezuela but also Argentina) took action to shift the media terrain in their countries to the left – even when done to correct an imbalance that posed a grave threat to democracy.  HRW and the CPJ have even criticized governments for withdrawing state advertising from hostile private media, so they can’t justify a weak response (or no response) to what Macri has done – at least not without embracing an obvious double standard. Unfortunately, reviewing the track record of these groups, they are unlikely to object forcefully, if at all, to a government that changes the media in way that is applauded by the US government and large corporate interests.

In 2012, in a report critical of Cristina Kirchner’s government, the CPJ made a brief and mildly critical remark about Macri’s media policies while he was a mayor but immediately dismissed his significance. There is no excuse for being dismissive now. The CPJ had reported

“…the city of Buenos Aires—led by Mayor Mauricio Macri, a Kirchner foe—favors media groups like Clarín and La Nación at the expense of public media and pro-Kirchner outlets. However, Macri’s government represents only 1 percent of the advertising market in Argentina.”

In the same report, the CPJ said that “in 2010, the federal government became the country’s principal advertiser, surpassing the corporations Unilever and Procter & Gamble to account for 9 percent of the total advertising market.” In other words, Cristina Kirchner’s government, which had clashed with powerful business interests, was providing a significant but hardly overwhelming counterweight to corporate advertisers. The CPJ actually found that alarming.

In April of 2002, when the late Hugo Chavez was violently overthrown in coup that was spearheaded by Venezuela’s corporate media, the CPJ did not acknowledge that a coup had taken place, never mind criticize the private media’s huge contribution to it. Instead, when it mattered most, the CPJ dutifully regurgitated exactly what was said by the private media in Venezuela:  that a “resignation” had taken place after the Chavez government had repressed peaceful protestors and attempted censor “critical coverage”.

Fourteen years later, the CPJ is still shockingly dishonest about what happened. It says that “critics accused” private broadcasters of “tacitly” backing the coup. The private media’s role in the coup is downgraded by CPJ to an “accusation” of mere “tacit” support. The perpetrators of the coup, while they were briefly in power, praised the private media as their “secret weapon”. The media censored the street protests that helped reverse the coup. The CPJ has no justification for pretending that those basic facts can be honestly disputed.

While the CPJ still can’t bring itself to report as fact what Venezuela’s private media did in 2002, it does report as fact the outrageous lie that “most news media are either controlled by President Nicolás Maduro’s administration or rarely criticize it”.  I’ve addressed that lie many times (here and here for example) because it is made so relentlessly, and because it shows what a remarkable lack of pluralism exists in the western media, especially in coverage related to US foreign policy.

RSF sunk to even lower Orwellian depths when Hugo Chavez was overthrown. The day before the coup, RSF released a statement that said

“There is no justification at all for interrupting TV and radio broadcasts about 30 times in the space of two days, despite the government’s legal right to oblige its voice to be heard in exceptional circumstances….at no time during this period did the state-controlled TV station give a voice to the opposition…”

So the day before the private media’s successful campaign to overthrow a democracy, RSF’s message to the elected government was “Stop interrupting them!” At the time, Venezuela’s state media had less than a 5% audience share on TV, but to RSF even that ineffective challenge to Venezuela’s media barons was unacceptable and more “voice” for the opposition was demanded.

In 2006, two years after a US perpetrated coup brought a brutal dictatorship to Haiti that, directly and through proxies, killed thousands of people, RSF applauded it as a step forward for press freedom:

“Changes of ruler are sometimes good for press freedom, as in the case of Haiti, which has risen from 125th to 87th place in two years after the flight into exile of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in early 2004. Several murders of journalists remain unpunished but violence against the media has abated.”

US troops kidnapped Aristide and flew him off to the Central African Republic. That was the “flight into exile” that RSF deceptively described. As in Venezuela two years earlier, the coup had the backing of the Haiti’s big private media.  Something similar is now threatening to happen in Brazil.

The big “press freedom” advocates reliably serve US foreign policy objectives in the Western Hemisphere. However, it is also true that Macri’s election exposes a big problem with using media that is directly funded by a government to break the dominance that unelected elites have over public debate. If an ally of those elites squeaks into power as Macri did then their dominance can be quickly restored. I’ve argued here that government funds should delivered to every voting age citizen in the form of vouchers which they can use to support any non-profit, non-advertising media outlets of their choice. The more deeply public debate is democratized, the more control is placed directly in the hands of voters, the harder it will be for a president like Macri to take it away.

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