20 Apr 2010 | News, Uncategorized
Dirty War abductions: A case involving the adopted heirs to an Argentinean media empire has reignited a row about press freedom. Ed Stocker reports
In a twist worthy of a telenovela, Ernestina Herrera de Noble, owner of Argentina’s largest media empire, Grupo Clarín, is at the heart of a court case that has reopened old wounds from the country’s 1970’s ‘Dirty War’.
De Noble stands accused of adopting two children of the ‘disappeared’— those tortured and murdered by the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. The case, which has already taken eight years, is aimed at determining the true identity of her adoptive children and whether they are two of the 500 children estimated to have been illegally taken from their parents by the military.
De Noble’s media group owns Clarín, the most widely read newspaper in Argentina. Some commentators claim its high-profile owner has affected the paper’s coverage of the case but the newspaper denies the accusations.
Now the argument has moved onto whether journalists have compromised their credibility by working for the newspaper. On Friday posters appeared around Buenos Aires featuring 12 journalists who work for the media conglomerate. Above their individual photos a slogan asked: “Can you be ‘independent journalists’ and work for the owner of a multimedia company who is accused of appropriating children of the disappeared?” So far no group has claimed responsibility for the posters.
Posters in Buenos Aires accusing Grupo Clarin journalists. Photograph: Ed Stocker
Clarín was quick to respond. In its Saturday edition the paper called the posters an “anonymous attack”. Gabriel Michi, president of the Foro de Periodismo Argentino (Argentine Journalism Forum) called the fly-posting a cowardly act, adding that it generated “a climate of pressure that could descend into much worse situations.”
The Senate approved a law in November 2009 that allows the compulsory collection of DNA in cases involving children of disappeared (1976-83). The posters surfaced after judges on 9 April rejected a legal application by Herrera de Noble’s adoptive children, Marcela and Felipe, aimed at preventing their DNA from being compared to samples in the National Bank of Genetic Data. The database preserves the genetic data of relatives of disappeared children; so far it has identified more than 100 children. Meanwhile the case is still working its way through the courts, and a decision about when the examination will take place is pending.
The Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, an organisation of mothers of the disappeared searching to identify their adopted grandchildren, celebrated the ruling as an important step. Abuela Buscarita Roa, reunited with her own granddaughter in 2000, said that she believed Clarín’s coverage, questionable in the past, had become more open in the last few months. She added: “Clarín has a very special power, as much economic as it is political. Due to this, censorship does exist.”
For Diego Martinez, journalist at the left-leaning daily Página 12, both Clarín and La Nación, Argentina’s other major newspaper, are guilty of obscuring the truth. He said: “Self-censorship in the de Noble case is evident as much in Clarín as La Nación which always twists the facts to fit in with the lawyers of the accused.”
A La Nación article on the Herrera de Noble case on 11 February stated that “the young children were adopted legally”, brushing over “Supposed irregularities” in the adoption proceedings. Clarín, too, has frequently printed interviews with lawyers representing de Noble’s adoptive children while denying a forum to those who question the children’s identity.
Martinez argues the papers report the story but fail to mention the “gross irregularities” surrounding the adoptions, including the fact that de Noble claims she found one child in a cardboard box on her doorstep.
Those opposed to Clarín and La Nación cite the papers’ close alignment with the military dictatorship that ran from 1976 to 1983 as one of the reasons they are reluctant to confront contemporary stories linked to the abuses of the past. For Buenos Aires-based journalist Juan Salinas, the papers were “accomplices and benefactors of the dictatorship.”
President Cristina Kirchner introduced a new media law in October 2009 aimed at breaking media monopolies, including the Clarín empire. Although approved by the Senate, the legislation is currently being held up by the courts, which caused thousands of protesters to take to the streets of the capital on 15 April in support of the law.
Opponents argue that it is a cynical way of trying to censure Grupo Clarín, which could be forced to sell of much of its assets and to a lesser extent La Nación, both of whom have been critical of the Kirchner governments.
Supporters claim the law is a much needed overhaul of a current system that can trace its roots to the establishment of the semi-monopolistic Papel Prensa, a news print producer formed by Clarín and La Nación in 1976,overseen by junta leader Jorge Rafael Videla.
Up to 30,000 people are thought to have been abducted and killed by the military dictatorship and as many as 500 children taken from their parents.
Ed Stocker is a freelance writer, currently based in Buenos Aires
8 Dec 2009 | Uncategorized
This is a guest post by Ángel García Català
On 14 December, the first national Brazilian congress on communication and media will be held in the country’s capital. The four day conference in Brasilia will discuss, amongst other things, the need for a new media law. The Workers’ Party (PT) is trying to amend the current legislation, which they consider to be “anachronistic and authoritarian” primarily because they believe it favours the interest of business over the interests of the wider population. Brazilian president President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has shown that he favours the reform, stating that “the more television there is, the more journalism and cultural programmes that appear, the more political debates ensue and the stronger the democratisation of communication will become”.
Brazil is following a process that has already been initiated by other countries in the region. El Salvador has also started discussions on media law whilst the parliament of Ecuador will begin the approval process of its own law on the 10 December. Other countries like Uruguay and Argentina have already adopted reforms.
Opinions on these laws and their suitability are polarised. Take the various reactions to the law adopted by the Argentinian Senate, for example. Some see this type of reform as a clear attack on freedom of expression, while others applaud it as a mechanism for strengthening democracy.
The new law in Argentina, which replaces the broadcasting law passed in 1980 during the military dictatorship of General Jorge Rafael Videla, provides that the same company cannot own more than 10 audiovisual licences. Those who are currently exceeding that number will be forced to sell the rest. One of the businesses most affected by this measure is the Clarín group, which has 264 licences and whose profits last year stood at around US $500 million.
The Spanish companies Telefonica and Grupo Prisa (which publishes El País) are also greatly affected. No wonder then, that these companies are among the biggest opponents to reform. Ricardo Roa, assistant general editor of the newspaper Clarín believes that “the law promotes a press weaker and docile toward political power”. Associations like the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) have also rejected the new law outright, saying that such reforms are an “enslavement to freedom of expression while promoting the creation and acquisition of media by the state and groups close to power.”
In contrast, the Argentinian reforms have the full support of Frank La Rue, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, who considers it as one of the most advanced reforms in the world, as well as seeing it as “an example to others countries [to] ensure access for all social sectors to the media”. Reporters Sans Frontieres has also endorsed the reform, calling it a “brave and necessary law, despite pressure from some pretty selfish press groups”.
12 May 2009 | Uncategorized
More trouble in paradise for the staff of Bermuda’s Royal Gazette and its sister newspaper, the Mid-Ocean News, after premier Ewart Brown bizarrely responded to their campaign for more government transparency and a freedom of information law — by trying to cut their access to government spokesmen.
Brown has ordered communications officers at the Cabinet Office and Ministry of Tourism and Transport to “reduce their contact” with the papers. Without apparent irony, Brown declared: “This step has been taken in order to prevent a total breakdown of communication between the Premier’s office and these publications.”
Ludicrous as the strategy reads, it’s seen as further evidence of Brown’s frustration at the failure of his bid to silence the papers’ criticism by stopping their state advertising and subscription deals in March 2008.
This kind of ‘soft censorship’ is common across the Americas and the Caribbean, and roundly condemned by press freedom activists and by constitutional lawyers.
“Government discrimination in the placement of advertising is an act of indirect coercion that is contrary to freedom of speech,” ruled Argentina’s Supreme Court when seeing off a similar bid by a provincial government to block a critical paper. Mexican president Felipe Calderón’s team was marked down last year for using the same tactics on the political magazines Processo and La Tijerata, among others.
It’s a slow-burning strategy that doesn’t always work, even if the courts don’t stand up for free expression rights. On the other side of the Caribbean, the Guyanese government banned state advertising in the leading private daily Stabroek News for 17 months before giving up the boycott under domestic and international pressure.
And with the Bermuda Royal Gazette citing an independent 2008 survey that found their print and online versions reached almost 90 percent of the island’s adult population, the government may be censoring its own messages to the public.
Editor Tim Hodgson of the Mid-Ocean News commented in an editorial that Brown’s decision to cut his already limited contacts with the paper “is entirely of a piece with his decision to introduce personal loyalty oaths for Cabinet Ministers — yet another aggressive demand for uncritical acceptance and unquestioning obedience.”
One answer may lie in the model adopted in Cartagena, Colombia, reported Don Podesta of the Centre for International Media Assistance in Washington. There newly-elected mayor Judith Pinedo set up a committee to regulate government advertising and distribute it with greater transparency and fairness.
In the meantime, premier Brown’s mean-minded strategy will not cow Royal Gazette editor Bill Zuill. “We will continue to submit questions to Government on matters of public importance,” he wrote last week. “When they are not answered, we will publish the questions so that the public will know we are simply trying to find out the truth on their behalf.”
