Homenaje a los periodistas

Bad news for some

Jun 4th 2009 | BUENOS AIRES
From The Economist print edition

The president and her husband offer carrots and sticks to the news media

Illustration by Claudio Muñoz

WHEN Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Argentina’s president, said on May 27th that she will cancel the tax debts of five private media companies, she couched her generosity in an argument about the importance of a free press. It was lofty talk from someone who often snaps back at criticism from the news media. Ms Fernández went her entire presidential campaign and most of her first year in office without giving a press conference. Her husband, Néstor Kirchner, who governs with her, gave none in his four years in the top job. Rather than warming to the Fourth Estate, though, the Kirchners are becoming more adept at media manipulation. The five firms in question have agreed to repay the debts by giving space for official advertising that paints the Kirchners in a positive light. Such propagandising is not new to Argentina but its growth under the Kirchners has been extraordinary.

The central government spent 395m pesos ($125m) on advertising in 2008, more than eight times its spending in 2003, when Mr Kirchner became president. The tax-debt swap wins the government propaganda on the cheap that will not show up in this year’s total. The first couple say these ads will not appear until after June 28th, when they face mid-term elections. However, the deal lets them spend more freely now, “knowing they have this on credit”, says Roberto Saba, a law professor.

Much of the expanding propaganda budget is used to keep small news outlets beholden to the government. Big media firms that have many private advertisers can get by without this revenue source but small ones cannot do without public-sector ads, says Maria O’Donnell, a journalist who dug up 3m pesos in advertising payments to a provincial press firm owned by a former chauffeur to Mr Kirchner.

The courts, at least, want change. In a first for Latin America, Argentina’s Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that the southern province of Neuquén had violated a local paper’s right to freedom of speech by withdrawing advertising after it had linked the governor to a bribery scandal. A larger newspaper, Perfil, hopes this ruling will help it in an ongoing case.

But the federal government’s behaviour has not shifted. A media law it is proposing contains no curbs on the politicisation of official advertising budgets. But it does restrict how many broadcasting licences a company can own. This pleases some leftists that the Kirchners want to keep sweet but it causes problems for the bulky Clarín media group, which has recently been in all-out war with the Kirchners, whom it once supported.

Opposition legislators are suspicious of an agency, with vaguely defined powers, that the Kirchners would create to implement the proposed law. Such suspicions are understandable. In April Argentina’s competition commission blocked the voting rights of two Telecom Italia directors who sit on the six-member board of Telecom Argentina. Whatever its merits in competition law, the ruling benefited Werthein, a private group that owns a big stake in the company and has close ties to the government.

In some respects a change in the law is needed. Today’s legislation was written during Argentina’s bloody dictatorship, when 500 journalists fled abroad, 80 were jailed and at least 68 disappeared and were probably murdered. Some news media are indeed concentrated in too few hands. Ms Fernández may try to push the bill through Congress before the elections, when she is expected to lose her majority in the lower house. But time is not on her side.