State-Owned Media and the Public Interest

Regimes that seek to limit civilian and political opposition have found a new tool in controlling their messaging: state-owned media.

This comes despite the fact that state media—like many means of communication—should serve the interests of all citizens and provide information free of commercial, state or political influence. According to a 2009 report by the special rapporteur for freedom of expression of the OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, public media should be “independent of the executive branch; truly pluralistic; universally accessible; with funding adequate to the mandate provided for by law; and they must provide community participation and accountability mechanisms.”

In the Americas, the increasing manipulation of sate-owned media is particularly evident in Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela where, unlike countries such as Canada, Australia, Japan, France, South Africa and the United Kingdom, there are no regulations entrusting that the official press serve the public interest.

The benefits for these three countries are clear: the official press allows leaders to multiply the reach of their messages while serving as a platform to launch smear campaigns and lambaste critics. This contradicts the basic notion of press freedom. Not only do these tactics add commercial and political influence to media outlets, but they effectively regulate free speech from the top down.

In Ecuador, President Rafael Correa typically devotes his Saturday radio broadcasts to launch verbal assaults—known as cadenas—against private media outlets, the most prominent of which is the leading daily newspaper El Universo. The Correa administration infamously sued El Universo’s opinion page editor and two directors last year after the newspaper published an opinion piece highly critical of his leadership. The three defendants were convicted of criminal libel and each sentenced to a three-year prison term; El Universo was fined $40 million in fines and damages. This case remains particularly worrisome even though Correa, facing significant pressure from international organizations and NGOs, relented and pardoned all three individuals in February 2012.

But this pattern began long before 2011. Shortly after assuming power in 2007, Correa started seizing media outlets, including two private television stations, in 2008. He justified these actions by saying that the outlets were owned by Grupo Isaías—a holding company that allegedly owed more than $600 million to the state after the collapse of its financial institution, Filanbanco, in 1998.

Read the full article at www.AmericasQuarterly.org.

Carlos Lauría is the Americas Senior Program Coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists.