Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

/ARTS WEEKLY/MEDIA-CHILE: Quixote’s Steed Dies on 400th Anniversary of the Don

Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, Oct 25 2005 (IPS) - This year, the 400th anniversary of Cervantes’ masterpiece Don Quixote, Chile lost one of its most widely respected cultural magazines, Rocinante – the name of Don Quixote’s horse.

Since 1998, it had managed to survive the dire financial straits faced by all independent publications in this country, which suffer discrimination from private as well as public advertising.

Another publication that disappeared this year was the weekly Plan B, founded by a group of young journalists, which like Rocinante was unable to secure even a tiny share of the 500 million dollars that state bodies allot every year to advertising. In the case of the print media, 62.7 percent goes to the El Mercurio newspaper chain.

“Rocinante’s closure is very painful. One more shameful blot on our much touted democracy. One more milestone in the concentration of news that impoverishes our cultural and political reality,” Juan Pablo Cárdenas, winner of the 2005 national journalism prize, told the state-owned daily La Nación this week.

Cárdenas, the director of the University of Chile radio station and a professor at the university, was the director of Análisis, an opposition magazine published during the 1973-1990 military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, which closed after the return to democracy due to financial troubles.

Other publications that were founded during the de facto regime – the dailies La Época and Fortín Mapocho and the magazines Cauce and Apsi – suffered the same fate for the same reason. And media outlets like the newspaper El Metropolitano and the magazines Página Abierta and Los Tiempos (the latter was also directed by Cárdenas) emerged after democracy was restored, but were short-lived.

In the 15 years since Chile returned to a democratic system, during which time the country has been governed by the centre- left ‘Concertación’ (coalition) for Democracy, “the number of media outlets that have been closed have surpassed the number that have been founded,” said Francisco Martorell, director of El Periodista, one of the few alternative magazines still circulating in this South American country.

“The Concertación governments have lacked the will to bring about a balance in the national news system. But nor is there a belief that this is important,” Martorell told IPS.

Critics of the communication policies followed by the governments of Ricardo Lagos and his predecessors Patricio Aylwin (1990-1994) and Eduardo Frei (1994-2000) complain that a print media duopoly – made up of the El Mercurio and Copesa newspaper chains – has been reinforced.

El Mercurio owns the national newspapers El Mercurio, Las Últimas Noticias and La Segunda, and 13 regional papers.

Copesa (Consorcio Periodístico S.A.) publishes the dailies La Tercera and La Cuarta, the weekly Qué Pasa, and the free newspapers La Hora and La Hora de la Tarde. This year it also purchased the magazine Siete más Siete and transformed it into the Diario Siete daily.

According to Martorell, the leaders of the ruling coalition “feel comfortable with the mainstream media.”

The government “has gotten used to having better relations for a while with the Copesa newspapers and then with the El Mercurio chain, constantly going back and forth in a kind of negotiation,” he said.

Reporter Faride Zerán, director of Rocinante, wrote in the last edition this month that the closure of the magazine amounts to a defeat “for the country and its authorities, particularly those who should be guaranteeing media pluralism, freedom of expression, and the rich diversity of our society.”

Rocinante was considered “the best cultural magazine” by the Chilean art critics association, and was recognised by the national writers association “for its contribution to culture and the dissemination of books in the country.”

In addition, the Ipso Search Marketing polling firm found that it was the publication that had the highest average number of readers per copy.

“If the debate is enriched, it is not the Concertación that wins, nor the right (the opposition), but democracy, the citizens, and freedom,” said Martorell.

In his view, “it is not a question of the government financing media outlets in order for them to toe the official line,” but for the state to guarantee equal access to official advertising and public notices. “It’s outrageous that El Mecurio takes 60 percent of the advertising,” he argued.

In its preference for El Mercurio, Martorell said the government cannot even argue that it awards the advertising to the publications with the greatest circulation, because the most widely read paper is Publimetro, a free newspaper owned by an international consortium “that barely gets a tiny share of the pie.”

“I totally agree that there should be more media outlets that express the entire spectrum of ideological positions that exist in the country,” said Claudio Huepe, a former lawmaker for the co-governing Christian Democratic Party and former government minister and spokesman.

“But rather than a lack of will, it is a problem of a lack of tools, because official advertising is quite limited,” he told IPS.

The state has to make these decisions based on business criteria, placing ads and notices in the media that have the largest readerships or audiences, because notices of public tenders or information from the ministries or public services must reach the widest possible public, he said.

“The government cannot arbitrarily assign funds to a media outlet,” added Huepe, who said the only way for the government to help bolster media pluralism with the use of state funds is for Congress to pass new legislation on the matter, which would require agreements with the right-wing opposition.

“That is not possible if the right does not agree with specific legislation, and the right knows that it has greater access to those media outlets,” commented Huepe, alluding to the El Mercurio and Copesa chains.

He said the Concertación has made efforts to strike a deal in Congress. “We were in a series of conversations regarding the possibility of support (for the independent press), but the response is always: if a newspaper or magazine is a flop and no one reads it, there’s nothing we can do about it.”

With that market-based criteria, programming or print media content is banalised, and culture and politics is impoverished for the sake of expanding a newspaper’s circulation or winning higher ratings in the case of TV programmes, said Cárdenas.