RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Concentrated Ownership Threatens Media Freedoms

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 5 1998 (IPS) - Argentina’s communication media are coming under the control of just two economic groups – something reporters read as a threat to media freedoms and the formation of balanced public opinion.

A survey by the Southern University and the Sofres Ibope poll firm which consulted 131 journalists showed 81.7 percent think freedom of expression is being threatened by concentrated media ownership.

This cause was also behind the surprise closure of the ‘Perfil’ newspaper on July 31, barely three months after it opened, claimed 300 laid-off workers currently occupying the paper’s offices.

Arguments for the untimely closure included low sales (some 30,000 copies) for a newspaper which aimed to become the most widely read national daily within two years. But the journalists suspect this was not really the case.

They believe the Perfil Publishing company, which owns a dozen other magazines apart from the closed newspaper, may have received a take-over offer from the Atlantida Publishing group – owner of another ten or so magazines and member of the biggest multimedia group in Argentina.

One former Perfil journalist who preferred to remain anonymous, told IPS the director and owner of the newspaper, Jorge Fontevecchia, had met only days before the closure with directors of Citicorp Equity Investment (CEI), which bought up the Atlantida company in March.

Following the meeting, Fontevecchia – who had bragged of the independence of his new paper – asked the Economy section to stop working on data related to the CEI and to delay publication of an article on the up-coming closure of one of Atlantida’s magazines.

Fontevecchia did not deny having met with members of the multimedia group, nor did the owners of CEI, although for the moment neither party will provide details of what was discussed in the meeting.

The source consulted said CEI must have proposed a buy out of the Perfil Publishing company, but only if the newspaper were closed. Journalists on the company’s magazines fear a possible merger which would make many of them redundant.

In the first week of this month, while workers on the Perfil daily occupied the newspaper offices, workers on the publishing groups’ magazines attended meetings and protests held the sacked staff.

The CEI is an investment company dealing with Argentine and foreign capital. Citibank is the main shareholder.

It is also an associate of Telefonica Internacional, and therefore the major shareholder in Telefonica de Argentina, while controlling more television broadcasting and cable concerns, radio stations, magazines and newspapers more than any other multimedia group.

Through Telefonica, it also forms part of a series of telephone, radio paging and satellite television companies, along with other telecommunications services.

Of the five broadcasting companies in Argentina, one is under state control (ATC) and another, channel 13, belongs to the Clarin group, which produces the newspaper of the same name and owns the Multicanal cable television company. The remaining three, Telefe, Canal 9 and America TV.

The CEI also controls seven channels in the interior, a radio station belonging to one of the channels taken over, 20 percent of the football broadcasting rights and other communication media, along with Cablevision and VCC – two cable companies.

One of its recent aquisitions was the Atlantida publishing company, belonging to the Vigil family, which handles around ten magazines. Most of these publications had a counterpart version in the competitor publisher, Perfil, which could now be absorbed by way of controlling the market.

Since this process has begun, legislators from the ruling party and opposition alike have merely looked on alarmed as media ownership has been shrinking into increasingly fewer hands.

While they have barely promised to discuss the issue and investigate possible monopolistic behaviour by CEI, the entity has extended like an octopus over the communication media, with all the implicit threats for press freedoms.