History of Communication by Rick Rockwell & Noreene Janus

Author:Rick Rockwell & Noreene Janus [Rockwell, Rick & Janus, Noreene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780252092282
Google: Luz_t4VpyBwC
Goodreads: 23036004
Publisher: Not Avail
Published: 2010-10-01T11:09:37+00:00

Guatemala

The administration of President Arzú moved quickly to deal with the media when he entered office in 1996. Besides canceling state subsidies to the media—both legitimate and illicit—Arzú also personally organized an antimedia campaign and advertising boycott with great parallels to the Salvadoran example.

Given the media’s growing liberty, strength, and independence, as evidenced through their efforts to catalyze society in the struggle to overcome state power during the Serrano era (see chapter 5), some of Arzú’s early moves seem to indicate a carefully calculated design at least to neutralize the media. Indeed, considering the aftermath of the Arzú era, this deliberate manipulation to keep the media off balance appears to have been the president’s plan from the beginning of his term.

After Arzú’s PAN lost elections in 1999, the media began to scrutinize his administration’s finances. Of course, this was easier with an opposition party in power. Early word of the financial scandals to come had begun to leak out in the waning days of Arzú’s administration and did not help the PAN’s standing at the polls. When the scandals finally broke after Arzú left office, they implicated many former advisers and key party officials. Less than six months after the transfer of power, the scandals led fifteen members of the PAN’s delegation in the Guatemalan legislature to resign their party affiliations because they were embarrassed by the corruption scandals. Even before the scandals, the PAN held only thirty-seven legislative seats and were far outnumbered by the far-right governing party, the Guatemalan Republican Front (Spanish acronym, FRG), which had sixty-seven seats.30 The party seemed to be a fractured, hollow version of what it had been when Arzú was president.

By employing an aggressive policy with the media, Arzú had been able to keep them from the watchdog role essential to democracy, namely, attempting to oversee the workings of the government. The media were unable to unearth the corruption hidden behind the president’s smoke screen of antimedia tactics.

The antimedia campaign looked very much like the ideological campaign employed in El Salvador, except this Guatemalan version was more personal. For example, the government’s efforts often centered on its problems with the news magazine Crónica, which fought Arzú’s advertising boycott by taking its problems to international press groups, such as the CPJ. During the advertising boycott, editors said, the magazine lost up to 90 percent of its regular advertisers and was forced to cut its size in half.31 Nevertheless, Luis Flores Asturias, Arzú’s vice-president, maintained a regular column in the magazine throughout the entire boycott. The magazine’s principal investor, Francisco Perez de Antón, the wealthy owner of a popular Guatemalan restaurant chain, was also often identified as a supporter of the PAN. Perez de Antón often told the media that the boycott was based on personal feelings that the president and others in his faction of the PAN bore toward Crónica and had nothing to do with ideology.32 However, in a country fresh from a civil war where death squads had often hunted journalists because

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.