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An Account of the Inter-American Dialogue Presentation, April 26, 2002
This review is from: Latin Politics, Global Media (Paperback)
Latin Politics, Global Media was officially presented at a breakfast discussion sponsored by the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, DC on Friday, April 26, 2002.
Peter Hakim, president of the Dialogue, said the book has "an intriguing title but even better content." "It's a very important study," he said. Hakim asked three Latin American journalists to offer their views about the book.
José Carreño, the Washington correspondent of El Universal of Mexico City, called the book a seminal work. He underscored this point by focusing on the relevance of the chapters on Venezuela and Mexico. "You can not explain what is going on in Venezuela without reading the chapter," he said. "It is amazing." In Mexico, he said, there had been incredible change in newspapers that "has become visible in the last two years and has been brewing for the last ten years." Carreño said this was caught by the book. "It blew my mind away," he said. "You can not understand the role of the media and the relationship of the media and government without reading this book."
Discussing another theme of the book, Carreño said that the people who run television in Latin America are not journalists. "The leaders of the electronic media are entrepreneurs and entertainers," he said. "They are allied, not necessarily with the government, but with the system."
Marcela Sanchez, a Colombian journalist who now writes a column in English and Spanish for the online edition of the Washington Post, also focused on Venezuela because of the recent failed coup and the return to power of President Hugo Chavez. She said the book was "visionary" because "it shows what happened in the last few days started a long time ago. Chavez has long felt that the media was out to get him." The thin skin of leaders is a major problem for Latin American journalists. When she worked for a Colombian newspaper, Sanchez recalled, an official asked her, "Are you a Colombian first or a journalist first?" She also noted that a major theme of the book is how "media conglomerates have prospered in Latin America from economic liberalization and from their closeness to governments." "To me," she went on, "that is one of the dangers to journalism in Latin America."
Paulo Sotero, the Washington correspondent of O Estado de Sao Paulo in Brazil, said that "Brazil would not be the democracy it is today if the press had not played its role." But he was critical of the tendency of Brazilian newspapers to cut staff as they computerized their operations and strived for higher profits. As a result, reporting lacks depth. "Once there were enough older people in a newsroom," he said, "to take younger people aside and show them what to do. But that does not happen anymore. The New York Times business section has more people on its staff than my entire paper. Journalists are the software of the press. But there is not enough investment in people today."
The comments of the three journalists evoked a lively discussion among the more than 30 people present, mostly journalists, government officials and think tank analysts specializing in Latin America. The editors, Elizabeth Fox and Silvio Waisbord, also participated in the discussion.
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