The power of the cursor: The best and worst of times for Latin American journalism

LAST December La Nación, an Argentine newspaper, published a series of reports revealing that companies owned by Lázaro Báez, a construction magnate, had made year-round block bookings for dozens of rooms in a luxury hotel in Patagonia owned by President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her late husband, Néstor Kirchner. Mr Báez, a former bank clerk and longstanding friend of Kirchner, has been the largest single beneficiary of public-works contracts in Patagonia in the decade in which the Kirchners have ruled Argentina. The paper found no evidence that the rooms were ever occupied.

The result of a two-year investigation, backed up with documentary evidence, this scoop had a big impact. A judge is now investigating the case, despite official harassment. The stories won the $15,000 annual prize for Latin American investigative journalism awarded by Instituto Prensa y Sociedad, a Lima-based NGO, and Transparency International, a Berlin-based anti-corruption watchdog.

Bello was a member of the prize jury, as he has been most years since the prize was established in 2003. He has been impressed by the steady improvement in the quality of the entries. A growing cohort of the region’s investigative reporters have postgraduate degrees from journalism schools in the United States and deploy the techniques of big data as well as old-fashioned sleuthing.

Yet if this is the best of times for Latin American journalism, it is also the worst. Media freedom is under greater threat than at any time since the end of the military dictatorships of the 1970s. The first danger comes from organised crime. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, an NGO, Colombia, Brazil and Mexico have been among the world’s 11 deadliest countries for journalists since 1992—though none of them suffers a conventional war. The killings have declined in recent years, but they continue: three journalists have been murdered this year in Paraguay, two in Brazil, two in Mexico and one in Peru (though in two cases the motive is unconfirmed). The vast majority of the killings go unpunished.

The second threat comes from autocratic governments, most blatantly in Venezuela and Ecuador but also in Bolivia, Nicaragua and to some extent Argentina. In Ecuador in August government liquidators shut down Hoy, a daily newspaper of the moderate left. Its editors blamed the withdrawal of all state advertising under President Rafael Correa, a radical leftist who dislikes independent media. Under Ecuador’s Communications Law of 2013, newspapers are fined for such offences as failing to give sufficient coverage to a private visit to Chile by Mr Correa.

Venezuela’s government has withdrawn licences from scores of broadcasters. In the past two years, businessmen friendly with President Nicolás Maduro’s regime have bought three embattled independent media outlets, driving out critical columnists and investigative reporters. This phenomenon is spreading, with businesses in several countries, including Bolivia, buying media and making them “apolitical” in return for government contracts or state-funded advertising, according to Claudio Paolillo, who chairs the press-freedom committee of the Inter-American Press Association, a body of newspaper proprietors.

After a period of growth fostered by a fall in poverty and the founding of new tabloid newspapers, Latin America’s print media are starting to suffer the digital disruption that hit their peers in the rich world a decade ago. In Brazil, one of the few places with reliable data, circulation of some of the biggest papers is still rising, according to IVC, which audits the figures. But print advertising in newspapers was down by 8% and in magazines by 14% in the year to August, according to Inter-Meios, which crunches these numbers. Several publishers have laid off journalists in recent years.

News websites are proliferating. Some, such as El Faro in El Salvador, have achieved big influence. Only half of Latin Americans are connected to the internet. But newspapers have only ever reached a small fraction of the region’s population, points out Rosental Alves, the director of the Knight Centre for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas. Such websites can suffer government pressure as well. Where that is happening, as in Venezuela, social media can partially fill the news vacuum.

There is plenty of work for Latin American journalists to do. Many of the region’s democracies are riddled with corruption and conflicts of interest. If democracy itself is to survive and prosper, such abuses by the powerful must be exposed so that they can be punished.