Public Broadcasting: The Latin American Exception

Abstract

In his first days as the new president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro said that he would liquidate the remains of the state-owned Brazil Communications Company, which had begun to decline during the former presidency of Michel Temer after a decade of operation (the state television network was created by the former president Lula Da Silva in 2007, as part of his confrontation with Grupo Globo). Likewise, the Chilean president, Sebastián Piñera, is defunding the national television channel (TVN), and in Argentina the right-wing Macri administration has emptied resources and programming from the public cultural channel, Encuentro, and the children's signal, PakaPaka. In addition, the government reduced the budget of the main state-run television channel (Tv Pública) and eliminated the free-to-air broadcasts of football, which had previously drawn large audiences to this station. In November 2018, the Mexican Chamber of Deputies removed legislative provisions for public media autonomy by making such institutions dependent on the Secretaría de Gobernación (Ministry of the Interior). However, the project was finally aborted by the Senate. From an agnostic and somewhat cynical perspective, there is no way for Latin American staterun media to win back hearts because there was not, as in Europe, a longstanding public media tradition. The positive experiences of Latin American public media were and are unstable (Safar and Pasquali, 2006; Gómez Orozco, 2002; Becerra and Mastrini, 2017; Bustamante and de Miguel, 2005). More than this; if public media means pluralism, free and open audience access, high quality news, general diversity of content and independence from governments, advertisers and other economic influences, then there are no such institutions in Latin America. State-run media in Latin America have no public function, as they have in Europe, North America, Japan or South Africa. In fact, wherever they exist, state-run media in Latin America depend directly on governments.