Press freedom still lacking in Chile [Junior]

Freedom House, an international human rights watchdog, released its freedom of the press rankings ahead of World Press Freedom Day, and Chile remains at only “partly-free” after being dropped down from “free” last year. Despite this disappointing ranking, the Andean country fared better than the region as a whole.

Chile’s overall global ranking by Freedom House lists the country as “partly-free,” on a scale that lists countries as either “free,” “partly-free” or “not free.” An earlier index released in January by  international organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF), placed the country at 60th, a jump up 20 spots from the previous year. The RSF report reflects a segment of the year, while the Freedom House report reflects the entire year.

The Freedom House index takes into account, “the legal environment in which media operate, political influences on reporting and access to information, and economic pressures on content and the dissemination of news.”

Chile first dropped down to “partly-free” in 2011 following increased arrests and pressure on journalists — particularly photographers — covering the education protests across the country, Ana Piquer, executive director of Amnesty International in Chile, told The Santiago Times.

“There have been allegations of police violence specifically aimed at employees of the press that were covering the demonstrations, apparently trying to avoid the collection of evidence of human rights abuses,” Piquer.

“[Multiple organizations] reported beatings, arbitrary arrests and confiscation of audio-visual material, and it is unacceptable from the point of view of human rights, and it directly affects the freedom of the press in Chile,” she added.
Piquer also noted that the lack of diversity among the major media providers in Chile can cause certain issues to remain invisible, and create an incomplete understanding of others.

“In Chile the media are concentrated in certain economic groups, so that their editorial lines tend to be aligned,” Piquer said. “ With few exceptions, it is common that all the media coverage is about the same topics. Therefore, it is frequent that certain subjects are invisible, or the coverage does not reflect all angles of the case.”

Professor Faride Zeran,coordinator of Universidad de Chile's Freedom of Citizen Expression Program, also spoke to The Santiago Times about the dangers of a concentrated media in Chile.

“If we stick to the concentration of media that exists today in Chile, in the newspapers with the duopoly El Mercurio-Copesa, in the radios with the Spanish and national conglomerates that homogenize the spectrum... the picture is bleak,” Zeran said. “Mostly because there is no diversity of other media that collect the country's political, social and cultural wealth.”

Zeran gave the example of the documentary,  “El Diario de Agustín,” that has been kept from Chilean airwaves. The documentary exposes the connections and influence of the government on El Mercurio, Chile’s historically largest media chain, throughout the last half century.

“[There is a ] persistence - from the military - of a culture that encourages dictator-era censorship and self-censorship, in which authorities’ fear is so strong that today a documentary awarded internationally as 'The Augustine newspaper' of filmmaker Ignacio Agüero... not only cannot be displayed on public television... but also on channels dedicated to the diffusion of documentaries, ARTV, which after announcing the exhibition, a few weeks ago, decided not to show it,” Zeran said.

Karin Karlekar, project director of Freedom of the Press for Freedom House, explained to The Santiago Times that there is much Chile can improve on, such as implementing legislation designed to open up the media landscape.

“Even though there was a lot of legislation passed strengthening provisions for community radio in Chile it seems like the implementation of has not been fully implemented,” Karlekar said. “I think that it would be a positive step to try to regularize the legal status of community radio which is a very important media environment in Chile and also would help to increase media diversity and help with concentration issues.”

She also noted the police and judiciary could place a greater effort in protecting and securing press freedom, citing the example of the still unsolved 2011 bomb attack that rocked the headquarters of Copesa, the Chilean media conglomerate that publishes the national newspaper La Tercera.

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Deadline: May 31st, 2013