Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management
Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2022 1:19 pm
HOW DOES THE MEDIA WAR WORK?
Patricia Villegas
7 Apr 2022 , 5:44 pm .
The discredit of traditional media grows, increasingly unable to disguise their positions and the growth of information consumption in other media (Photo: Getty Images / iStockphoto)
As I write, I listen to the report of our colleague in Peru.
Once again, President Pedro Castillo faces a vacancy request to remove him from power. One of the reasons has to do with a statement to the CNN Channel in Spanish; In it, according to that medium, the President would have promised to give some kind of solution so that Bolivia achieves an outlet to the sea.
I remember that days after that dialogue, I had the opportunity to talk with the now former Minister of Women of that country and ask her if she knew the reasons why that television meeting had taken place and I showed her a recently published note in which It indicated how just CNN in its original version, had lost 80% of its viewers.
I am telling this episode, because even today, there are some sectors in our region that disbelieve in the scenario of war that is being waged in the media and grant, as in this example, a role of journalism to those who have long since abandoned the profession. , but they take refuge in it, and are in reality agents of destabilization of everything that is outside the strategy of POWER. The media, then, are NOT only weapons of war, they are the very scene of war.
I still remember that same "journalist" (with whom President Castillo spoke, who, by the way, managed by a small difference to defeat this destituent episode), receiving awards from the Bolivian coup plotters, after having achieved a regime change in that country. in the year 2019.
Fernando del Rincón with Luis Fernando Camacho of the Pro Santa Cruz Committee (Photo: File)
Therefore, the first thing to say, without us doubting it, is that on that TV Channel that you like, that newspaper that you usually read, that radio that plays the music that transports you, has been chosen for you to defend those interests and be part of the strategy of adding you to a side of history at a certain juncture.
Saying this in a country like Venezuela seems naive, because, along with Cuba and recently Nicaragua, Bolivia (after the coup d'état), the citizenry assumes that the media are part of the network of interests and, therefore, have already dispossessed them. of that idea of objectivity and even neutrality that they have historically told us they have. Recently, in Bolivia, a study sponsored by a German foundation was published, in which 8 out of 10 of those consulted consider that the media are political actors and 72% of people consider that the media "inform according to their interests".
In other countries, where until a few years ago, this debate was described as the product of the conspiracy ideas of leftists, we are beginning to see evidence that broad sectors of the population doubt the hegemonic media and therefore have sought other sources of information. Case Colombia, in full social explosion in 2020 or Chile in the same social, political and cultural process in 2019.
In fact, these surveys by CELAG (Strategic Center for Latin American Thought), carried out in different countries of the region, show how this discredit of traditional media is progressing, increasingly unable to disguise their positions and the growth of information consumption in other media, mainly social networks.
(Photo: TeleSur)
(Photo: TeleSur)
(Photo: TeleSur)
HOW DOES THIS WAR WORK?
This is a taxonomic attempt. It is the effort to dissect a fact that has become news. Of course, as in an organism, a part depends on the whole. We are facing a system, therefore, one characteristic is intermingled with another.
1. OVERINFORMATION
We are witnessing a data bombardment. It is being in the middle of a jungle, escaping from the bombs that fall one after another, one after another. Every glance at the phone becomes a tsunami of images, colors, words, languages. Spectacular photos with printed text: dead elephants, dead whales... the why, the what for... they don't appear.
Perhaps, like no other generation that preceded us, we have the ability to access information in any language, at any time, on the most diverse topics. Today the children of any city with a basic internet, talk to Siri and find the fastest answers. The same happens with the information of the situation and current affairs. But this ability to access does not mean that we obtain the knowledge.
The stories must fit in a few characters, it is the privilege of the image over the texts, the same image, the same text, put in various colors, presented in various formats, by various presenters, in various languages, who tell you the same thing, every hour, without adding a datum, an angle, a context, a contribution to memory. They are content factories, releasing "hot" news, like bread, every second. Tik, tak, tik, tak, every second.
From one moment to another, the TV screens, at that time social networks were less influential, were filled with images that were basically red lights, out of focus. What was that? The proof of the bombing of Gaddafi's government to his town in Tripoli's green square. Those images were the evidence of that attack contrary to international law.
Everyone took it for granted, but after a few days, a Latin American multimedia company (teleSUR) broadcast live, direct, from that same place, showing that there was no evidence of an attack and fewer victims. 20 years later, a report made for the British Parliament confirms that there were indeed no large-scale attacks against Libyan civilians and that Gaddafi had recaptured cities from the so-called "rebels" without attacking civilians in early February 2011.
Months later, an influential Arab chain recreated the attack on that same capital, which ultimately ended up falling, hours later, when all the media took for granted, something that in practice had already been announced, without it happening.
Right now, we have all become experts in slaps and blows, after the events of the last Oscar Awards gala and it seems that for a few hours, this event left the war in Ukraine behind.
We go from the pandemic to the war, from the war to the night of the cinema, turned into experts of one thing and another, on account of the information overload, which gives us that feeling of satiety, but which in practice constitutes an effective mechanism so that we have the position that the hegemon has built to be consumed by millions.
2. FRAGMENTATION
Linked to this phenomenon is the fragmentation of information. It seems that we have a lot of knowledge about a topic, but really we have only been able to access a small part of it. There are many examples for this, but just COVID is an example star!
Why? When COVID arrives in Europe, not before in China, all the media turned to inform us and educate us about it. In a few days we became epidemiologists, we learned terms like curve, exponential, PCR, rapid tests, biosafety. Anyone would say that scientific journalism and health journalism finally reached the podium with a gold medal, but NO.
True and serious information was left behind and the headlines focused on death and disease as a number.
Each party was expected by millions to know how many victims and potential patients fell in the countries of the bloc. And this same disease moved to AL that of course, continues to inherit the evils.
In Chile, for example, the Minister of Health appeared at the beginning of the pandemic, saying that I WISH THE VIRUS WOULD BECOME A GOOD PERSON.
And while he was the star of the headlines, the country did not have a general quarantine, his cases became the highest % per 100,000 inhabitants at the time and the media were headlining with the minister and not telling us how the population was getting sick and dying and how the disease that was first of the rich, became poor and economically deprived.
Did it really matter what the minister had said, did he say it because he believed it? We do not have the answers, because he ratified it several times, but while everyone focused on him, COVID killed thousands of Chileans.
3. HIDING
The avalanche of news about the disease (COVID), War (Ukraine) Violence at the Oscars, has prevented us from telling the story of the other agendas.
In the case of the pandemic, one of the most relevant facts is that the structural causes that brought us to this scenario and the effects on the most vulnerable sectors of our societies have been deliberately hidden.
In Colombia, President Duque did a program of no less than an hour a day, where he talks about COVID, but not a single reference to the other social problems in the country. The massacres occur daily, the assassination of leaders and demobilized FARC, never went into quarantine.
The country returned to war, while the media reported numbers of sick people, deaths and the false debate between economy and health.
According to INDEPAZ, at the close of this writing, this year there have been 31 massacres, with a balance of 103 victims.
Brazil loses an important part of its natural wealth in El Platanal, but unlike the previous year, the media does not headline it.
Nor with the fires in Bolivia, whose coverage, two years ago, constituted the beginning of the destitution process of then President Evo Morales. And that this year, like the previous ones, has received priority attention from the State.
But COVID, or the informative abuse of it, has also allowed not to overexpose the Venezuelan reality, which previously occupied the headlines of the news around the world, but now to deliberately hide it, make it invisible.
The inhabitants of this Latin American country had to endure the resurgence of the economic war, the failures in their public service systems, lack of gasoline, and the attempted mercenary invasion, almost in the silence of their graves. Not to mention the hundreds who returned to the country, expelled due to the health and economic conditions of the countries of the region where they had emigrated for economic reasons.
As invisible has been, with very small exceptions, the work of Cuban medicine, which not only sent brigades to more than 60 countries to support local health systems, but has also generated the ONLY Latin American vaccine against the disease.
The War in Ukraine has left us hundreds of images of refugees crossing the border between that country and Poland. Lots of journalists dispatching live, from that intersection and quite a few, from the zones of confrontation and conflict. We saw a famous reporter, with the Eifel Tower in the background, in Paris, dressed in camouflage. Paris is 2,382 km from kyiv.
But only now, a month later, timidly, the Western media show us the actions of human rights violations of the Russian combatants. It is painfully surprising to see a video of a Ukrainian soldier, calling a mother of a Russian one, who had been discharged and was making fun of that fact of war on video. That video has all the elements to have become the headline of the big media, but it did not get there, because it is not part of the official history of the war.
Or the families tied to poles, in the Donbass area, by the Ukrainian army and the Nazi battalion.
It is not new, Orlando Figuera, engulfed in flames in the vicinity of Plaza Francia in the Venezuelan capital, failed to be on the same covers as the "guarimberos" in full events of 2017.
The hours before the coup against Evo Morales, left us in our memory, the harassment to which Patricia Arce, mayor of a small town called Vinto, was subjected. The cameras did not show it, as they intentionally focused on the raid of the current governor of Santa Cruz, public leader of the coup plotters, arriving in La Paz with a flag and a bible.
4. FARANDULIZATION
The keys to journalistic writing today are based on the same writing scheme as the entertainment source. With the idea of hooking, activating interest in the emotional, in obtaining confidential information or simple and useful recipes, we attend to some "frameworks" or general guides, for the writing of texts and presentation of information, whatever the topic that let's board
It doesn't matter if what we need is to know about the Polish economy or the fashionable colors in summer suits in Buenos Aires, because everything is written in the same way.
The 10 points to understand how to understand your mother-in-law or the 10 reasons to love your cat or Zendaya's 10 exercises to have a flat stomach.
He realizes?
In 10 steps, they give us the key to fix any problem. So don't even flinch, wearing high-heeled shoes is as easy as developing a campaign against racial discrimination.
In this logic, the information is written in a dramatic soap opera structure. A protagonist and an antagonist. One good, one bad. Putin is without a doubt the bad guy of the moment, but President Nicolás Maduro already was, as well as Miguel Díaz-Canel and even Evo Morales, trying to put out the fire in the Amazon, was the villain of the film.
There are NO shades or grays. Characters are built and on those roles, stories are developed. If this were in the fiction genre, there would be no problem, but when the story is the story of reality, we are in danger.
A NOTE
In the current situation, Putin went from being a great global leader to being psychologically unbalanced, with authoritarian traits, unable to control his emotions.
Psychologists, psychiatrists, experts in human behavior have been consulted to find the opinion, to ratify the hypothesis of the disqualification of the adversary. It is necessary, in this scheme, to diminish the "public enemy" in all his capacities.
TO DO?
Two actions:
1. GENERATE MORE MEDIA AND MORE DISTRIBUTION HIGHWAYS
Public media are needed today more than ever. The deliberate effort of neoliberalism in Latin America and of right-wing governments in recent years has left our region with serious weaknesses in the production of news content.
The public media, the evidence expresses it, are in a good part of the continent dedicated to delivering products of extraordinary quality and value, but far from the dispute of the construction of the daily, conjunctural story. I mean, the news.
The emblematic newspaper El Telégrafo of Ecuador, born in the citizen revolution, today faces the emptying, via sale of its printing presses, by the current government.
We saw Argentine public TV cancel its weekend newscasts, because the government of Mauricio Macri "could not pay" the wages that were generated for work on holidays.
Bolivian public TV and the citizen channel, Abya Yala, were closed during the coup against President Evo Morales, while the corporate media, united with the strategy, did the requested job: achieve the coup.
There is no other way, we must have more media and more information options. Community, citizen, worker, union, neighborhood, parish, university, school journalism. It is time for the multiplication of informational undertakings on a different scale. We must strengthen what we have created, make our media speak several languages, produce on each platform under the imposed rules and challenge them with ethics, creativity and journalistic rigor.
We also have to work on more highways to distribute this content. The recent action against the Russian network RT and one of the news agencies in that country: Sputnik, shows that not only effective content production schemes must be consolidated, but also spaces to distribute them.
In a pilot plan they did it with the blockades to the teleSUR signal in Latin America. Since the very birth of multimedia, there were territories banned for its signal. From the first great coverage, around that distant 2009, Honduras was left without the signal from the Channel that had managed to obtain the images, the queen proof, of the coup that had shaken his country and the subsequent repressive actions.
The same strategy was followed by a satellite TV operator in Ecuador, in the midst of social upheaval in October 2019. And the de facto government of Bolivia eliminated our signal from all platforms, both public and private, once it managed to consummate the coup de Condition. Inexplicably, Instagram accounts, journalists' tweets, presenters and the Channel itself disappear, losing millions of users in one fell swoop.
The path undertaken by Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, member countries of teleSUR today, 16 years ago, has allowed the region and, on many occasions, the world, to find out about events that should have been hidden from large audiences. . This bold commitment has become a model for many alternative and counter-hegemonic communication ventures. It has played a stellar role in the creation of a community of critical citizens, who did not have a meeting point where they could share and contrast views on the global situation. teleSUR has been a great factory for Latin American content and has worked hard to recover the memory of our region. Today teleSUR speaks English, Spanish and produces content in Portuguese.
2. EDUCATE THE CITIZEN
Not only do we have the urgent task of democratizing information, of building more media and more highways of our own to distribute it.
If we don't train, making a parallel with the COVID vaccine, we won't have the minimum antibodies necessary to face this war that we wage daily and that is very effective, like the virus, because it is omnipresent and in many cases it is still very subtle.
It is urgent that we create, from primary schools, academic spaces to build ourselves critical subjects in the face of media stories.
An educated subject will be less difficult to co-opt by these increasingly sophisticated mechanisms. Social networks generate addictions. Just as the world has developed campaigns to prevent the consumption of illicit substances, it must build them so that we understand the mechanisms how they work and we can protect ourselves.
The very proliferation of content highways makes the work of teachers and parents more complex.
The WHO has indicated that we live in an INFODEMIC. Sharing this diagnosis, we cannot assist, without acting, in the face of the distressing situation we face.
It is imperative to work on the processes of training critical audiences, who upon reading that chlorine can cure COVID, don't even think about trying it!
Patricia Villegas is a journalist and director of TeleSur.
Paper presented on April 1st at the 3R.NETS Communication Forum at the Bolívar Theater in Caracas. Republic of Reasons of Cuba .
https://misionverdad.com/opinion/como-o ... -mediatica
Google Translator
Patricia Villegas
7 Apr 2022 , 5:44 pm .
The discredit of traditional media grows, increasingly unable to disguise their positions and the growth of information consumption in other media (Photo: Getty Images / iStockphoto)
As I write, I listen to the report of our colleague in Peru.
Once again, President Pedro Castillo faces a vacancy request to remove him from power. One of the reasons has to do with a statement to the CNN Channel in Spanish; In it, according to that medium, the President would have promised to give some kind of solution so that Bolivia achieves an outlet to the sea.
I remember that days after that dialogue, I had the opportunity to talk with the now former Minister of Women of that country and ask her if she knew the reasons why that television meeting had taken place and I showed her a recently published note in which It indicated how just CNN in its original version, had lost 80% of its viewers.
I am telling this episode, because even today, there are some sectors in our region that disbelieve in the scenario of war that is being waged in the media and grant, as in this example, a role of journalism to those who have long since abandoned the profession. , but they take refuge in it, and are in reality agents of destabilization of everything that is outside the strategy of POWER. The media, then, are NOT only weapons of war, they are the very scene of war.
I still remember that same "journalist" (with whom President Castillo spoke, who, by the way, managed by a small difference to defeat this destituent episode), receiving awards from the Bolivian coup plotters, after having achieved a regime change in that country. in the year 2019.
Fernando del Rincón with Luis Fernando Camacho of the Pro Santa Cruz Committee (Photo: File)
Therefore, the first thing to say, without us doubting it, is that on that TV Channel that you like, that newspaper that you usually read, that radio that plays the music that transports you, has been chosen for you to defend those interests and be part of the strategy of adding you to a side of history at a certain juncture.
Saying this in a country like Venezuela seems naive, because, along with Cuba and recently Nicaragua, Bolivia (after the coup d'état), the citizenry assumes that the media are part of the network of interests and, therefore, have already dispossessed them. of that idea of objectivity and even neutrality that they have historically told us they have. Recently, in Bolivia, a study sponsored by a German foundation was published, in which 8 out of 10 of those consulted consider that the media are political actors and 72% of people consider that the media "inform according to their interests".
In other countries, where until a few years ago, this debate was described as the product of the conspiracy ideas of leftists, we are beginning to see evidence that broad sectors of the population doubt the hegemonic media and therefore have sought other sources of information. Case Colombia, in full social explosion in 2020 or Chile in the same social, political and cultural process in 2019.
In fact, these surveys by CELAG (Strategic Center for Latin American Thought), carried out in different countries of the region, show how this discredit of traditional media is progressing, increasingly unable to disguise their positions and the growth of information consumption in other media, mainly social networks.
(Photo: TeleSur)
(Photo: TeleSur)
(Photo: TeleSur)
HOW DOES THIS WAR WORK?
This is a taxonomic attempt. It is the effort to dissect a fact that has become news. Of course, as in an organism, a part depends on the whole. We are facing a system, therefore, one characteristic is intermingled with another.
1. OVERINFORMATION
We are witnessing a data bombardment. It is being in the middle of a jungle, escaping from the bombs that fall one after another, one after another. Every glance at the phone becomes a tsunami of images, colors, words, languages. Spectacular photos with printed text: dead elephants, dead whales... the why, the what for... they don't appear.
Perhaps, like no other generation that preceded us, we have the ability to access information in any language, at any time, on the most diverse topics. Today the children of any city with a basic internet, talk to Siri and find the fastest answers. The same happens with the information of the situation and current affairs. But this ability to access does not mean that we obtain the knowledge.
The stories must fit in a few characters, it is the privilege of the image over the texts, the same image, the same text, put in various colors, presented in various formats, by various presenters, in various languages, who tell you the same thing, every hour, without adding a datum, an angle, a context, a contribution to memory. They are content factories, releasing "hot" news, like bread, every second. Tik, tak, tik, tak, every second.
From one moment to another, the TV screens, at that time social networks were less influential, were filled with images that were basically red lights, out of focus. What was that? The proof of the bombing of Gaddafi's government to his town in Tripoli's green square. Those images were the evidence of that attack contrary to international law.
Everyone took it for granted, but after a few days, a Latin American multimedia company (teleSUR) broadcast live, direct, from that same place, showing that there was no evidence of an attack and fewer victims. 20 years later, a report made for the British Parliament confirms that there were indeed no large-scale attacks against Libyan civilians and that Gaddafi had recaptured cities from the so-called "rebels" without attacking civilians in early February 2011.
Months later, an influential Arab chain recreated the attack on that same capital, which ultimately ended up falling, hours later, when all the media took for granted, something that in practice had already been announced, without it happening.
Right now, we have all become experts in slaps and blows, after the events of the last Oscar Awards gala and it seems that for a few hours, this event left the war in Ukraine behind.
We go from the pandemic to the war, from the war to the night of the cinema, turned into experts of one thing and another, on account of the information overload, which gives us that feeling of satiety, but which in practice constitutes an effective mechanism so that we have the position that the hegemon has built to be consumed by millions.
2. FRAGMENTATION
Linked to this phenomenon is the fragmentation of information. It seems that we have a lot of knowledge about a topic, but really we have only been able to access a small part of it. There are many examples for this, but just COVID is an example star!
Why? When COVID arrives in Europe, not before in China, all the media turned to inform us and educate us about it. In a few days we became epidemiologists, we learned terms like curve, exponential, PCR, rapid tests, biosafety. Anyone would say that scientific journalism and health journalism finally reached the podium with a gold medal, but NO.
True and serious information was left behind and the headlines focused on death and disease as a number.
Each party was expected by millions to know how many victims and potential patients fell in the countries of the bloc. And this same disease moved to AL that of course, continues to inherit the evils.
In Chile, for example, the Minister of Health appeared at the beginning of the pandemic, saying that I WISH THE VIRUS WOULD BECOME A GOOD PERSON.
And while he was the star of the headlines, the country did not have a general quarantine, his cases became the highest % per 100,000 inhabitants at the time and the media were headlining with the minister and not telling us how the population was getting sick and dying and how the disease that was first of the rich, became poor and economically deprived.
Did it really matter what the minister had said, did he say it because he believed it? We do not have the answers, because he ratified it several times, but while everyone focused on him, COVID killed thousands of Chileans.
3. HIDING
The avalanche of news about the disease (COVID), War (Ukraine) Violence at the Oscars, has prevented us from telling the story of the other agendas.
In the case of the pandemic, one of the most relevant facts is that the structural causes that brought us to this scenario and the effects on the most vulnerable sectors of our societies have been deliberately hidden.
In Colombia, President Duque did a program of no less than an hour a day, where he talks about COVID, but not a single reference to the other social problems in the country. The massacres occur daily, the assassination of leaders and demobilized FARC, never went into quarantine.
The country returned to war, while the media reported numbers of sick people, deaths and the false debate between economy and health.
According to INDEPAZ, at the close of this writing, this year there have been 31 massacres, with a balance of 103 victims.
Brazil loses an important part of its natural wealth in El Platanal, but unlike the previous year, the media does not headline it.
Nor with the fires in Bolivia, whose coverage, two years ago, constituted the beginning of the destitution process of then President Evo Morales. And that this year, like the previous ones, has received priority attention from the State.
But COVID, or the informative abuse of it, has also allowed not to overexpose the Venezuelan reality, which previously occupied the headlines of the news around the world, but now to deliberately hide it, make it invisible.
The inhabitants of this Latin American country had to endure the resurgence of the economic war, the failures in their public service systems, lack of gasoline, and the attempted mercenary invasion, almost in the silence of their graves. Not to mention the hundreds who returned to the country, expelled due to the health and economic conditions of the countries of the region where they had emigrated for economic reasons.
As invisible has been, with very small exceptions, the work of Cuban medicine, which not only sent brigades to more than 60 countries to support local health systems, but has also generated the ONLY Latin American vaccine against the disease.
The War in Ukraine has left us hundreds of images of refugees crossing the border between that country and Poland. Lots of journalists dispatching live, from that intersection and quite a few, from the zones of confrontation and conflict. We saw a famous reporter, with the Eifel Tower in the background, in Paris, dressed in camouflage. Paris is 2,382 km from kyiv.
But only now, a month later, timidly, the Western media show us the actions of human rights violations of the Russian combatants. It is painfully surprising to see a video of a Ukrainian soldier, calling a mother of a Russian one, who had been discharged and was making fun of that fact of war on video. That video has all the elements to have become the headline of the big media, but it did not get there, because it is not part of the official history of the war.
Or the families tied to poles, in the Donbass area, by the Ukrainian army and the Nazi battalion.
It is not new, Orlando Figuera, engulfed in flames in the vicinity of Plaza Francia in the Venezuelan capital, failed to be on the same covers as the "guarimberos" in full events of 2017.
The hours before the coup against Evo Morales, left us in our memory, the harassment to which Patricia Arce, mayor of a small town called Vinto, was subjected. The cameras did not show it, as they intentionally focused on the raid of the current governor of Santa Cruz, public leader of the coup plotters, arriving in La Paz with a flag and a bible.
4. FARANDULIZATION
The keys to journalistic writing today are based on the same writing scheme as the entertainment source. With the idea of hooking, activating interest in the emotional, in obtaining confidential information or simple and useful recipes, we attend to some "frameworks" or general guides, for the writing of texts and presentation of information, whatever the topic that let's board
It doesn't matter if what we need is to know about the Polish economy or the fashionable colors in summer suits in Buenos Aires, because everything is written in the same way.
The 10 points to understand how to understand your mother-in-law or the 10 reasons to love your cat or Zendaya's 10 exercises to have a flat stomach.
He realizes?
In 10 steps, they give us the key to fix any problem. So don't even flinch, wearing high-heeled shoes is as easy as developing a campaign against racial discrimination.
In this logic, the information is written in a dramatic soap opera structure. A protagonist and an antagonist. One good, one bad. Putin is without a doubt the bad guy of the moment, but President Nicolás Maduro already was, as well as Miguel Díaz-Canel and even Evo Morales, trying to put out the fire in the Amazon, was the villain of the film.
There are NO shades or grays. Characters are built and on those roles, stories are developed. If this were in the fiction genre, there would be no problem, but when the story is the story of reality, we are in danger.
A NOTE
In the current situation, Putin went from being a great global leader to being psychologically unbalanced, with authoritarian traits, unable to control his emotions.
Psychologists, psychiatrists, experts in human behavior have been consulted to find the opinion, to ratify the hypothesis of the disqualification of the adversary. It is necessary, in this scheme, to diminish the "public enemy" in all his capacities.
TO DO?
Two actions:
1. GENERATE MORE MEDIA AND MORE DISTRIBUTION HIGHWAYS
Public media are needed today more than ever. The deliberate effort of neoliberalism in Latin America and of right-wing governments in recent years has left our region with serious weaknesses in the production of news content.
The public media, the evidence expresses it, are in a good part of the continent dedicated to delivering products of extraordinary quality and value, but far from the dispute of the construction of the daily, conjunctural story. I mean, the news.
The emblematic newspaper El Telégrafo of Ecuador, born in the citizen revolution, today faces the emptying, via sale of its printing presses, by the current government.
We saw Argentine public TV cancel its weekend newscasts, because the government of Mauricio Macri "could not pay" the wages that were generated for work on holidays.
Bolivian public TV and the citizen channel, Abya Yala, were closed during the coup against President Evo Morales, while the corporate media, united with the strategy, did the requested job: achieve the coup.
There is no other way, we must have more media and more information options. Community, citizen, worker, union, neighborhood, parish, university, school journalism. It is time for the multiplication of informational undertakings on a different scale. We must strengthen what we have created, make our media speak several languages, produce on each platform under the imposed rules and challenge them with ethics, creativity and journalistic rigor.
We also have to work on more highways to distribute this content. The recent action against the Russian network RT and one of the news agencies in that country: Sputnik, shows that not only effective content production schemes must be consolidated, but also spaces to distribute them.
In a pilot plan they did it with the blockades to the teleSUR signal in Latin America. Since the very birth of multimedia, there were territories banned for its signal. From the first great coverage, around that distant 2009, Honduras was left without the signal from the Channel that had managed to obtain the images, the queen proof, of the coup that had shaken his country and the subsequent repressive actions.
The same strategy was followed by a satellite TV operator in Ecuador, in the midst of social upheaval in October 2019. And the de facto government of Bolivia eliminated our signal from all platforms, both public and private, once it managed to consummate the coup de Condition. Inexplicably, Instagram accounts, journalists' tweets, presenters and the Channel itself disappear, losing millions of users in one fell swoop.
The path undertaken by Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, member countries of teleSUR today, 16 years ago, has allowed the region and, on many occasions, the world, to find out about events that should have been hidden from large audiences. . This bold commitment has become a model for many alternative and counter-hegemonic communication ventures. It has played a stellar role in the creation of a community of critical citizens, who did not have a meeting point where they could share and contrast views on the global situation. teleSUR has been a great factory for Latin American content and has worked hard to recover the memory of our region. Today teleSUR speaks English, Spanish and produces content in Portuguese.
2. EDUCATE THE CITIZEN
Not only do we have the urgent task of democratizing information, of building more media and more highways of our own to distribute it.
If we don't train, making a parallel with the COVID vaccine, we won't have the minimum antibodies necessary to face this war that we wage daily and that is very effective, like the virus, because it is omnipresent and in many cases it is still very subtle.
It is urgent that we create, from primary schools, academic spaces to build ourselves critical subjects in the face of media stories.
An educated subject will be less difficult to co-opt by these increasingly sophisticated mechanisms. Social networks generate addictions. Just as the world has developed campaigns to prevent the consumption of illicit substances, it must build them so that we understand the mechanisms how they work and we can protect ourselves.
The very proliferation of content highways makes the work of teachers and parents more complex.
The WHO has indicated that we live in an INFODEMIC. Sharing this diagnosis, we cannot assist, without acting, in the face of the distressing situation we face.
It is imperative to work on the processes of training critical audiences, who upon reading that chlorine can cure COVID, don't even think about trying it!
Patricia Villegas is a journalist and director of TeleSur.
Paper presented on April 1st at the 3R.NETS Communication Forum at the Bolívar Theater in Caracas. Republic of Reasons of Cuba .
https://misionverdad.com/opinion/como-o ... -mediatica
Google Translator