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15/10/2013 | Argentina - Kirchner Moves Against Argentina's Free Press

Mary Anastasia O'Grady

The government acts to strip the most important television network of its main source of revenue.

 

The last time Argentina lost its independent judiciary was during the military government from 1976-83. It's no coincidence that the independent media and free speech were also verboten. Now President Cristina Kirchner wants to return the nation to those days, albeit with her own brand of tyranny.

Last week Mrs. Kirchner had brain surgery, described by her doctors as low risk, to remove a blood clot. She is recovering. But the republic is near death. Its survival depends on whether the Supreme Court president, Ricardo Lorenzetti, is able to withstand government pressure to knuckle under.

The U.S. Supreme Court knows something of that. In his 2010 state of the union,Barack Obama scolded the justices who voted for the majority in Citizens United, and progressives badgered them relentlessly. Two years later Chief Justice John Roberts ruled in favor of ObamaCare.

At issue in Argentina is a 2009 law designed to expand state-controlled media and rein in privately owned outlets. Among other things, it would force the Clarin Group, the country's most important independent television voice, to sell a substantial part of its cable network. Divestiture would deprive Clarin of its main source of revenue.

The company also owns a newspaper and an all-news broadcast station. Its decline would mean the elimination of important sources of information about the government that are otherwise not available.

An Argentine court has ruled that key articles in the 2009 media law—including the forced divestiture of Clarin's cable assets and the canceling of licenses without compensation—are unconstitutional.

The government's appeal is pending, with heavy speculation that Justice Lorenzetti will cast the deciding vote. In recent weeks Mrs. Kirchner and her vice president, Amado Boudou, have pressured the court, by way of public statements, for a favorable decision before the Oct. 27 midterm elections. Reportedly, private messages from high government officials have also been delivered to the justices. In June, Justice Lorenzetti alleged that his family was the target of tax investigations in order to influence his decision.

The Kirchner family's fiddling with the court is familiar. In the early years of Néstor Kirchner's presidency, (2003-07), the government forced the resignation of a majority of justices on the nine-member Supreme Court by publicly accusing them of ties to the unpopular former president Carlos Menem. Mobs sympathetic to the Kirchners harassed and intimidated them in the streets.

Some of the vacated seats were filled by pro-Kirchner appointees. Two were left vacant. In 2006, the Kirchner-controlled Congress passed a law to reduce the number of justices, through attrition, to five. If all goes according to plan, when older members of the court retire, the kirchneristas will control the majority.

Until then, la presidenta has to make do. That's not so easy. Election polling suggests that her party, the Front for Victory, is in for a drubbing in two weeks. The economy is swooning, annual inflation is 30%, and even in traditional strongholds there is Kirchner fatigue.

But the media-law controversy could help. Some observers believe that a favorable, pre-election day ruling would demonstrate that Mrs. Kirchner still wields the kind ofcaudillo power her husband enjoyed. That might narrow the margin of defeat and allow her to cobble together a coalition. Her dream of changing the electoral law so that she could run for a third term would still be possible.

The added bonus would be the end of the pesky fourth estate, which harms her image by reporting on corruption, crime and the economy. It revealed that government surrogates were slandering the Argentine Pope Francis because he had been a critic.

Mrs. Kirchner says Clarin has too much power in television. But she has much more. State-owned television, traditionally neutral, has been converted into a government-propaganda vehicle. All soccer and race-car broadcasts have been nationalized so that viewers can be saturated with pro-government messages.

In Buenos Aires three of the four privately held broadcast channels are owned by companies with ties to the government and depend on some government advertising. They are under pressure to censor their coverage. In print media only a handful of leading opposition newspapers remain—including La Nación, which publishes some content from the Journal.

Argentine patriots have not given up. Seven prominent journalists have filed complaints with the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, alleging state harassment, intimidation and slander. An Argentine federal judge is leading a criminal investigation of Secretary of Commerce Guillermo Moreno for allegedly instructing the advertising departments of companies to boycott newspapers that are not pro-government.

"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once," the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote. "Slavery has so frightful an aspect to men accustomed to freedom that it must steal in upon them by degrees and must disguise itself in a thousand shapes in order to be received." The media law is one such disguise.

Wall Street Journal (Estados Unidos)

 



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