desde nicaragua

Learning from Venezuela's media machine

                                        (banner on Carretera Norte, Managua)

There's more to the aid that Daniel Ortega's government gets from Venezuela than the controversial petro-dollars used to fund social, health and education programs. I don't want to get into whether those programs are any good, whether only card-carrying Sandinistas benefit, whether the folks who run them are corrupt, etc.

I'm interested in media strategy. Have a look at this story: Chávez works on U.S. image. Here, Pablo Bachelet looks at the incredible PR web that Hugo Chávez has created to court support in the U.S. (Check out the Citgo commercials!)

Indeed, no Latin American country in recent history has invested so much money and effort in shaping U.S. perceptions of its government, largely negative as a result of Chávez's anti-Bush rhetoric, his friendship with Cuba and Iran, and doubts about his commitment to democracy.

I think Danny O. is taking some lessons from Chávez. Let me start with some background.

Here in Nicaragua, Ortega faces the same kind of opposition from the private newspapers as does Chávez in Venezuela. It's a chicken-egg question, in both countries. Just over a year ago, PBS's Online News Hour devoted a segment to media in Venezuela.

(Maryclen Stelling Macareño, who runs an independent media analysis,) said that if the media doesn't "behave," then Chavez will quite simply shut them down. Asked if the state media also intends to become more objective, she answered, "Who is going to be the first one? No, nobody knows."

Again, same story in Nicaragua. Newspapers here are fiercely critical and not objective. Ortega, too, regularly criticizes the press and the individual families who run the newspapers. (Oligarchy, his word.)

Before taking office last January, Ortega had said that the media can "say what they want. There is freedom of expression here even to say any crude thing, any slander ... I harbor no sentiment of hatred or revenge against those sending this kind of message, this dirty campaign."

The dirty campaign has continued, from both sides. But in the past few months, the government has changed tactics. It's now sidestepping local newspapers and producing its own media instead.

Ortega's media team is run by his wife, Rosario Murillo. Government sources say it's the foreign press she wants to court. (Similarly, the newspapers here pander to a U.S. crowd. A growing portion of the newspapers' readers are in the United States, getting their news online.)

Cue in the government's new(ish) Web site, Elpueblopresident.com, which I wrote about recently. Instead of talking about news or issues with the private media, the government just posts the information it wants to share on its site, just like media analysts had predicted.

The administration has been increasingly snatching talent from the private media and placing them in flack jobs throughout government agencies. Part of their job? Writing for the news site. Sources say more high-profile journalists will soon join the exodus.

Nicaragua doesn't have the coffers that Venezuela has in order to open up media offices in the United States. But this site — along with promises from Iran to support journalism here, the entry of Venezuela's Telesur on public airwaves — definitely indicates a strategy shift toward the Venezuelan media model.

And so far it looks successful. Alexa searches show government sites' popularity rankings are on the rise. Reporters — frustrated with typical government secrecy — are taking their cues from the sites for interesting "investigative" reports. The government even printed cute baseball caps (in hot blue and pink) to promote El Pueblo Presidente.

Nicaraguans don't use the Internet for local news (porn and social networks are more popular than newspaper sites, according to Alexa, and general Internet reach is minimal). So it's obvious who government trying to convince: folks in the States.

The question I have is why Ortega — who seems to enjoy badmouthing the U.S. — cares what they think.

Thoughts?

*** update

I should have thought to mention this. But just in case you didn't know, the US does the same thing — in Cuba, in the Middle East, etc. Maybe we can say that Venezuela is learning from the US model.

Also, this is kind of cute. What kind of information do we get on Latin America, anyway?

The Internet is a tool. A good one.

They cut Internet access at work. By work I mean La Prensa's newsroom. By newsroom I mean a place where journalists gather information, and assemble it into stories. By stories I mean the stuff published in newspapers that informs readers about what is happening in the world around them.

I can't imagine doing my job without the Internet. That is, I can't imagine doing it well.

Perhaps it's because I'm a Western-trained journalist, but access to the Internet to me means access to information that helps me understand subjects before waltzing blindly into a story; it opens the door to complex, investigative and explanatory reporting. I'm a better journalist with the internet.

But here at La Prensa, as of the middle of last week, a good deal of reporters (how many? I'm verifying numbers) arrived to work to discover their access had been cut. Editors had apparently complained that too many people waste time on MSN Messenger instead of working. (This happens back home, too.) So the higher-ups cut selected certain people and cut their access to the web, period. And yet it's not like back home where newsrooms (or workplaces in general) will cut access to particular sites or limit user privileges ... Here, it's all or nothing (minus work e-mail, which crashes often).

Needless to say, folks here aren't happy. Stories are being turned in earlier — which was probably the point behind the measure. But some reporters say they're turning in work that isn't as thorough as it could have been had they been able to do some research on the web.

Is there some other way to get that research done, or is it hopeless? I asked one reporter.

"If the editors don't think that the Internet is an important resource, then I'm not going to go out of my way to do that research," he told me. "I'll go home earlier."

The situation reminds me of a conversation I had recently with Cornelio Hopmann, executive director of eNicaragua, an Internet policy institute based in Managua. He told me Nicaraguans — even those from the highest economic class — just don't think the Internet is very important.

"In Nicaragua it's no means of communication, even for those who can afford it, who are educated, who in the U.S. would use the Internet," he said. "It's not a Latin American phenomenon; it's a Nicaraguan phenomenon."

on hip sites, newspapers and britney

The Ortega administration has an incredible number of Web sites. I learn about a new one daily.

Like El Pueblo Presidente!, which became public on Monday. It seems to be part of the government's new media strategy of: 1) appearing to make more information public and 2) having space to not only combat the daily criticism from mainstream media, but a space to publicize good news.

You would never guess that this administration does anything good from the stories in La Prensa or El Nuevo Diario. I even started to believe this my first few weeks here. But, like anything and everything, there are an infinite number of shades between black and white.

The longer I spend here, the more I am surprised by what I learn about how this country's main newspapers work. Perhaps it's because, as I've written about earlier, I have access to levels of government/society/business here that I would never be granted in the States, and the inner workings I see here are the same back home.

What have I learned? Well, the newspapers here don't serve to explain how and why government functions the way it does so that citizens can make informed political, social or economic decisions.

No, the newspapers are a political force. They serve to criticize/support parties and personalities. And the line between advertising and journalism is incredibly blurry, if there at all. (The complications get multiplied when newspapers traditionally depend on government for advertising revenue. What happens when you bite the hand that feeds?)

The president talked about this at a speech last night in Laureles Norte, a poor Managuan barrio. (He was at one of the bean sales by Enabas that I'd written about yesterday, throwing out free 5-pound bags of beans to very excited supporters afterward.)

Ortega called the newspapers "powerful media that is at the service of the rich," referring to the Chamorro family which owns both major dailies. "Who are the Chamorros?" Ortega asked. "A family of the oligarchy."

While I haven't been here long enough to form a legitimate opinion, I am not ready to discount what Ortega says.

Sure, we can say he's just angry because the papers bash him every day. It's part of their job to hold him (and any public official) responsible — I really believe that. But there needs to be more substance. I often wonder whether the media is:
— professional (and whose standards am I holding it up to?)
— criticizing the administration for personal grudges, for the sake of criticizing
— unwilling or unable to prove assertions
— ignoring when the candidates/personalities they champion are in the wrong
— engaging in superficial "he said, she said" coverage

The other night I was talking with an editor at one of the major newspapers who said he doesn't belong to any political party. He told me he doesn't believe what his own newspaper publishes.

"I take more seriously whether Britney is pregnant or going to lose her baby than what we publish in this newspaper."

With all this reeling in my head, I've decided to focus my IAPA research on the role newspapers play in national politics here. It's fascinating.

on government documents

I don't think a good journalist can write with authority on current events without knowing what happened yesterday. I'm talking about events or circumstances in the previous weeks, months, years or decades that truly impact and shape what and why things are happening now. (Although, often enough, you read stories in newspapers -- both here and in the States -- that sound as if the reporter literally had no clue what happened the day before.)

That's why I was interested in a conference that began today at la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua-Managua, sponsored by its history department. Douglas Kraft, from the U.S. Office of the Historian, presented Part One of a two-day lecture on "U.S.-Central American relations in the second half of the 20th Century: An analysis though documented sources."

Kraft explained the basic function of his office — to publish the United State's "official" historical version of its foreign policy. Often this means declassifying military and intelligence documents. He went through the main reasons documents get various classifications — what does national security mean? — and then talked about access to information laws in the United States. There, historians and journalists and anybody interested have the help of something called the Freedom of Information Act. There is also a non-governmental organization called the National Security Archive which works solely to get government documents declassified.

The topic wasn't anything new to me. But it was to the hundred or so people in the room — mostly professors and students — who deal with a different sort of openness from government. (It also seemed the perfect moment to attack the United State's track record of keeping secrets, overthrowing presidents and contributing to instability in Latin America.) I'm not saying that the United States is perfect and I can access any kind of information I want there, because I obviously can't and there are tons of cases that prove otherwise.

But I am interested in learning more about how Nicaraguan access to information compares. After all, this is the place I'm trying to do journalism. From the comments I heard after Kraft's speech, I gather that historians here don't often get access to internal government documents. Despite legitimate complaints about what the U.S. government doesn't provide access to, there seemed a general understanding in that room that it's a hell of a lot better than what Nicaraguans get. I'm going to speak with the director of UNAN's history department tomorrow afternoon to get his opinion.

By pure coincidence, the Inter American Press Association has been meeting these past few days in Miami to discuss problems journalists face in Latin America. Here's a big one: getting killed. Writing about the conference, Frances Robles and Andres Viglucci of the Miami Herald had a story in today's paper about violence against journalists:

"By the IAPA's count, 320 journalists in the Americas have been killed in 20 years in connection with their work. While many killings are attributed to narco-trafficking terrorist groups like the FARC or Colombian paramilitary groups, others are for more-mundane print or broadcast revelations of municipal corruption, often linked to organized crime."

(Perhaps even more telling of how important this topic is, this country's two main newspapers have had stories on their front pages about the IAPA findings and journalists' general access to information.)

Managua taxi drivers often give me advice about staying safe after I tell them I'm a journalist. Usually it's when we drive past a monument to journalists they say this, often adding that anybody who speaks out of line is silenced. Nicaragua's main example of a martyred journalist is Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, the La Prensa editor whose assassination in 1978 truly prompted the masses to rise against the Somoza dictatorship.

The other day, I was tagging along at the National Assembly with a journalist from La Prensa and she explained that one fo the first things the Sandinista government did this year was cut all ads in the media. Newspapers and TV stations here depend on advertisements by government; without them, they can't afford to operate. Several newspapers and stations have let go of reporters and editors; one paper just started making smaller pages.

Anyway, this is just the beginning of my learnings. Part of the work I'm doing here is research into access to information, particularly about health, education and employment. I expect to start doing more sociology-like academic interviews with folks next week about the subject.

It's exciting to experience what I'd only read about in books before.