Content is more important than ownership
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by Eric Jackson
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by Eric Jackson
One medium, several media. It helps to remember this oft-ignored grammatical distinction when looking at what Panama’s constitution and laws say about our national means of mass communications, and considering what they ought to say. Surely, now that the possibility of a new constitution is moving toward center stage of the national debate, we should start thinking about such things.
As it now stands, the Panamanian Constitution provides that the owners of Panamanian media must be Panamanian. That, however, leaves a lot of questions unanswered.
For example, if a radio network is owned by a Panamanian corporation, is it legal for some of the owners of that corporation to be foreigners? In practice this is allowed, but if the same logic that the Supreme Court used to bar non-Panamanians from being directors of non-profit foundations holds, the government could give Caracol radio and certain other media a hard time about foreign ownership.
Meanwhile, as the constitution directs attention toward the ownership question, a huge portion of the content carried by our national media comes from abroad, most especially from the United States. Whether that’s a healthy thing, and if not what ought to be done about it, is the line of questioning that’s more relevant to Panamanian society.
Panama is a small market, without the resources to be a major player in the international film, television, music recording or news reporting industries. We are, however, an important global crossroads, where most of the world’s great commercial and cultural powers are present and active. The former situation makes us vulnerable to cultural domination, but the latter gives us the opportunity to balance foreign influences in a way that prevents us from being overwhelmed by any single foreign country.
We are not taking advantage of our possibilities. Outside of a few Latin American television programs, some British rock and music from around the Spanish-speaking world, Panama’s cultural imports are almost all from the United States. We need to seriously consider whether the perverse associations between sex and violence, the shallow materialism and the alien political and social assumptions inherent in so much of what Panamanian-owned media corporations import from the Hollywood is healthy for this country in such large doses.
Imitation complicates the problem. How many of the people who make Latin American television shows in overwhelmingly non-white countries fall head over heels for Hollywood concepts of beauty, to the extent that the stars they cast are usually blonde?
The foreign ownership restrictions imposed on Panamanian media have two major drawbacks. They limit Panama’s ability to export its own cultural products, and they limit the resources available to develop Panama’s media to their fullest potential. Yet they have proven ineffective at protecting Panama from cultural domination by the United States.
I would suggest doing away with foreign ownership restrictions in our laws and constitution, but imposing foreign content limits on our mass communications media. These content limits shouldn’t be absolute, but should prevent imports from any one country from dominating our cultural life. For example, the law might provide that half of a Panamanian television network’s programming must be produced in Panama, and no more than 10 percent of its air time may be taken up by content from any one foreign country.
Now under such a system benighted programming directors might still prefer Hollywood’s junk over its jewels, and reject the best that Latin America, Europe and the rest of the world have to offer us. However, they’d only get away with that if they had monopolistic powers --- which is a problem with our media that will be addressed in another column.
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