These have been awful years for all media supported by advertising sales. International journalism and human rights organizations point to the constant legal harassment of Panamanian journalists by politicians, but the worst blows --- including the worst politically motivated blows --- have been economic. You can see the damage on Panama's television news broadcasts if you watch carefully.

The general trends have been layoffs that mean less content, political hirings and firings that mean slanted and "dumbed down" content, and the exodus of many of Panama's finest journalists to other places or occupations. RPC-TV and Telemetro are hardcore PRD, with a little space for the former Christian Democrats (now Partido Popular), who are allied with the PRD for the moment. TVN also slants a bit toward the PRD, but not nearly as obviously as the other two commercial networks. Due to layoffs, all of these commercial news departments run the same stories over and over again to fill the gaps left by the departures of those left jobless.

When Mireya Moscoso became president, she recruited the country's most popular news anchor, the multi-talented Lissette Condassín, as her press aide. RPC's loss was not Mireya's gain, however. Condassín was left in the dark too many times by an opaque and corrupt administration, and soon quit. Now she's doing PR for cigarette maker Philip Morris.

Condassín is a talented singer and actress, but never was a reporter. She became RPC's evening news anchor without having worked the trenches. The network's replacement in her old spot, however, has worked and still works as a reporter. Marta Alvarado is the best of the commercial network's evening anchors. Not only does she read the news, she gets out and does reporting as well, and frequently shows up to lend her solidarity when a fellow journalist goes on trial. If she has less material with which to work than Condassín used to, it's due to economic factors beyond her control.

But meanwhile, the up-and-coming competition isn't from the other MEDCOM network (Telemetro) or TVN, but from the non-commercial channels.

Canal Once, the public educational channel, has picked up a number of journalists who were laid off by the commercial broadcasters. Their product is to a great extent ridiculously slanted Arnulfista-MOLIRENA propaganda, but if you want that point of view, it's presented with some technical skill. Moreover, public TV's evening news picked up sportscaster Héctor Villarreal after TVN let him go and he does a good job with relatively few resources.

The real contender, however, is the news team from FETV, the Catholic channel. Sure, you get Catholic values in all of the station's programming, including the news. But Panama is, after all, an 85 percent Catholic country and the church's politics take in a wide spectrum from Opus Dei on the right to the Liberation Theology on the left. If you turn to channel 5 in Panama City, anchors Luis Carlos Velarde and Margorieth Tejeira give you the news without the partisan slant and cover stories and groups that the commercial mainstream ignores or misrepresents.

For example, the commercial stations' coverage of the debate about whether the Western Watershed ought to be flooded is driven by visual and political factors. There are a handful of persons, groups and institutions deemed "worthy" by the elites who call the shots at MEDCOM and TVN, and to maintain good relations with the "right" talking heads those stations will give time to their opinions. Radical activists and dirt-poor farmers generally need not apply, UNLESS they fill the streets with shouting protesters. Thus the principal opposition to the canal's westward expansion tends to get caricatured on RPC, Telemetro and TVN as this rabble shouting simplistic slogans, and those who favor the new lake get all manner of opportunities for cheap shots against people who won't get the same time and space to respond. FETV, however, treats the protagonists more even-handedly. You hear the substance of both sides' arguments on FETV's "Noticiero Estelar."

Panama's media are not nearly so politically polarized as, for example, Venzuela's are. Nobody is using Panamanian television to urge mobs to overthrow the government. However, at the commercial and government networks the biases are flagrant, the quality is low and you have to take everything you see and hear with a large boulder of salt. The Catholic channel shows a lot more respect for your intelligence than the others.