Gutman, A compromised press

TEGUCIGALPA -- Journalism is the first draft of history. In its pages are seized, then frozen in time, indelible images of the human drama. Its lucid and hard-nosed renderings discourage revisionists from tampering with fact. Alas, in an imperfect world, fact is calumny, reality is disgrace, truth is scandal. For those whose only loyalty is to the truth, it is a lonely world as well. The price for such devotion is often steep and those who are willing to pay it never lack enemies.

To the enemies of truth, newsmen make an especially appetizing quarry. Because reality is what the self-perceives, their accounts are never accurate enough, fair or broad enough to satisfy the biases and optic of all readers. If their articles lack focus or detail, they're dismissed as shallow and irrelevant. If their exposés or commentaries are too graphic, too close for comfort, they're accused of needlessly giving readers palpitations. No matter what they report, journalists are sure to be reviled by someone along the way.

Readers come in sundry stripes too. Most seek to be informed. Most possess the mental elasticity to judge an article on its merits. It is to them that scrupulous journalists devote their columns. Some, like disoriented butterflies, skip chunks of text that do not pique their interest or that unsettle or intimidate them. Hasty or inattentive they invariably take things out of context and misconstrue. Others see conspiracy in syntax: They scrutinize and dissect every utterance as if it concealed some subliminal code. They can't see the sentence from the words, the idea from the inflection, the message from the timbre. Others yet are so jarred by the truth that they want it suppressed, obliterated, reduced to ashes for fear that they might become infected by it.

Working in Central America, where journalists are often accused of heresy, can be especially daunting. Large numbers of people in positions of influence still equate democratization, respect for civil liberties and transparency in government with chaos, legitimate popular aspirations with some clandestine Bolshevik plot. Perched on the highest rungs of government, a crypto-fascist element continues to regard independent and outspoken journalists as meddlers, as purveyors of social disenchantment, as blabbermouths who threaten the status quo.

Like its neighbors, Honduras has surrendered to self-censorship. The media refuse to point fingers at the real source of malignancy --- successive nepotistic dynasties of corrupt, power-hungry plutocrats who sold their soul to the US and (like self-righteous little Costa Rica) to mercenary Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese and South Korean business interests.

Like its neighbors, Honduras lacks an independent, fearless and genuinely incorruptible voice that dares tell it like it is. Paralyzed with fear, Honduran journalists are loath to admit that every problem the nation faces can be traced to a symbiosis of greed, negligence, monumental ineptitude in high places, and crass ignorance, laziness, fear and cowardice among the masses.

It is no wonder that a series of articles critical of Honduras published by this writer in The Tico Times, Honduras This Week and The Panama News (and widely syndicated in North America) was systematically kept off the pages of Honduras' mainstream dailies -- including El Heraldo, La Tribuna and La Prensa. Hiding behind a wall of silence and aloofness, Tiempo, under the combined editorship of Manuel Gamero, German Quintanilla and Vilma Rosales, was exceptionally blatant in its dissimulation and lack of professional decorum.

Nor will it surprise readers to learn that this very column, originally slated to appear in Honduras This Week, was suddenly embargoed, and that repeated attempts by this writer to obtain an explanation were thwarted. Is this rebuke, timed to coincide with "el Día del Periodista" in Honduras, an act of timidity or the product of extreme displeasure with the column's polemical tone?

Alas, timidity is a common trait among Honduran journalists. Fearing that he might be "accidentally run over by a bus" or "poisoned with arsenic-laced Coke at a press conference," a newsman who spoke on condition of anonymity declared, "there is no free press in Honduras. It's for sale --- literally. Any journalist who values his life must dilute his sense of ethics with a strong solution of pragmatism and caution. We are all walking on a tightrope."

\Of course, silence screams. Silence is a scoop and self-censorship is as instructive an account of what cannot or will not be laid bare as a slobbering confession. Unlike open scandal, which peaks in an orgy of vitriol and reproof, then dies, silence leaves a trail of churlish speculation and a scent of putrefaction. It is bad enough when governments hide behind a wall of secrecy; it is infinitely worse when the media --- the conscience of a free society --- sheepishly abdicate their mission and collude to keep the public in miasmic ignorance.

Despite opinions to the contrary --- some expressed by disgruntled readers --- journalists do not get paid to find solutions for the problems they uncover, but to observe and expose the dynamics that lead to these problems. Solutions are to be found in the problems themselves.

When the press capitulates to the government, all is lost. In the process, the lambs are led to slaughter by the wolves in a deafening silence of apathy and inertia. A nation deprived of an honest press is asleep at the switch and faces an imminent and rude awakening.

In parting, I wish to leave readers angered by my writings with a final message: I have no regrets and offer no apology. Those who seek the truth are infinitely closer to it than those who purport to have found it. The great frustration of journalists is not with the carping of dogmatists and know-nothings but with the cowardice and perfidy of those empowered to give the truth a voice --- and choose not to.

W. E. Gutman is a veteran journalist on regular assignment in Central America since 1991. He lives in southern California.

Also in this section:
Leis, Justice on trial
What they're saying about Iraq
Gore, Disgrace and humiliation
Bush, Speech to the Air Force Academy graduating class
Gutman, The timid Honduran press
Cryan, Mainstream reporting about Colombia
Carpio, The Latin America and Caribbean - European Union summit
Bond, Brown's broken promise
Durán, Split in the Panamanian left
Jackson, No blank check for the Electoral Tribunal

opinion

Honduras: A nation asleep at the switch