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editorial

At the semi-annual meeting of mainstream corporate media management organization known as the Inter-American Press Association, President Torrijos promised that he would submit legislation to the National Assembly which would repeal Panama's anti-press "gag laws." The president promptly moved to implement this vague promise by proposing some modest but positive specific legislation.

The vagueness here stems from the question of which laws are properly considered “gag laws,” or as we say here in Spanish, “leyes de mordaza.” There are a number of unnecessary laws that restrict freedom of the press here, some of them passed in the course of the president's father's military dictatorship, others of earlier origin, and the legislation that the Cabinet Council has approved would repeal some but not all of them.

The Panama News would like to see the abolition of criminal penalties for defamation and their replacement with a law granting reasonable civil recourse to those whose lives have been damaged by false and defamatory publications. We'd like to see the Censor Board abolished. We'd like to see the definitive curtailment of the summary powers of judges and politicians to use the disrespect laws as a pretext to punish the publication of unflattering truths. We'd like to see much greater access to public information for the press and everyone else.

We will applaud these sorts of changes when they happen, but not before.

Why the jaded attitude? Because we have heard promises of the sort that the president made so many times before, from successive governments, and yet the gag laws remain. Because over the years we have seen the president's party take a very anti-press attitude in the legislature, including during Mireya Moscoso's regime by voting unanimously to license journalists.

What needs to change even more than the laws, and is unlikely to change given the attitudes of this country's political and economic elites, is the prevailing notion in high places of the role of an independent press in a free society. The plain truth of the matter is that this country's political parties and powerful families prefer newspapers that look like capitalist versions of Fidel Castro's Granma, full of staged photos of "dignitaries" in suits and bereft of independent reporting of uncomfortable truths of which a well informed public should be aware.

It doesn't help when we have a corrupt pseudo-union trying to exclude all but graduates of the University of Panama's journalism department --- a truly bizarre anachronism at a university that has no student newspaper --- from working as journalists in this country. Nor is it helpful that our mainstream corporate media are all partisan-aligned, that monopolistic practices distort real competition among our media, that our advertising and modeling industries and commercial television networks are overtly racist, or that many of Panama's reporters and editors take bribes.

This messy situation of repressive laws, pompous manipulations and rampant corruption does enormous damage to Panama. It stifles the open public discourse needed for the nation's advancement on many fronts. It turns us into a scientific and cultural backwater. It subjects our sources of information to foreign domination. It retards the development of excellence in our mass communications media, and inhibits the export of such excellent work that gets produced despite all of the obstacles.

When one looks at the PRD leadership and their family and business ties to the advertising cartel and to most of the corporate mainstream media, it's cause for pessimism about whether this country will see the changes that ought to be enacted. Those powerful few who are cashing in on the current bleached blonde banality that passes for information and culture don't want to see change, and those people are very close to the levers of power.

So yes, it would be a good start if the promises Martín made to the media moguls are carried out, but excuse us if we don't believe in any of this until we see it.

Bear in mind...

To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.

Jorge Luis Borges

Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

Hannah Arendt

When a nation is ruled by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile.

Hunter S. Thompson