opinion

Information control games

by Eric Jackson

A few days ago, as the daily newspapers were leading with a story about how the National Assembly's Credentials Committee had blown off a complaint about Supreme Court corruption made by a coalition of 18 groups that includes the Catholic Church's Justice and Peace Commission, President Torrijos was flying to Cuba. What a convenient way to avoid embarrassing questions, given that the party which he leads holds most the seats on the committee that voted unanimously for corruption and the pecuniary interest of a hoodlum political class.

How did the PRD-aligned media handle the story? While Martín was in Havana  the story that the US State Department had revoked high court magistrate Winston Spadafora's visa broke, and the presidential website issued a statement about how this was a sovereign decision of a foreign country about how to run its own immigration affairs. La Prensa, the MEDCOM channels et al let that substitute for an answer to why the president's party took a pro-corruption stand in the legislature.

Meanwhile, we have heard in the corporate media about how weak FRENADESO is and how successfully the “reformed” Seguro Social reform proposal to emerge from the government-controlled dialogue was negotiated. Except now the government has to admit something very unseemly about the plan that the “responsible” labor leaders --- and worse yet, the nation's principal religious leaders --- have signed onto. It will bankrupt the Maternity Fund sometime the middle of next year. Except that the government has been afraid to publish the entire document for public scrutiny. (Martín now promises to let us know the contents --- no doubt in an officially edited summary, published by his friends the mainstream media owners in such a way that the ad agencies owned by his relatives get a healthy cut of the action --- before the National Assembly rams it through. Gee, thanks.)

Meanwhile, the proposed new urban planning law whizzed through committee with hardly any debate. The sum total of what has been officially published about this is that it has 46 articles and 14 chapters, but details are beginning to leak out. As in, how density restrictions will be applied by lot rather than neighborhood, so that a skyscraper full of new commuters can be readily inserted into an area that already has twice-a-day traffic jams. What could we expect, given that the developers were the only ones that were consulted in the drafting of this law?

Meanwhile, a presidential committee on the media is preparing a new law, and one member of this is the infamous signer of false diplomas, a man whose own alleged doctorate appears, on the evidence so far provided, to be itself fake: the University of Panama's “Rector Magnifico” Gustavo García de Paredes. We should thus expect a further extension of the present de facto journalist licensing, by way of the policies that treat only graduates of the wretched University of Panama School of Social Communication as “real journalists” who are allowed onto government email lists, into government press conferences and so on. Maybe this time they'll succeed in getting Miguel Antonio Bernal's radio show off the air --- after all, just because he's won international recognition for his work for Le Monde Diplomatique hasn't kept the bribe-takers and other mediocrities at the University of Panama's journalism school from sniffing that because he's got a doctorate in law rather than a journalism degree from a school with no student media he's unqualified. Maybe we'll even see de jure journalist licensing before the legislature again, this time with presidential support.

Pretty slick, isn't it?

It is if you're a true believer or an idiot.

If you are a thinking man or woman, however, you ought to be even more insulted by Martín Torrijos's corny information control games than you were by his campaign, which was run on the essentially meaningless “Sí se puede” slogan. But then, the ad cartel into which the president is married is noted for its monopolistic practices, not the quality of its publicity and certainly not for doing its market research homework.

What's going to happen one of these days --- maybe even before the next general elections, as in when the canal expansion referendum is held --- is that all the powers that be will spend a ton of money and muster the support of all the corporate media and all the rabiblanco notables, and most people will still vote the “wrong” way because they are sick of being manipulated as if they were children.