The Roots of Conflict between Private Media and Left-Wing Governments in Latin America: The Brazilian Case

Abstract

In recent years, the accession to government by new left-wing political forces in Latin America has led to the emergence of conflicts between the policies enunciated by the presidencies and important private media groups which, in many cases, have given sustained coverage adverse to these governments. Focusing on the case of Brazil, in this paper we approach the roots of this conflict, which have manifested themselves in several countries in the region and to a great extent concern the public agenda of Latin American countries.

Keywords:

• media
• Latin America
• governments
• Brazil
• Lula

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas (CONICET) of Argentina. I am deeply grateful for the feedback provided by Professor Mario Toer and the two anonymous reviewers of this journal.

Notes on Contributor

Ariel Goldstein is a master in Political Science at the Institute of High Social Studies, University of San Martin. He also is CONICET doctoral fellow at the Institute of Studies of Latin America and Caribbean at the University of Buenos Aires. His main field of research is media and politics in contemporary Latin America and specifically the Brazilian case. Recent publications include “From ‘Realism or Isolation’ to a ‘Bolivarian Diplomacy’: Brazilian Foreign Policy in O Estado de S. Paulo during Lula da Silva's First Rule” (2013) in Reflexión Política and From Expectative to Confrontation: O Estado de S. Paulo during Lula da Silva's First Rule, Centro Internacional de Estudios Superiores para la Comunicación de América Latina (forthcoming).

Notes

¹The Argentinian case has been variously described depending on the author. Even if authors like Paramio (2006) have situated this case on the axis of the “populist” governments of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, probably the most fitting assessment comes from Laclau (2006), who claims that Argentinian Kirchnerism contains both populist and institutionalist elements, making it a hybrid in this classification normally based on the existence of the two lefts.

²I argue that one of the obstacles to characterizing the current “political cycle” (Ramirez Gallegos 2006) of popular governments in the region (Aboy Carlés 2013) is due to the difficulty in linking the particularities that differentiate each of these processes with a broad category which can appropriately refer to all of them. To reduce uncertainty, with a pretension not without political consequences, some have chosen to classify these experiences in two leftist groups. This tension, moreover, between general grouping categories and experiences of a particular type, characteristic of the social sciences as a whole, is precisely what is expressed in the dissimilar categorizations that different authors have used to define this political cycle, such as “post-neoliberal” (Sader 2009), “progressive” (Zibechi 2005), among others.

³By way of example, in a recent interview Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa referred to the “terrible opponent faced by the progressive governments in Latin America: the media companies that take the place of right-wing parties in decline, blatantly make politics and try to destabilize and conspire on a daily basis” (Sader 2013a; originally in Portuguese).

⁴In the last two cases of Venezuela and Ecuador, unlike the case of Argentina, the area of application of these laws is not only the concentration of media ownership, but the production of contents thereof. As Waisbord (2013) states: “the Resorte Law deserves special attention because it was a key legislative tool of Chavez's to produce profound changes in media content. This was not a law designed to transform ownership structures and the political economy of the industry, such as ‘media law’ in Argentina, but to regulate audiovisual media outlets” (Waisbord 2013, 64; originally in Spanish).

⁵My interview with O Estado de S. Paulo leader-writer José Neumanne Pinto, Sao Paulo, March 20, 2014.

⁶Interview with Ricardo Kotscho, Press Secretary to Lula in his first term, March 27, 2012, Sao Paulo.

⁷In this context, despite accusations against the government, Sader (2013b, 140) states that: “Investment in social policies began to generate results, changing the government's fundamental basis of social support to the poorest and most overlooked regions of the country. Faced with the possibility that Lula would trigger a big popular mobilization in defense of the government and of his office, the opposition receded and pulled out all stops on the chance of bleeding the government's resources in Congress and defeating him in the 2006 elections. But the effects of social policies allowed Lula to be reelected, consolidating a new kind of government support, parallel to the recovery of growth. This trend had to do directly with the change of the government's economic team and their general priorities, who abandoned the conservative orientation of economic policy, replacing it with a model of development that structurally articulated economic growth with income distribution policies” (originally in Portuguese).

⁸See “Franklin defende agencia reguladora para a mídia,” a notice in the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, p.19, about Franklin Martins, the Secretariat of Social Communication of the Brazilian government, and his proposals on media regulation, on October 8, 2010.

⁹ This initiative meant that several officials facing corruption charges would be stepping down: Minister of Agriculture Wagner Rossi, leader of the PMDB, who came after the Chief of Staff Antonio Palocci (PT) and the Minister for Transport Alfredo Nascimento (PR). Decisions generated tension within the governing coalition, especially in connection with the PT-PMDB alliances, where Vice President Michel Temer and a significant number of representatives and senators belong.

¹⁰During the June 2013 demonstrations, which shook Brazilian politics, some conservative press media like O Estado de S. Paulo went from initial criticism, as they denounced the disturbance of public order posed by the demonstrators, to the reivindication of these demonstrations, as they then understood that if they were redefined in a conservative fashion, they could affect the government's political capital, as they indeed did.

¹¹As Kitzberger (2012, 13) puts it in a recent article: “a limit lay in the communicative power of big media actors, especially in their ability to affect the relationship of the government with the public and society. Any attempt to put any kind of regulation of the sector under discussion—predictably—meant a declaration of war with the actors who dominated the media field” (originally in Spanish).

¹²In Venezuela, the important role played by the private media groups in the coup against President Hugo Chavez in 2002, which produced a watershed in Venezuelan politics and led to the enactment of the law RESORTE, and in Argentina, where the conflict between the Argentine government and the agricultural entities produced a scenario of polarization which later led to the adoption of a new Law on Audiovisual Communication Services, showed moments where the rise in the conflict between the government and mainstream media groups led to governments claiming to exercise reforms in media systems.