05 May 11 | News and features
Argentina has found an effective way of stifling independent inflation data — fining economists who question the official government statistics. Ed Stocker reports
In Argentina, inflation is never far from the media agenda. Primetime news channels endlessly debate the monthly rises in the canasta básica — the basic monthly family shopping basket — and the apparent divergence from official statistics.
Expressing contrasting views about the level of inflation in the country has become a divisive issue, highlighted by the decision of Internal Commerce Secretariat to fine several companies in April over their price-rise data.
Companies fined include Estudio Bein & Asociados, Finsoport, M&S Consultores and GRA Consultoras, as well as Graciela Bevacqua, a former employee of Indec, the state organisation charged with gathering statistics.
The secretariat claimed companies were being fined for publishing information that lacked “scientific rigour”, adding that if it was broadcast by media organisations it could “lead to error, deception or confusion”.
Miguel Kiguel , a former economist for the World Bank and head of the Econviews financial consultancy, received a fine of AR$500,000 (£73,000) for his forecast.
Speaking to Index on Censorship, he said: “This whole episode [fine] is surprising. The process is based on fair commerce laws that don’t apply to professional services and misleading advertising –– but we don’t carry out any type of advertising.
“It’s a way of scaring professionals who suggest that inflation is higher than the figures published by Indec.”
Asked if the government’s actions amounted to a freedom of expression violation, he replied: “Effectively these fines limit freedom of expression. The whole case is based on public declarations that I made in newspapers and on the radio. It is very worrying that one can receive very high fines for expressing one’s opinion on inflation and monetary policy.”
Last Thursday (28 April ) members of the Internal Commerce Secretariat defended their decision to impose fines. El Cronista Comericial, a newspaper that had previously questioned the reasons behind the fines, published an article by Internal Commerce national director Fernando Carro and Graciela Peppe, entitled “The truth will make us free”.
In the article they wrote: “One cannot assume that the resolutions behind the fines violate rights guaranteed by the National Constitution… Claiming that the fines infringe constitutional rights has no basis.” They added that suggesting government actions were an act of censorship showed a “profound confusion”.
The article continued: “From the ongoing investigation it has been possible to prove that the levels [of inflation] ascertained and disseminated by the firms that have been punished are little more than an artificial invention, based on reflections lacking the smallest hint of reliability.”
Earlier this year Indec published its figures for 2010, stating that inflation for the year was 10.9 per cent. Other economists suggest the unofficial figure is closer to 25 per cent.
Last April a group of pro-government activists interrupted the launch of a new book criticising Indec at Buenos Aires’ annual Feria del Libro (Book Fair). Gustavo Noreiga’s Indek: historia íntima de una estafa (Indek: the intimate story of a fraud) criticises the running of the statistics body, claiming President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner exercises political control over it.
Ed Stocker is a freelance writer based in Buenos Aires and London
01 Feb 11 | Uncategorized
Financial Times editor Lionel Barber’s Hugh Cudlipp Lecture, delivered last night, managed to fit the many and varied dilemmas facing the UK press into a short and entertaining speech.
It is pretty much accepted by anyone in possession of a press card that print media is in decline; but Barber points out that this a very much a western world phenomenon. In some markets, print is thriving:
These figures largely reflect a western disease: the virus has yet to strike the world’s biggest countries, China and India; and it is not true of many emerging countries such as Brazil, where the appetite for news in all forms is growing fast.
Since 2005, for example, the number of paid-for Indian daily newspaper titles has surged to 2,700, according to the World Association of Newspapers. The circulation of Hindi papers rose from less than 8m in the early 1990s to more than 25m last year. Meanwhile, the total circulation of Brazilian newspapers has expanded by 1m over the past decade to 8.2m, with steamy tabloids among the biggest beneficiaries.
Barber goes on to question why US and UK newspapers are suffering. Could it be because the press is a little too close to those it is meant to scrutinise?
In hindsight, Watergate was a curse as well as a blessing for American journalism. The courageous reporting of the Post and the New York Times – coupled with the favourable Supreme Court rulings on publication of the Pentagon Papers – were landmarks for the interpretation of First Amendment rights and the freedom of the press. But they also encouraged the cult of celebrity and media self-absorption.
In the words of Eric Alterman, as reporters became more sophisticated and respected, the top rank came to be regarded as the social equal of those people they were reporting on such as Senators and CEOs. Some came to identify more closely with their subjects rather than with their readers. In short, they joined the Establishment.
Does this apply to Britain?
[…]I believe we have entered our own period of media self-absorption, driven partly by our industry’s financial difficulties. Second, we have in recent years witnessed if not exactly a merger of the media and political class, certainly an increasingly intertwined relationship which, I suspect, does not necessarily serve the interest of either.
Today, many members of the political elite in Britain have all worked in or with the media industry. David Cameron worked in a commercial TV company. Jeremy Hunt ran a publishing business. Michael Gove was a newspaper columnist. Boris Johnson was a magazine editor (and still writes a weekly newspaper column). Ed Miliband was a TV researcher. And Ed Balls was an editorial writer for the FT.
This new social network in Britain may be more informal than formal, but it still comes across as far too cosy. Arguably, our elected representatives have become a tad too respectful toward broadcast and print media.
Many would argue that the web has broken up the influence of this network, with the exploits of Wikileaks in 2010 blowing traditional media out of the water. But Barber, quoting New York Times editor Bill Keller, questions this narrative:
Keller’s observation that Assange was primarily a source is highly pertinent. That plain fact should tamp down the fevered debate over whether WikiLeaks spells either the end of diplomacy or a new age of journalism. Like Keller, I believe it does neither.
Barber is also quite scathing on the News of the World phone-hacking scandal:
The suspicion must remain that News Corporation assumed that it enjoyed enough power and influence in Britain to make the phone hacking controversy go away.
Of interest to Index readers is this line, which will have to be borne in mind as the government’s defamation bill comes before parliament:
Many MPs are itching to retaliate for the humiliation of the expenses scandal, but statutory regulation would be a grave step in the wrong direction.
Press freedom is woven into the fabric of our nation. We do not want to go down the same road as countries such as Argentina, Hungary and South Africa which have adopted or are about to adopt new laws curbing press freedom. Democracy, it should be remembered, is not just about holding elections.
There is a case for rebalancing the right to privacy and the protections offered by Britain’s overly onerous libel laws which are weighted in favour of the well-heeled plaintiff. But Westminster should also tread carefully with regard to privacy, lest the rich and famous, on and off the football field, become untouchable.
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03 Nov 10 | Americas, Mexico
Las Aparicio, a telenovela produced by Argos Comunicacion, the cutting-edge Mexican production house headed by Epigmenio Ibarra and his wife Veronica Velasco, has managed to anger both the Mexican church and Venezuelan president. Called “immoral” by Hugo Chavez and Mexican prelates, the series finished in September on the free-to-air television channel Cadena Tres in Mexico. Its critics were angered by “open scenes of lesbianism,” and a strong dosage of realism. The programme is about a clan of women who only have daughters and turn that curse into a strength. The characters include ghosts, a lesbian couple and divorced professional women and the women have sex and look to life after divorce. A typical Argos recipe for breaking taboos in Mexican television. After having initially pulled the programme from schedules at the prodding of local church officials, 11 Mexican cities eventually got to watch the show and Chavez finally relented and allowed the series to be shown on Venezuelan television at midnight.
Mexico is the home of the telenovela. The genre in the 1940s. There are various storylines, but the most popular ones are the telenovela rosa, which always involves the story of a poor woman who falls in love with a rich man, and the evil woman who tries to stop the love from flourishing. When I first moved to Mexico, I spent the first year watching these telenovelas to see if they have anything to say about Mexican culture. They don’t.
Epigmenio Ibarra is the antithesis of a rosa producer. At the beginning he was seen as an anti-christ just for producing a different type of story. Television owners think that people want stories of chivalry and traditional values that put religion at the top of the heap, says Epigmenio, a medium built man with glasses who has a penchant for staring down at his interviewer. I met Epigmenio in Central America as he reported the news for the Mexican news agency Notimex. A clever man, he managed to find sources on both sides of that vicious civil war — he was loved by both army generals and guerrilla leaders. He remains close friends with former guerrilla leader Joaquin Villalobos who teaches at Cambridge.
Seventeen years ago, Epigmenio returned home after the Central American wars ended. He tried to continue reporting on the Gulf War and the Balkan wars, but it did not feel the same. He decided to take a stake in the now-changing Mexico, which was in the throes of moving from a one party system, run by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). He met his wife Veronica Velasco, a television reporter, and tried to get into the national television business. In Mexico there was only room for two news networks, Televisa, which is the second largest media conglomerate in Latin America after Consorcio Globo, and Television Azteca. “They closed the doors on us,” he recalls. “So we started doing telenovelas.”
Epigmenio and his wife started working with Azteca, as Veronica was a former television star who had worked with one of the chain’s channels. They did a series that investigated crime and justice, but they broke big when they produced political drama Nada Personal a thinly veiled critical look at the political soap surrounding former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. With Nada Personal, the socially conscious telenovela was born.
Since that first hit, Argos has produced a series of groundbreaking programmes that have taken on lesbianism, womanising priests, philandering politicians and strong women. The house’s most recent series, Capadocia — which it produced with HBO — deals with women in prison, and chapters are inserted with real life “hijuelos” or bastards, capturing real stories of drug trafficking, political corruption and social upheaval, which Argos introduces in the weekly or daily episodes, making the series uncannily close to real life.
“We are not interested in making a telenovela that features women who cry but still have perfect makeup. We look for a thinking viewer who does not want to be fed a story,” says Veronica Velasco, a tall, dark-haired striking woman.
Argos Comunicacion, the couple’s production company launched in 1992 — is today a sort of family business, with Epigmenio and Veronica at the helm, and other family members working in key positions, including one of Epigmenio’s daughters, Erendira, who played a lesbian in Las Aparicio. They have other business partners, including Mexico’s richest man Carlos Slim, who has invested in their production house. But the couple controls the content of Argo’s productions.
Epigmenio and Veronica recount the awards their series have obtained in the last 17 years, more out of awe at having conquered all odds than out of ego. “We won five awards in the recent International Festival of Telenovelas in Argentina,” adds Epigmenio, as we sit around a large square table in his spacious office. It is here in the Casa Azul — a turn of the century large mansion in Colonia Condesa — that he runs a production/talent scout and drama school conglomerate. Aware that many of the telenovela or Mexican starlets come out of the drama schools run by the two large television networks, he has also focused in trying to create more sophisticated and focused talent.
“It is the first time one telenovela has won all those awards in the festival in Argentina,” he continues. “We use the same writers TV Azteca uses, but they don’t win awards there,” tells Veronica. Cadena Tres was less of a struggle for Argos, which has had legendary falling outs with TV Azteca, its old outlet. Cadena Tres is a smaller media conglomerate. This new network is run by another Mexican millionare, Olegario Vasquez Raña, who owns hospitals and a newspaper.
Epigmenio continues to be involved in politics. He supported Andres Manuel Obrador the candidate on the leftist Partido Revolucionary Democratico (PRD), who ran for president in 2006 and lost to current president Felipe Calderon, amidst charges of vote fraud. On his twitter account, he writes anti-government messages. But one thing he learned being a war correspondent is that peace should be kept at all times. He says El Salvador’s biggest achievement was to reach peace after twelve years of war.
Argos’s latest plan are to produce a new soap called “The Weaker Sex”, a parody of a group of men who are abandoned by their wives and girlfriends. It is an old story in the United States and Europe. But this is a serious topic in a society that it is still dominated by the macho man and his virgin girlfriend telenovela that the other networks produce.
Still, Epigmenio and Veronica continue to be the outsiders who learned how to be insiders in Mexico. Their number one lesson from all the years producing telenovelas and series is: “You can’t touch the church and its values. We learned that when we tried to write about a womaniser priest. So we have figured out how to work out socially important stories without elaborating much on the church.”
Mexico is a very religious country, says Epigmenio. “We were told all priests were good when the Maciel scandal was at its height.” [Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ, a conservative catholic sect, was exposed as a sex offender and has subsequently been formally denounced by the Vatican].
“We believe that the analysis commercial television uses to measure what Mexicans and Latin Americans want is wrong,” says Epigmenio “Lets not assume entertainment is something vacuous…television should also take risks,” he concludes.
Ana Arana finds out how the producers of Mexican soap operas sidestep government and Church outrage