Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy

“Give me a balcony and I will become president,” is a famous saying of José Maria Velasco (1893-1979), a prominent Ecuadorean politician who was five times elected president, first in 1934 and last in 1968.

It is unlikely that a balcony would still suffice today to be elected president but perhaps Mr Velasco, who was a rather charismatic figure in his days, might have done as well on television. After all, with an estimated 250 television sets, 418 radio receivers and a daily newspaper circulation of 72 per thousand people, in Ecuador too, politicians have come to depend heavily on the media to reach their audience.

Given this dependency the relations between the media and politics are bound to be fraught with controversy. No less in Latin America, where dissatisfaction with politicians is widespread and scepticism abounds about the impartiality of media reporting. Hence, the objective of the conference in Lima: to address the relations between the media and politics in Latin America with a view to identify ways of enhancing public confidence in both.

The conference is the first in a series taking place in 2006-2007 as part of the project ‘Media, politics and democracy in Central America and the Andes region’. The project is a joint initiative of NIMD, Radio Netherlands (RNW) and FreeVoice (FV). These organizations have worked thus far separately with a variety of partners in Latin America to promote democracy, pluralism in politics and in the media.

By organising discussions, trainings and workshops with politicians, journalists and academics from Central America and the Andes region, the project seeks to help improve the quality of both the way in which politicians communicate and the reporting about politics in the two regions.

As became apparent at the Lima conference, due to the democratisation of politics and the privatisation of the means of communication throughout Latin America, state control and censorship are no longer perceived to be the principle obstacles to pluralism in politics and in the media. Instead, there is a growing concern about the concentration of the media in the hands of a few media conglomerates, the economic interests that these corporations have and the political ties that their owners maintain to pursue these.

Therefore it was suggested at the conference that the project should try to involve the owners of media corporations in a dialogue with politicians about possible ways of safeguarding impartial reporting and pluralism within the media sector, e.g. by self-regulation.

Yet the conference also established that any such regulation would still require a properly functioning legal framework and a commitment on the part of politicians themselves to observe codes of conduct in their dealings with the media.

Another widely shared conclusion was that it would be in the interest of both democratic politics and pluralism in the media to provide for public financing of political parties and publicly accessible, if not fully state-sponsored but politically independent media. That such media can complement and flourish alongside commercial media, without falling prey to state control is evidenced by the case of public broadcasting in the Netherlands.

However, the conference concluded that any initiative to reshape the relations between politics and the media in Central America and the Andes region - including the (re)introduction of public broadcasting - can only be successful if it comprises of a joint initiative of all stakeholders to try and change both the political culture and the journalistic culture in their countries.