Honduran President Manuel Zelaya used a speech about press freedom at the Inter American Press Association’s (IAPA) annual meeting Monday to blast his nation’s news media as biased towards its other business interests — touching off a barely polite shouting match with several questioners.
Clearly, some in the group attending the luncheon for Zelaya were angry at the president even before he made his remarks, because he had just returned from a friendly visit with Fidel Castro. And IAPA, in a report to be formally released Tuesday, has condemned Zelaya for making “threats” to “intimidate” news organizations.
An official in Zelaya’s administration also noted with apparent approval Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s decision to take Radio Caracas Television off the air by refusing to renew its license — another red flag for the IAPA publishers who uniformly loathe Chavez.
A Miami Spanish-language radio host demanded to know whether Zelaya had talked with the Cuban president about the utter lack of press freedom on the island. To her persistent questions, Zelaya said repeatedly that he keeps his communications with fellow leaders confidential — “just as I will when I see President Bush.” He also said he would not broach topics in a way that would “interfere with the internal affairs” of another country.
Zelaya’s speech in Spanish to IAPA started slowly with sonorous rhetoric about the importance of a free press in national social and economic development. He noted early on, too, that Honduras in his 20 months in office has adopted a freedom of information law, and had eliminated laws that made defamation a criminal offense.
But soon he was taking on the “powerful, big media” companies that he said dominate Honduras — and actually limit the average citizen’s right to be informed by a free press.
“It’s inexcusable that in Honduras there exists oligopolies of big chains of news media, print, radio, television,” he said.
“In Honduras, the owners of the powerful media are businessmen,” he said, “and they own banks, and construction — and they use the media for their own profits, for their own (economic) interests.”
Zelaya portrayed his nation’s press as “manipulative” and inclined to substitute “political propaganda” for objective coverage. “There’s a difference between reporting and opinion,” he said. “I say, let the reader make up his own mind.”
Honduran news organization, he suggested, have shut out his government’s point of view. “The only thing I have ever asked publicly of the powerful communications chains in my nation is that they concede, at least to the President, the right to reply and to clarify — and this fundamental right has been rejected by the principal media of Honduras.”
If the media are so powerful, one questioner asked him, how did he get elected?
“The people are more intelligent than the owners of the oligopolies,” Zelaya responded.
He also suggested he had a duty to oppose the news organizations in Honduras: “My right is to clarify information. It’s a fundamental right as a president. If a president, can’t clarify information or at least oppose manipulation, he’s a fallen president, a failed president.”
In an indication of the kind of reception Zelaya received at IAPA, his questioner, Aldo Zuccolillo, publisher of the Asuncion, Paraguay, daily ABC Color, responded in a loud voice: “You’re not answering the question!”
By Mark Fitzgerald
