When the ethics crashed
Since I was 13 years old I wanted to become a journalist, just for the excitement of revealing or uncover the truth. Later, at journalism school, I realized that those ideals had a translation in real life: the freedom of speech and the right to be informed.
Many discussions between peers and professors about how to exercise and protect those rights dominated the classrooms.
Back in the early 90’s that kind of debates were allowed in public without repressions for the first time in many years, since Guatemala was approaching to end the 36 years long civil war. Not long before, the State of Guatemala inflicted a great deal of violence to citizens in order to suffocate the leftist guerrilla movement and their fight for freedom and better human conditions for the poor. The state also managed to censor the news in local media about the horror. Many journalists and some media owners were killed, disappeared, incarcerated, or forced to exile when they reported about the war.
When I got a job as journalist, the classroom theory of ethics crashed hard in the day-to-day newsroom routine. As for the editors, they tended to impose their opinion on whether a story should be published or not. There was also the media owners. Opposite of what I used to believe, media moved from being bastions of freedom and democracy to be commercial and economic enterprises. Many of them even were part of huge corporations destined to protect a variety of interests far from to freedom of speech.
For example, in the Guatemalan newspaper “Siglo Veintiuno” (Twentieth Century in English, ironically) the owners were part of the country’s financial and social elite as well as of the Opus Dei catholic movement. Thus, implying that members of the elite were misbehaving in any way was prohibited. Nor could we publish anything about divorce, criticism against the Pope or the catholic church, the Pro Choice movement.
CNN in Spanish was very strict about how the US government was portrayed in their stories. Once the editor erased, from one of my stories, a statement from a local government employee assuring that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) financed the budget of the Guatemalan office against drug dealing. No explanations were given. On another occasion I had a mayor reprimand when I quoted an environment expert accusing an oil company of destroying the natural resources of a rural community. The oil company complained that the numbers the expert gave were false and the editor called my work shallow and unfounded.
It turned out that many other journalists had the same predicament about internal censorship as I did. But ongoing debates and sharing experiences has helped to create common and innovative ways to avoid censorship. The lesson I have learnt is that words are still powerful and that media plays a significant role in the globalization era. I also learned that censorship runs through all levels of information. Every line, second or quote matters.
Adelma Bercián
Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies
Guatemala