Artículos periodísticos acerca de la relación entre la administración Kirchner y la prensa hay muchos y muy buenos. Publicados en los principales medios del país, están al alcance de todos.
En cambio este artículo de Marcelo García publicado por el Buenos Aires Herald en su edición del 12/12/05, pg.3, no ha tenido tanta difusión (por estar escrito en inglés y haber aparecido en un periódico de poca distribución). No obstante, tal vez porque está pensado para que lo lean extranjeros, es un aceptable resumen del tema.
Lo presentamos hoy en su versión original en inglés. Próximamente incluiremos la traducción al castellano.

In control of the (good) news

Néstor Kirchner has said inflation worries keep him awake at night. Keeping the Clarin hotline alive and well may be his second biggest wory. If not for love, out of fear.

Niccolo Machiavelli believed it was better for rulers to be feared than loved. And that the Prince should make his people need his government "in every action and every possible situation" (Il Principe, 1532). Politiquette in the 21st century, however, dictates that it's more fashionable to keep the public on one's side by delivering good news rather than spreading fear. This is maybe what Mayor Sharpe James and the City Council of Newark, New Jersey, had in mind when they recently devised a new way to get their good-vibes messaga across: paying a weekly paper 100.000 dollars to print "good news" about them and their city.
President Néstor Kirchner would do that if he could. But doesn't he? Since taking office two-and-a-half years ag, Kirchner has ceaselessly tried to build, via a stick-and-carrot approach, a slavish media to report the good deeds of his administration. And succeeded he has, mostly, Kirchner, no more than an unknown governor from a remote province in southern Argentina when he took office, became the leading and most popular political figure in the land -overnight.
A columnist in La Nación last week quoted a presidential aide saying on a strict condition of anonymity: "One has only two options with Kirchner: either being a slave or an enemy".
The media, at least the largest and most influential, appear to stand among the former. But is that changing?
"Kirchner has become the editor-in-chief of most of the publications of Argentina", Jorge Asís said last week. The line carries a touch of intentional and provocative exaggeration very common to Asís, a writer of flavoury words, a government official in Carlos Menem's neo-conservative administration and a part-time politician.
But Asís, who stands on the "enemy"side of the Kirchner divide, is also the author of Diario de la Argentina (1984), a novel that, under the veil of fiction, narrates his years as young failed writer-cum-star reporter on Clarin in dictatorship years. While Kirchner surely worries little about the opinion of marginal "enemies" as Asís, the rising organization Asís described in Diario de la Argentina has evolved to become the flagship company of the country's largest and most influential media conglomerate. The Clarín group has almighty powers to mould Argentina's public opinion at will via its mammoth media portfolio (including TV channels, radio stations, cable television, Internet companies, etc.), its main asset being the snowball-effect puissance of Clarín's front-page. Clarín the newspaper, wich turned 60 this year, sells more copies everyday than all its competition put together. Clarín the group is a partner of the state and of the broadsheet La Nación in Papel Prensa S.A., the only Argentine company that manufacturates newsprint (a deal struck with the rulers of the bloody 1976-1983 dictatorship, when Asís wrote colour pieces in Clarín under the nom de plume Oberdán Rocamora).
Though overshadowed by the leftist Página/12 (which critics dub as Argentina's parallel Official Gazette and which rumours go is secretly owned by the Clarín group since the late 1990s), Clarín runs second in the "good news" press department under Néstor Kirchner. And it's been far from standing among "the enemies" (unlike La Nación, which the President himself described as "the opposition"). Having Clarín on their side (or at least in a state of neutrality) is good news for Kirchner & Co.
Clarín's portrayal of Argentina's reality is one of the key elements behind the public's good mood and Kirchner's popularity. But nothing lasts for ever.
"For the sake of credibility, the media complacency inexorably begins to attenuate", wrote Asís last week.
On Monday, for instance, the government swallowed some bad news from the INDEC statistics bureau: inflation hit 1.2 percent in November to surpass the initial 11 percent ceiling target set for the whole of the year. The next day, all newspapers (all but the shiny-happy Página/12) led with the bad news. Some carried panicky words: inflation was "scary" (La Prensa), had "shot up" (La Nación) and hit "80 percent of the products" (Infobae). Clarín picked a neutral verb ("increase") but printed the sharper 3.3 percent food-price increase in front-page bold letters.
Noticias, the best-selling news magazine, on Friday picked Clarín's CEO Héctor Magnetto as the man of the year. Magnetto is little-known to the public, yet Noticias describes him as the chief of the most powerful "virtual" political party in Argentina. Clarín, the report says, is making big money for the first time after the 2001-2002 Big Crisis, which pushed the group to the verge of bankruptcy or sale. Street wisdom in the corridors of powers says you cannot govern Argentina without negotiating terms with Clarín authorities. Noticias reports Kirchner, or at least his all-terrain aide Alberto Fernández, the Cabinet chief, speak by phone with Magnetto every day. Kirchner has said inflation worries keep him awake at night. Keeping the Magnetto hotline alive and well may be his second higgest worry. If not for love, out of fear.

CONTROL NOT TOO GOOD A WORD
"Control" continues to be the word dominating the news. It has benn so since Kirchner revamped his Cabinet two weeks ago to face the second half of his four-year-plus term after his candidates scored a commanding victory in the October 23 midterm election. To most of the leading media, the Cabinet reshuffle -which included the high-profile exit of heavyweight economy minister Roberto Lavagna- puts the President in full control of the administration. The use of the word "control" was good news for the Kirchner administration, whose initial legitimacy was weak after the President was elected with 22 percent of the vote in 2003 -the lowest mandate in Argentina's democratic history.
But the domination of the word "control" spread at last week into the economic sphere. And it mostly stood by, again, the word "inflation". Political volatility in Argentina has often followed increasing prices. Ask Raúl Alfonsin, the veteran Radical caudillo who won the presidency with soaring credibility ar the end of the bloody 1976-1983 military dictatorship and had to resign before concluding his six-year term in 1989 as hyperinflation devoured the country. Now Kirchner knows that a great chunk of his political future -including re-election in 2007- depends on how is administration can keep inflation at bay, i.e. control, next year.
But the Kirchner administration neglected the word "control" this time. The expression "price control" dates back to pre-neoconservatism years, freaking out the average pro-market economist. And it carries the stigma of having only preceded out-of-control hyperinflation almost every time it was mouthed by an Argentine economy minister in the past. No wonder new Economy Minister Felisa Miceli asked reporters in Government House on Tuesday not to call the government's action a "price control" strategy but rather one of "preice watch". Obedience (or fear) due, most of the leading papers erased the word "control" from their pages the next day.