Asunción (Opinión) It is unbelievable to see the partial attitude of some sectors of the international press that systematically avoid and ignore public news that are of the utmost importance, especially when such news refer to certain figures that have been maliciously categorized, thus adopting a stance more for emotional reasons than for valid and verifiable ones. This is a professional defect that as journalists we never want to recognize. And it refers to the tendency to publish only what the owners of the media allow us to publish. This means that we should stop throwing our hands up in horror when we talk about the manipulation of information and want to raise up high our supposed “journalistic independence”.
It is not my intention to practice journalism of journalists, but we should “admit our guilt”, leave hypocrisy aside and recognize the partiality that we all have had in relation to certain particular matters and that we will go on having because we have been defeated by the pressure of the media and do not want to lose our jobs.
In the General Lino Cesar Oviedo Case, the tendentious information and the discriminatory and derogatory conceptualization of the constituent terms of the news proper should be specially pointed out. When reference is made to general Oviedo, he is systematically stigmatized with added concepts in the body of the news, such as: former coup-plotter general, former fugitive military commander, political refugee, among others. These preconceptions, result of our own opinion, or the opinion imposed by our editors, places us far away from one of the major ethical roles and pillar of our beloved profession: Impartiality of Information.
Namely: Lino Oviedo is not a political refugee. Conversely, the Brazilian Supreme Court has given him absolute freedom to live and travel within the Brazilian territory by unanimously deciding, on December 17, 2001, that the extradition request issued by the Paraguayan government covered up an evident political persecution. That is to say that the right thing to say would be, should the journalist want to add any personal qualifier about the referent, his capacity as political persecuted …
Such things do not happen when inevitably the “opinion published” is placed in a crucial point: the instituted bias against a specific figure, with the complex aggravating circumstance of the well-known South-American tendency to systematically reject any figure that comes from the Armed Forces. Of course, we can give some credit to such rejection due to what happened in the countries of the region under the terrible dictatorships generated by that sector of society.
However, nothing justifies the fact that we systematically give in to our social role as communicators – to inform our society independently from any tendency, belief o personal inclinations – due to illegitimate interests that have infiltrated and corrupted one of the most noble professional activities: to inform ...