They said the injunction should hold until the Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of the effort to limit the power of private media companies. The ruling suspended the centerpiece of the Fernandez presidency, and all but guaranteed that her supporters and opponents would keep fighting for the known future.
Fernandez still planned to celebrate her campaign against corporate-funded speech with a Sunday rock concert and presidential address in the capital’s historic Plaza de Mayo.
Meanwhile, the media landscape in Argentina has mostly been reduced to warring alliances of newspapers, television and radio stations lined up for and against the government. Both sides devote vast resources to rewarding friends and attacking enemies in country’s insular political world.
Journalists in Buenos Aires say the collateral damage is painfully evident: The quality of news coverage has declined, and media credibility is abysmal, with any effort to hold officials accountable dismissed as low blows fed by partisanship.
“Between the government and Argentina’s leading papers, they’re destroying journalism,” said Roberto Guareschi, a former Clarin editor and professor at University of California at Berkeley who now edits Project Syndicate, which publishes opinion pieces internationally.
This fight “has diminished the quality of journalism in general,” agreed Andres D’Alessandro, director of the Forum for Argentine Journalism, whose survey of 1,000 reporters last year found that declining standards of their craft was their highest concern, after salaries.
The Miami-based InterAmerican Press Association sent a delegation to Buenos Aires to evaluate press freedom, and concluded Friday that “serious inconveniences remain for the free exercise of journalism in the country.”
IAPA said it “shares the stated goals of the media law — to bring about a greater plurality of voices and prevent excessive concentrations of media in a few hands.”
However, IAPA said “this healthy proposal” has been betrayed and “turned into an instrument used by the government to do away with its new worst enemy - Grupo Clarin.”
The government asked the Supreme Court on Friday to rule directly on the media law’s merits, bypassing multiple layers of lower courts where the case has been stuck for three years without a decision. Media regulator Martin Sabbatella said any additional delay “damages democracy.”
“The Argentine justice system isn’t prepared to fight against the corporations, because much of the courts have been colonized by the same corporations,” Sabbatella argued.