Honduran Press Attacked on All Sides

By: Mark Fitzgerald Manuel Zelaya, the president of Honduras who was hustled out of the country in his pajamas at gunpoint last week, was no particular friend of the Honduran press -- and didn't care who knew it.

Two years ago in Miami, at the annual meeting of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA), Zelaya accepted an invitation to talk on the theme of press freedom. In sonorous Spanish, he started off with the sort of expected rhetoric about liberty and transparency you might expect.

And then he got on message.

Here are some excerpts from a column I wrote at the time about his speech, which touched off some barely polite shouting matches between IAPA publishers and the president:

"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," Zelaya went on, "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 organizations, 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 the time since then, Zelaya's government came under criticism from other press freedom groups such as Reporters Without Borders for his increasing reliance on a playbook of intimidation, bluster and legal threats against the press that was perfected in Venezuela by President Hugo Chavez.

But now Zelaya is at least temporarily removed from the presidency -- and the Honduran press finds itself in an even worse situation.

Call self-described President Roberto Micheletti and the generals and politicians around him what you will -- I prefer the straightforward description, coup leaders -- they have not just continued Zelaya's campaign against the press, they've intensified it.

In the immediate days after the ouster last week, broadcast stations were taken off the air. A week later, two TV stations remained off the air, one that was critical of Micheletti in the past and a government-owned station that hewed to Zelaya's viewpoint.

When a TV station in the northern Honduras Aguan region broadcast video of protests demanding the return of Zelaya, troops appeared and confiscated "all" its equipment, the director, Nahun Palacios, told the Tegucigalpa, Honduras-based Committee for Free Expression.

The military quickly got personal, Palacios said: "Armed men grabbed my children, they raided my home. The second in command in the armed forces, the captain of the third frigate, threatened me."

That's no isolated incident -- nor is involving family a tactic used only against broadcasters, according to IAPA. "Some editors, after
receiving constant threats against themselves and their journalists -- in their newsrooms and in cell phone messages -- have decided to protect their families by moving them out of their hometowns or out of the country," an IAPA report released Monday said.

In Aguan, Channel 5's equipment was eventually returned, but "with conditions," director Palacio said. And military officers invited all the press in the area to lunch -- with a strict message: Don't talk about the coup.

In the major city of San Pedro Sula, the TV station Canal 66 Maya TV was shut down immediately after the coup. When it was allowed to reopen, said Eduardo Maldonado, a former presidential candidate who hosted a show, "We didn't put out full information, only the official line."

Press freedom supporters in the U.S. are sometimes put off by the obviously partisan journalism practiced in much of Latin America. In Honduras, as Nicholas Case of The Wall Street Journal pointed out over the Independence Day weekend, TV stations often rent out time to "journalists" who are paid both by the station and the government -- and who enthusiastically shape coverage to please their paymasters. Channel 36, still closed by the coup, was another example of a station that was relentlessly pro-Zelaya.

But that should be no factor in defending a vigorous press, as San Antonio (Texas) Express-News Editor Robert Rivard, chairman of IAPA's Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, reminds in a statement about the Honduran situation.

"We cannot allow ourselves to be misguided by the existing polarization and permit discrimination against the media, reporters and columnists who might be on one side or the other politically," Rivard said.

"The essence of press freedom is "plurality and diversity," he added. "in this conflict we are seeing that all reporters and editors are being affected in one way or another by the conflicting groups."