Buenos Aires journalism traps Argentina in bubble

“Paint your village and refrain from painting the country, this is what the media in Buenos Aires are for,” seems to be the slogan imposed inside. Everything happens as if the possibility of thinking national was exclusive to Buenos Aires.

“Perhaps we should go back to the Argentine Confederation (1831-1861), led by Justo José de Urquiza, to find a historic moment when provincial journalism had a national impact. This is because Urquiza has funded media in various provinces to defend against journalism in Buenos Aires. After these first years of national organization, journalism in Buenos Aires completely re-established its exclusive hegemony. Thus, in the media, the national is porteño ”, concludes Fernando Ruiz, researcher and teacher dedicated to the study of journalism, and president of the Argentinian Journalism Forum (Fopea).

Sandra Valdettaro, director of the Center for Mediation Research and the Master in Cultural Studies at UNR, asserts that “from a macro perspective, the general trend of media coverage in Argentina has always been characterized by a centralist of the tone, mainly based on the Agenda of Buenos Aires. The recurring representation of the different aspects of Buenos Aires covers the information spectrum and circulates like a consolidated stereotype of the country which flattens the deep heterogeneities and inequalities of the different regions. This produces distorted images whose practical consequences are counterproductive in all areas, both politically, economically, as well as culturally and socially. “

And he adds: “When the motivations of the central media refer to other provinces or localities, the resource of stereotypes is also used, the case of media representations of Rosario being one of the most notorious examples.”

How strong will these stereotypes be that Rosario still carries the stigma of “comegato”, despite the fact that exactly twenty-five years have passed since that fact. It was in May 1996, in the midst of a deep economic crisis, that journalist Julio Bazán arrived in Rosario and broadcast images of a group of people roasting a cat on the grill in a villa in the Bajo on the program. “national” information from Canal 13. Ayolas, in the southern area. While acknowledging the gravity of the social situation, the then mayor, Hermes Binner, denounced that it was only a staging and that they had paid “100 pesos to film the exhibition. feline ”. Truth or lie, in a few hours the image has spread and repeated itself endlessly throughout the country and has been around the world.

It is that when the national broadcasters of Buenos Aires give information from the inside, it is always due to a natural tragedy, to a fatal road accident or to “showing” a fact but in a scandalous way. Or to report something exotic, chronic travel type. At best, the “federalism” of these “national” channels boils down to having fixed cameras inside (without microphones) for the audience to walk inside through the footage.

And this in a country where not only football is passion, but also the news: Argentina is the country in South America with the largest offer of national channels dedicated to information. There are a total of seven signals: TN, C5N, A24, Crónica TV, IP, La Nación + and Channel 26. Brazil has five and Chile only two. And another singularity is the geographical hyper-concentration of these channels, which broadcast 24 hours a day via cable television: they call themselves “national”, but six are from Buenos Aires and Channel 26 is based in Greater Buenos Aires, but most of his journalists come from the capital.

Martín Becerra, doctor of information sciences and researcher at Conicet, warns that the concentration in federal terms of the media “is a historical process which has been accentuated in recent years with the intersection of the media, telecommunications and the Internet. . The example of the merger between Cablevisión and Telecom – the most important in Latin American history in the communications sector – illustrates the new gigantic scale of the trend in recent years. Technological convergence has many effects, but if the state does not protect competition and if it does not control excessive concentration, a characteristic deepens that ends up affecting citizens ”.

And he adds: “The media ownership map is even more centralized in Buenos Aires than other economic activities, and this happens because in addition to being economically important, the media are still very important politically and are the lubricant for other activities. dialogue with governments, banks, large companies and the judiciary ”.

Journalists from the seven news channels always talk about Buenos Aires, what is happening there, from the most important issues to the most trivial. National issues are obviously approached with a focus on Buenos Aires. They speak as if everything that happens in the capital is what happens in Argentina. They do not do it out of spite, it is neither more nor less a demonstration that no one is speaking out of nowhere. And so, on “national” screens, there is nothing about the social, political, economic and cultural diversity of the different regions of the country.

A traffic accident on 9 de Julio Avenue is bigger in any of these seven canals than a week-long bus strike in any city in the interior. The fall of a tree in the district of Palermo Hollywood is worth more television seconds than the fire of hundreds of hectares in the Delta in front of the province of Santa Fe. The complaint of a group of merchants of Buenos Aires has as many visibility in these media as the invisibility of the claims of the businessmen of Tucumán. How many minutes of television would these channels give to a meeting between the governors of Entre Ríos and Santa Fe? Imagine, however, what would happen if those who met were the head of the city of Buenos Aires and the governor of Buenos Aires.

And so, by dint of hours and hours on the air, a large part of the country knows, for example, that the Minister of Health of Buenos Aires is called Fernán Quirós. But does anyone not know who is the Minister of Health of the province of Salta, but at least the name of its governor, or that of Neuquén, or that of Tierra del Fuego, or that of Corrientes? , or that of Catamarca? It is clear that the political leadership of Buenos Aires has these seven channels as springboards for its political projection at the national level. It is no coincidence that out of the last five presidents of the Nation elected at the polls, three left the city of Buenos Aires (Fernando de la Rúa, Mauricio Macri and Alberto Fernández), and two were at the head of Buenos Aires. government. It is also no coincidence that since 2003 the province of Buenos Aires has been governed by leaders born in the city of Buenos Aires: Felipe Solá, Daniel Scioli, María Eugenia Vidal (who was previously deputy head of government de Buenos Aires) and Axel Kicillof. And not to mention the effects of this media concentration on governance.

“If a certain bubble of the middle class of Buenos Aires is added to the bubble of Buenos Aires in which this journalism is encapsulated, it helps us to understand some of its difficulty in connecting with the whole country and all social sectors. “, explains Ruiz, holder of Fopea.

Valdettaro, of the UNR, warns that “the local media, for their part, generally depend on such central coverage, interspersed with content which, most of the time, is too local and little contextualized. However, the current news agenda is very abundant and complex, with many media (graphic design, radio, audiovisual) which offer differentiated and singular styles, which manage to distinguish themselves from this general trend by providing information and quality analyzes, and attentive to particularities. from each region. Social networks and platforms add complexity to this information regime, building transversal audiences who navigate according to their own criteria and stylistic needs ”.

The mass media are the main instrument for building social meaning. And in this geographically concentrated communicational scheme, the consolidated, legitimized and disseminated social imaginaries respond to the view that exists in the federal capital, more precisely of its middle and upper classes, relegating the regional and social diversity of the country.