Are the mainstream media always late in denouncing human rights violations? Do they choose to keep silent on stories that contradict their ideological positions, business interests or perceived readers' concerns? This is an interrogation that has been floating on the Argentinian press for many years, in particular in the context of the recent trials and convictions of former military leaders who ruled between 1976 and 1983 and were responsible of massive human rights violations.
Last May
Horacio Verbitsky, one of the most famous journalists in Latin America, published a story in the daily
Pagina 12 exposing a secret meeting in 1978 between President Jorge Videla and three members of the Argentinian bishops' conference that discussed the practise of "disappearances" organized by the security forces. It was a major breakthrough in the battle to confirm contested facts in Argentina's and the Catholic Church's "official histories".
Up to now however the Argentinian mainstream media have kept silence on these revelations, as if they did not want to remind their readers that in these brutal 70s they did not denounce nor even cover these stories, therefore violating their own commitment to human rights principles and to the most basic standards of journalism.
The bravery of an expats' newspaper
In fact in these years the banner of decency and professional journalistic commitment was raised by a small team of dedicated journalists most of them working for the expats' newspaper,
The Buenos Aires Herald. Doggedly, courageously, at the risk of their life, this moderately liberal newspaper, as much disgusted by the violence of the far left guerillas as by the thuggishness of the security services and the far right, did its job. Thanks to their coverage of the disappearances the Buenos Aires Herald journalists provided comfort to the parents' victims, they informed the embassies and international opinion of what was really happening in a country in the midst of one of the cruellest periods of its history, and they saved hundreds of lives.
For those who want to reflect on the essential role of the media in (un)covering human rights abuses and to ponder on the passivity and complicity of major mainstream media two books of memoirs stand out:
Dirty Secrets, Dirty War, by David Cox,who tells the story of his father
Robert Cox, who bravely guided the newspaper through these somber years, and
A State of Fear. Memories of Argentina's Nightmare, by
Andrew Graham-Yool, who was at the time the news editor of The Herald.
"Free the prisoners of our darkness"
Both journalists tell a story of threats, intimidation, assassination plots and eventually exile. A story also of cowardice, passivity and complicity on the part of the corporate or mainstream media. Robert Cox describes a press practising self-censorship by default and willfully ignoring the unfolding terror.
In a June 6,1979 article, juste before he left Argentina due to death threats Robert Cox described the role of the press, what it was and what it should be, when history requires to take a stand : this article should be studied as a classic text in the realm of journalistic principles. "Out of such national suffering", writes Robert Cox, "a responsible
press should have arisen to keep the country informed so that it could
come to terms with history as history unfolded. Argentina must mature. We must come out into the light. We must release the prisoners of our darkness. We must replace euphemism with fact and evasion with the truth".
More than 30 years after this statement some of the Argentinian media still seem mired in denial and stuck in the old sinews of complacency and complicity as if they had not learned anything: neither human decency nor professional excellence.
