An own agenda

It was only a few lines by the end of a three-hour-plus speech. President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner looked up at the Legislative Assembly in front of her, as if she were seeking some (political) class solidarity. Do not let your agendas be managed by “three or four monopolies,” she told the politicos of this land. “Think how they massacre all of you when you don’t do whatever they want.”

“They” is, in the President’s language, the media conglomerates (especially one of them) her administration has adopted as its main political rival almost since day one. The last paragraph in her State of the Nation’s speech on Thursday called for “national unity.” It is up to the citizen to complete the rest of the President’s syllogism: the media giants are committed to disunite the Nation.

The presidential emphasis on singling out some media as the enemies of a political nation that could otherwise unite around important causes may be both a sign of the administration’s obsession with words as much as a remnant of a time when the journalistic establishment wielded undisputed agenda-setting powers. Citizens now enjoy multiple — and often chaotic — sources of information. The government’s political war on the mainstream media — starting with a heads-on collision with the country’s media giant, Grupo Clarín, during a conflict over export duties with the farming sector in 2008 — climbs on a global wave toward the de-monopolization of the public word.

The President, probably out of political desperation rather than conviction, disputed the media’s agenda and won — at least by the evidence of the avalanche of votes which granted her reelection last October. And therefore, she felt entitled to give fellow-politicians some advice: “Keep your own agenda, your own ideas and your own objectives. And be certain that if you are right, you will win.”

Earlier in her speech, the President has sought to dissuade the opposition from struggling to get “an extra two lines” in the newspapers or “two minutes” on television. “That lasts for a very short time and it is ultimately worth nothing.” She spoke for over three hours instead.

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Having one’s own agenda also requires some communicational hardware. The President has been well aware of that throughout her media ordeal. Néstor Kirchner, her late husband and predecessor in office, started off by disputing the agenda on “software” terms. He would lash out at some of the country’s best-known editorialists (mostly from the conservative broadsheet La Nación) in public or instruct his staff to call up journalists who the administration believed were getting the story wrong. Only later on did the Kirchner administration come to the idea that fighting with words was not enough and that it also needed to control some of the hardware of public communications too.

The tools were (are) varied, some more politically correct than others (the Media Act passed by Congress in October 2009 among the former, the creation of para-State media financed by state advertising among the latter). The four-year media policy now allows the government to set its own agenda and/or ignore that of mainstream opposition media.

For evidence, check on the strategy of Vice-President Amado Boudou, who has been the star of an influence-peddling saga broken by the daily Clarín and followed up by La Nación, which includes stories tying him to shady business dealings running on a daily basis during the last month. After three weeks of silence, Boudou appeared this week on the staunchly pro-government primetime talk show 6,7,8 on State television and said he would not “jump on the agenda of these (media) groups” because “they have been very harmful for the country in the past.” Boudou only said that the allegations were “lies” and that “the truth” would gradually come out.

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The discursive obsession this column attributed to the Fernández de Kirchner administration last week, based on Transport Secretary Juan Pablo Schiavi’s first reaction to the Once train station tragedy on February 22, is not exclusive to the government. A choir of commentators was also obsessed with the President’s silence in the aftermath of the train slaughter. “The sound of (the President’s) silence gets louder by the minute,” said, for example, the renowned radio and television host Ernesto Tenembaum. Her silence was “sticky, uncomfortable and disrespectful,” he added. By then, the President had declared two days of national mourning. Heads of governments speak first through acts and only secondly through words, a maxim that applies both to Schiavi’s initial blunder and to the government critics. In reaction to that type of criticism, the President joked in a public appearance this week that even though she would not speak in public the next day, she continued to run the country.

The President’s public speaking skills is the best communication tool the government has. Her 23,000-word State-of-the-Nation address covered the entire political scene and set, at least for a while, the pace of the country’s political agenda. Her own presidential experience, however, has taught the President that words alone often fail to materialize enduring agendas. So should they know by now the mainstream media, which are stubbornly sticking to a one-way agenda of political erosion — so far to no avail.