“The urgent need to reform and revitalize public television in Chile”

* The author is part of the community of readers of La Vanguardia

If there has been an absent actor during the entire constituent process that Chile has experienced in recent years, it is undoubtedly Televisión Nacional de Chile (TVN), which despite everything that has happened in the country, continues to function from inertia. incomprehensible, incapable of behaving as a public medium, which allows the meeting of society in all its plurality.

The reasons for this inertia are widely known, and they respond to a lack of communication policy from the State, which responds to the context of the return of democracy in Chile, where the market ended up regulating the media system, which generated a brutal concentration of these over time (written press, radio and television) and abandonment of public and community media.

This is what the report called More breadth, more voices and more democracycommissioned by the Ministry of the General Secretariat of Government (SEGPRES) and carried out by the University of Chile, the University of La Serena and the University of La Frontera, which It was delivered and presented at the beginning of this year 2023.

This study reveals the enormous problems that Chile has regarding access to information and communication rights.

Although it does not propose anything very new and that we have not previously known, it was a participatory and plural instance of work, where different referents and civil society organizations from the communication field were present, with the exception of course of the National Press Association (ANP). ).

This is how this report raises the need to promote cross-cutting issues in the different media in a decentralized manner (interculturality and gender perspective), incorporate media literacy in the school system, promote instances aimed at indigenous peoples, migrants and the LGTBQ+ community , regulating state advertising in the face of underfunding of community media, strengthening public media, creating regulatory frameworks to control hate speech and improving access to connectivity throughout Chile, among many other recommendations.

In the case of public television, particularly that of Televisión Nacional de Chile (TVN), it is recommended to finance and implement Law 19,132, as well as to expand the channel’s directory, in order to be a much more plural space, representing really to the State and the diversity of civil society, which is an enormous debt and which has brought costs in the type of democracy that we have built as a country in recent decades.

Hence the importance of resuming the public role of TVN, which, due to having to finance itself and compete with other private television channels, has had to adapt its programming and end up reinforcing the agenda of the large concentrated media, leaving aside its mission. educational and social, that helps to build a more democratic country and that belongs to everyone.

Surely there will be some who continue to defend the TVN model, as it has relative autonomy from the governments in power, as happened with the misuse of it by the Chilean dictatorship, as well as certain recent left-wing governments in the region that have coapted the public media, but there are other public television experiences that have not been official spokespersons, as has happened with channels such as the BBC in England, ARD and ZDF in Germany, NHK in Japan or RVTE in Spain.

In turn, it can be argued that TVN was able to sustain itself financially for several years and compete with other private channels, having its heyday in the 1990s and 2000s, but that has dramatically reversed in recent years.

The media are not a big business or to become a millionaire, but rather are key instruments of the large economic groups to install their agenda, and not allow issues that can politicize and generate awareness in society, that allow generating important institutional transformations to become visible.

This is not about believing that the media control everything and that we are passive beings who do not think about the information we receive, but the media are the ones that ultimately build public opinion, which in the Chilean case, is totally currently uploaded to the security agenda.

The government of Gabriel Boric has a historic opportunity to recover Televisión Nacional de Chile (TVN), as the report mentions More breadth, more voices and more democracywhich reminds us that, without a media policy, Chile will continue to have a low-intensity democracy.

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