TV Peru, the statements of Minister Silva and why an independent public television is important

“Channel 7 hits us as if it were a strange channel, we also have to make changes there”. The statements of the Minister of Transport and Communications (MTC) Juan Silva, surprised. Not just because for years TV Peru belongs to the Ministry of Culture, but opens, once again, a debate that seemed resolved: What is the place that public television should have in Peru?

For Fernando Vivas, a political journalist who for years investigated the history of Peruvian television, before entering a debate on management styles, one must take into account the nature of a minister as Silva, someone who, in his opinion, more than analyzing an ideology behind their words, rather it is a vacuum of ideas. “He is a person with few credentials, who does not have great learning from the public. He is someone who is completely oblivious to the debate about the convenience of having a public television and how different an official television should be from the government of the day“, Explain.

“It is evident that, by the naturalness with which he launched a threat to the current workers of TV Peru, the minister Silva does not conceive of that dimension. What he does conceive is an absolutely outdated version of power: whoever is in government has the right to certain loot and certain quotas. Everything else is illusion”, Affirms the journalist and sociologist.

Indeed, an official cannot ignore the autonomy of the National Institute of Radio and Television of Peru, a public medium with a directory that brings together people with a certain representative profile in the management of television. “TV Peru It is not a public channel as we would have liked, because we are waiting for a law that requires that its head be appointed by its board of directors and not hand-picked by the president”, He says. For the journalist of TradeThat the decision that the direction of the channel be appointed by civil society would have been crucial.

In recent years, either because of the personality of its most recent directors or because the digital signal allowed various public institutions to have their own television signal, the old pressures on TV Peru had waned. Nevertheless, there were no shortage of cases of interference by the Executive, of officials who they did not understand that a public channel is not a government medium with the mission of silencing the opposition and closing ranks with the government.

The gaseous representation

But beyond the ambitions of a public official, something that characterizes the current government and that can be seen in different sectors is an ambiguous discourse that appeals to regional representativeness in decision-making. Minister Silva, who would later say that his statements were “Taken out of context”It even suggested that municipalities buy radio and television equipment to produce content that would feed public television programming.

What model of public television supports this discourse? As Fernando Vivas points out, the regionalist demand speech against Lima’s centralism has been very useful to the government and this is where its victory in the elections lies. “So politically profitable, the government abuses it to generate polarizations, avoid criticism, and encourage endorsements on controversial issues. That happens now with the Minister Silva, which goes so far as to say things that directly collide with the specificity of television: the media cannot be dispersed among the population. They always have a minimally regional coverage. For the local, a major communication medium is not needed. We have to be realists“, Explain. That is, it is noted that the minister not only does not have a clear strategy, but also makes news from its inconsistency.

Management models to serve

If the government structured its regionalist intentions into concrete projects, if it thought to bring what are now gaseous bravado into public policies, what models of public television that occur in other countries could serve them? As Vivas explains, the history of television is divided into two great models. The first, the American model, is defined by its origin, genesis, and private evolution. That is the television that has been replicated in Latin America: mostly private signals that coexist with “small public plots” that address issues that are not very profitable for the private ones such as culture and education.

A second model, the researcher details, occurs in Europe, part of Asia and, exceptionally, Chile, where television is considered too powerful a medium to be handed over to private hands, its management from the State was considered convenient. “France, Great Britain, Italy, Spain or Germany are all countries with a very strong public television that covered all genres, including entertainment. Currently, these countries have opted for a mixed model, where the older public channels coexist with the new private channels, in open and healthy competition. “

In the Latin American case, Vivas highlights the case of Chile, when in the 1950s a television signal was chosen that did not belong to either the state or the private sector, but was left in the hands of the universities. “Therein lies the strength of the most solid public television in Latin America”, He says.

Another interesting model is Colombia, where television was handed over to the private sector under state-run concessions. “The private companies do not own any channel, but they produced for the channels run by the State. That is an interesting middle way out”, He warns. To these examples of competition and convergence between public and private signals, we must now add new consumer trends, such as television on demand and large streaming platforms. “We have many models of success that we could learn from“, Add.