Argentina Tackles Media Ownership Concentration

[Commentary] It doesn’t look good for Argentina’s biggest broadcast conglomerate. After four years of battles between Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s government and Argentine multimedia mogul Clarín Group, Supreme Court judges, by a 6-1 vote, declared constitutional a law that forces media companies to shrink their broadcast divisions. Argentina’s media law has been heralded by UNESCO officials as a model of media democratization in an effort to combat public disinformation and media monopolies. The Supreme Court of Argentine sided with the government on curtailing the size large private media conglomerates like Clarín, while maintaining that public media should not be used as a “mere instrument to support government policies, or as a means of eliminating dissenting voices.” The court stressed that the Federal Authority on Audiovisual Communication Services (AFSCA), the government body regulating audiovisual media, “should be independent” and that the law in question “should be applied equitably and using due process.”