Argentine Government is Now Against Telesur and Russia Today

June 11, 2016

In a new action against media plurality, after removing Telesur from Open Digital Television (TDA), the Argentine government of President Mauricio Macri also eliminated Russia Today (RT) from that public system.

RT was broadcast on TDA, a free and open network of TV channels created by the government of Cristina Fernandez, so that more people could have access to television nationwide.

It was the result of an agreement signed by the then Argentine head of State and Russian President Vladimir Putin in October 2014 and made public through a videoconference.

The new leadership of Radio y Television Argentina Sociedad del Estado (RTA SE), which administers the country’s state-owned media, suspended the broadcasts of RT, a decision that was officially informed to the Russian TV network on Thursday, RT reported.

According to the official communication from RTA SE, the suspension of RT broadcasts will be effective in 60 days, according to RT.

Two days before, on June 7, RTA SE sent a similar communication to Telesur, although the deadline to suspend its broadcast on TDA is only 15 days.

Previously, the Macri administration decided to terminate the contract by virtue of which the Argentine State participated as a stakeholder in Telesur, because it was shared by other countries like Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay and Venezuela.

The communication was sent on March 27, 2016, by the president of Sistema Federal de Medios y Contenidos Publicos de Argentina, Hernan Lombardi.

However, days before that, the company Cablevision, a property of the monopolistic group Clarin, had removed the broadcasts of Telesur from its offer of cable channels.

That way, Argentina became the first founding partner of Telesur to leave the Latin American channel.

Despite the verse that they defend the plurality of voices, they are precisely silencing plural voices, those that are not functional because they defend the reality, the truth that they do not want to be known and to transcend, said the Argentinean political scientist Stella Calloni.

Even before terminating the agreements with Telesur and now with Russia Today, the new authorities of the state-owned news agency Telam decided to rescind a reciprocity and cooperation agreement with the Latin American News Agency Prensa Latina.

The leadership of Telam informed Prensa Latina of such a decision on February 18, 2016.

http://www.plenglish.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4965071&Itemid=1

Source: Prensa Latina