SANTIAGO – Representatives of the Journalists’ School of Chile will commemorate 100 years of La Nación with its former employees, and will not take part in the official celebration organized by the now privatized newspaper.
The Association of Journalists in Chile also described the situation as an unfortunate setback in achieving a diverse and pluralistic media system. They also noted, “The lack of commitment and clarity regarding the challenges of the country works to prevent the type of media system we need”, even more when the activity on March 22nd which has called the controlling group LANOVO- owned by Luis Alberto Novoa Miranda, Novoa and Limited Company, have confirmed their participation as the highest authorities.
“As a professional organization we cannot be part of this celebration, and express our most emphatic rejection of the privatization of La Nación by the government of Sebastian Piñera,” the group expressed.
Such a measure, they reiterated, meant not only that the State would lose a means of relevant communications, but also the loss of an historical archive from the privatization of the file of journalism that had existed since 1917 and the sale of “an important heritage, as demonstrated by the Supreme Court to establish that the amount of alienation was less than the actual”.
“Our participation in this event would validate the decision, and being that we still believe it is necessary to make efforts to resolve it, we must concur with all those who considered the operation not only a mistake but a regrettable sign and a step backwards in the establishment of a diverse and pluralistic media system,” they pointed out.
In this regard, they reiterated a call for “instituting in Chile a media system composed of three sectors: private, social community or non-profit, and public. As well, La Nación, along with TVN was an important part of the public sector”.
Soon after assuming the Presidency in 2010, billionaire businessman Sebastián Piñera had privatized daily La Nación, or ‘The Nation’.
The last printed edition of La Nación was published on December 16, 2010 , after which the media remained exclusively as an information portal on the Internet.
The newspaper is currently owned by Comunicaciones Lanet SA , a communications company whose legal representative is Luis Novoa Miranda.
Translated by Kendall Thiele | The Santiago Times Staff
