Télam news agency is Argentina’s main federal informative connection. Together with Radio Nacional, they are the only two media with correspondents in every province of a country where the population uses mostly the media to get information (and not social networks such as Twitter or X).
These very same media are, in turn, clients of Télam, a state news agency that we could call a “wholesaler”, providing written and audiovisual informative content. Journalists who work in private and state, community and university media know and value Télam’s contributions. Their statements last week speak for themselves.
The agency also provides free and open access to its website, providing a public service, as befits its function. Or, better said, did provide, because the national government blocked the access to the website, denying citizens of relevant information that, due to its geographical distribution, only Télam produces and disseminates.
Apart from preventing citizens from entering Télam’s website, the government also banned the agency’s staff from entering the buildings, thus paralyzing Télam’s activities.
“National government blocked the access to the website, denying citizens of relevant information that, due to its geographical distribution, only Télam produces and disseminates.”
Martín Becerra
Télam has been operating for almost 80 years and has had continuity during governments of different political parties, and also during civic-military dictatorships. The agency’s archive is a legacy that nurtures the knowledge of Argentina’s national reality. Shutting the agency down would be an attack to freedom of speech.
Télam is the second most important news agency in the Spanish language, after EFE, Spain’s state-owned agency. On the other hand, many private agencies in central countries need help from the State Treasury to survive.
Télam is the largest news agency in Latin America, where ten other countries also have state-owned news agency, Brazil, Bolivia and Peru among them.
For Télam to be shut down, President Javier Milei would need to overcome legal obstacles and gain legislative support, similar to what Mexican President Andrés López Obrador had to do a few months ago to close Notimex.
Indeed, the obsession against public media is age-long and goes beyond Argentina. The reason is that active public media operate and provide various and necessary services to private media. Not everything is market-related, especially in a country that, because of its geography, would be doomed to informative ostracism, multiplying “news deserts”, if it depended solely on profit.
Improvising from a dogmatic perspective could be very detrimental to the public’s access of information and could aggravate the attack to the press and the right of freedom of speech, which has already earned Milei a warning from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). Also, it would be burdensome and economically inefficient because of the huge amount of law suits that it would entail and that the State -that is, all of Argentina’s society- would end up paying.