What shouldn’t be expected of the Herald

Replying to those who want this paper to abandon basic principles of journalism

 

By Sebastián Lacunza

Editor-in-Chief

For the third time this year, one of the managing editors of local newspaper La Nación, Pablo Sirvén, referred to the Buenos Aires Herald in his Sunday column. Each time, Sirven has accused the newspaper of being pro-government, although he has qualified this supposed political leaning as “low intensity.”
It’s comforting, in a way, that Argentina’s most influential newspaper thinks another daily that seeks to travel down a dignified path, albeit with modest pretensions, is worthy of so much of its time and space.
Sirvén’s latest attack toward the Herald focused on the interview this paper published with the repressor Omar Graffigna, who led the Air Force during much of the 1976-1983 dictatorship. The La Nación managing editor characterized the interview as a “favour” to Horacio Verbitsky given that Graffigna denied that the Página/12 columnist had written his speeches during the dictatorship, contradicting recent media reports.
Sirvén expressed suspicions that it would have suddenly “occurred” to journalist Luciana Bertoia to call Graffigna and carry out an interview that, as was published, began addressing the Malvinas War and the repression carried out by the military dictatorhip, only to end with questions about Verbitsky.
Nothing strange there. The Herald journalist, a human rights specialist whose daily work consists of verifying and obtaining information about dictatorship-era crimes through interviews and documents, carried out the basic task of calling a repressor to hear his version of events, something that is not very frequent in journalism these days.
Bertoia is one of the Argentine journalists with the most training on human rights issues and she has extensive knowledge of the judicial cases that have to do with the repression. That is, in fact, one of the main reasons why she was hired to work at a newspaper that holds the search for memory, truth and justice among its highest priorities, contrasting with other media outlets that preach forgetting, misrepresentation and impunity. The suspicions expressed by Sirven are, therefore, understandable.
This newspaper has become an uncomfortable media outlet in times of snap characterizations: you’re either on one side or the other. Case in point, the day after the interview with Graffigna that bothered La Nación so much, the paper published a backpage interview with Santiago O’Donnell, who, along with Mariano Melamed, wrote a book that is critical of Verbitsky and the CELS human rights group he leads. Perhaps La Nación’s media specialist doesn’t have an opportunity to read the Herald every day, meaning that he is forced to take a look when this newspaper publishes a scoop or is the subject of debate on social networks. As is well known, Twitter sometimes leads nowhere.
It must be even more disconcerting for the partisan journalists that often reach conclusions based on loose facts to review the newspaper’s regular columnists, some of whom have been writing for more than three decades in our opinion pages. Almost all of them are critical of the government. A basic review of the Herald’s news stories would surely increase this bewilderment since it regularly features topics that are uncomfortable to all governments, making any rushed effort to slap on a label impossible.
One clear example. The Herald was one of the first media outlets to point out the marked weakness in the criminal complaint filed by the late AMIA special prosecutor Alberto Nisman against President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and other officials, something that, it must be noted, many others agree with today. That, however, did not stop this newspaper from placing a spotlight on the government’s questionable running of its intelligence agencies and its complicity with a prosecutor whose performance is now being questioned by the Pink House. True, the president praised a Herald front page about Nisman—out not the one from a day earlier, nor the one from the following day.
Immediately, Sirvén reached conclusions about CFK’s comment. Yet this newspaper also published on the front page an analysis of the presidential speech that mentioned the Herald under the headline, “Commentator-in-Chief.”
These are times of “due obedience”. Some even see it as a somewhat religious issue (Sirven’s first column targeting this newspaper was headlined, “The Herald’s curse”). Those who take roll to prove loyalties seek an unthinking adherence to whichever version of events is useful to hurt the adversary. But don’t expect the newspaper I head abandon the core principles of journalism.
@sebalacunza