The journalist credited with calling the 1930s “infamous” is José Luis Torres. Although he also investigated election fraud, his primary concern was the contagious relationship between politicians and businessmen. This journalist died sixty years ago, but if he came back to life I don’t know if he would see things very differently.
As this December 9th is International Anti-Corruption Day, we ask ourselves: Are dealings between the state and regulated companies the same, almost a century after the Torres investigation? And above all: what does journalism do with it?
In last Sunday’s Defensor column (“From Baby Boomer Journalism to Z”) we saw overlaps between generations of journalists, but in corruption investigations there is none. They agree that the theft of public funds in the black holes of the regulated economy in a society with so many flaws comes at an unbearable human cost.
Authoritarians don’t like that
The practice of professional and critical journalism is a mainstay of democracy. That is why it bothers those who believe that they are the owners of the truth.
SOCIAL NORMS. In a typical week, you might be scammed by the official car service on Monday, by the plumber on Wednesday, and on Friday by dinner at a restaurant that doesn’t issue a bill. This doesn’t justify major corruption, but the businessmen who deliver (and deliver?) bags to law offices, street corners, houses, hotels or parking lots are part of our weak culture of legality.
The norms that are most followed in a country are social norms, which are sometimes consistent with legal norms and sometimes contradict them. In Argentina it is obvious that we have a contradiction between social and legal norms in the fight against corruption.
In this context, journalism can stimulate temporary or permanent changes in both social and legal norms. The most important current case is the Cuadernos case.
At 7:01 a.m. on August 1, 2018, journalism shocked the business world. The action of journalist Diego Cabot, who took over and fully supported La Nación, resulted in two dozen civil servants and six dozen major businessmen moving from an abstract and washable reputational risk to the risk of imprisonment.
Although La Nación was the sole protagonist, other media helped solve the mystery. Noticias, for example, is mentioned by the Cuadernos prosecutor’s office for a note from Rodis Recalt and Carlos Claa about the driver’s wife Angel Centeno, dated August 4, 2018.
This case benefited from regulatory changes in recent months, such as the adoption of the Law on Criminal Liability of Legal Persons and the so-called Repentance Law. This latest law was buoyed by the clean dismissal of the Senate bribery case, which was another investigation conducted by journalists since 2000. First, the political columnist of La Nación, Joaquín Morales Solá, informed the society of “great personal favors”, and then María Fernanda Villosio, accredited to the Senate of the same newspaper, published statements by a senator in which he acknowledged the payment of bribes.
Three years later, in an article in TXT Magazine, Villosio shocked the country again by interviewing the “suitcase man,” the person responsible for transporting the money. Today Villosio is general information editor at Noticias magazine and is making a documentary on the subject.
This connection between the bribery case and the Cuadernos case, two historical causes that journalists have highlighted, is an excellent example of how journalism can act in the fight against corruption. The successive cases lead to cultural and regulatory changes that can lead to real progress over time.
In the case of Cuaderno it is also obvious that the key to his long media presence is that it concerns Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. This is the main focus that journalism pays to this issue, putting the system of corruption between officials and businessmen in the background.
Were the changes temporary or permanent? As experts say, companies in underdeveloped countries are at high risk of non-compliance because they live in a forest of laws that lead to permanent illegality, but they are rarely prosecuted. In developed democratic countries, legislation is simpler and prosecution for non-compliance is higher.
That changed somewhat with Cabot’s research. The risk for a businessman of seeing a photo of himself going to prison became real, sparking a wave of companies with compliance programs. But many do it for decorative reasons: the CEO never meets with the head of compliance, they copy codes of ethics from similar companies, or they create reporting channels that no one pays attention to, or anonymity is forbidden.
Business consultants interviewed by this ombudsman about the impact of journalism argue that corruption became more sophisticated after the Cuaderno case, and that some players came in and others left. It is also a fact that, according to the Transparency International ranking, the perception of corruption has not improved either. The year before the notebooks were published, Argentina was ranked 85th; Today it is ranked 99th, fourteen places lower.
But it seems clear that the culture has changed a bit and “notebook risk” is now part of the decision-making process of actors in Argentina’s regulated economy.
THE TWO PLATFORMS OF JOURNALISM. I take this opportunity to recall that democracy and capitalism are the two best platforms for the development of professional journalism. When democracy becomes murky, the climate for journalists becomes tense. The same thing happens when business enthusiasm wanes. The media is losing power and the future of the journalist is becoming bleak.
Therefore, large leaps in journalistic quality tend to occur as both political and economic platforms improve. It is necessary to understand the vital connection that exists between journalism, capitalism and democracy. It is a bond of mutual needs that the actors involved do not always see. Unless a strong economic base is consolidated, quality journalism is episodic, precarious and unstable, reduced to small and even professional one-person islands. Business enthusiasm is therefore a vector of journalistic quality.
At the same time, the mainstream media tends to treat union members poorly and flatter business owners. This ombudsman will deal with this issue in the future. Furthermore, entitlement must be maintained for changes in social norms to be permanent. So it doesn’t help that when big business owners appear in the business news, they are not reminded of their presence in the justice news. This shows the characteristics of underdeveloped capitalist journalism.