21/07/2005
INTERVIEW TO PRENSA DE FRENTE, BY THE SITE ENREDANDO, JUN 2005
"We hope we can make an experience together with other contra informative groups."


In Prensa De Frente we are gather together journalists, students and activists from different social organizations, unemployed, cultural, neighbourhood, university organizations.
Since the moment when some of our organizations started to gain force some years ago, such as the MTD (unemployed workers movement), we saw with growing consent that our reality was only expressed by the big mass media when it was convenient to the “political conjuncture” in a way in which our interests were not at all said. The story of our actions and thoughts that was told ended up being shallow if not deformed with the intention of deforming our fights. The same thing happened with the reality of student’s claims or the cultural activities proposed by our companions, they couldn’t find diffusion lanes.

On the other hand, we found out that some of us had journalism as a profession, and agreed in the need to propulse alternative tools of information that could help us express ourselves freely and could stay faithful with the interests of popular groups and less dependent to the management logic that rules in the mass media.


This process had several stages. The need to show to society that we exist or to show the reasons why social conflict emerge, took us in the beginning to convoke, follow and insist journalists or producers that work at the grand media to show the reality pd humble neighbourhoods, productive enterprises, diffund an artistic festival or explain student claims against university policies. At the time we noticed that despite the insistence we were not able to change the informative agenda – that was related most of the times with the needs of governments or their economic interests –opposite to ours. That is how we started to think we had to build, together with a whole new reality, another informative and communicational reality.
We notice that there is still little unity between the projects of alternative communication as web as some kind of lack of will to getting out of “marginality” in the sense of building informative tools for the people that can as well dispute the place that the hegemonic speech built by huge mediatic corporations over our country reality. Prensa De Frente is, for us, a small tool that allows us share a formative experience, diffund our reality but we know that we face some limits. This way, our aspiration is to built an experience together with other groups, with time newspapers, radios and, why not, TV channels that empower a new form of popular communication.

Do you believe “traditional” media don’t pay attention (or do it in a wrong way) to those facts that move social organizations?

We learnt that mass media stigmatise what is “politically correct”. For them poverty, youth, rebellion, marginality, social struggle, politics made by workers or excluded, is politically incorrect. It is this way, for them, because it attempts against the “politically correct” system, where we find a lot of press operations from politics and functionaries, they prevail the economic interests from the powerful ones, power that includes mass media not only as enterprises but also as consensus builders.

What does it mean, from this point of view, being a journalist?

From our point of view, being a journalist is impossible if unplugged from social reality in which we live, without taking part.
A journalist can choose between receiving an expensive gift from a multinational enterprise or accept the political conditions from the media in which he works and adapt himself/ herself: then he will criticise the piqueteros when they cut a street, but he/ she won’t say anything when an enterprise ion charge of highways raises the cost of services or when it prohibit the entrance to whom can not pay, or will remain quite when he notice that in the newspaper he/ she works in does not publish certain information.
That is a way of taking part: this way he/ she is helping with indifference or complicity to make everything remains as it is (and things the way they are, are not exactly fine).
A different way of taking part is not accepting those conditions, is being sensitive to the reality in which we live, is practicing some ethical principles. We consider this option takes to a commitment to the needs and struggles of the people, and this commitment is, actually, the opposite to the interests of mass media.
That is why we think the new communication tools that emerge from the new social organizations are necessary, even though they are incipient. It is through these new tools that we can gather together the efforts of those who, day by day, are ready to commit to a project of social change.