Norma Morandini
06/19/2020 - 17:15
- Clarín.com
- Opinion
In these days when women journalists have angered the President of the Nation, I recalled my days as a legislator, marked by hostility and contempt for the press, now covered by the superiority of male power that, in general, continues to see women women as naive or ignorant.
As a new deputy, I released my address to the then Chief of Staff, today the President of the Nation, Alberto Fernandez, with a question about the government's decision to avoid mediation by the press to replace it with direct communication, that of the lectern and propaganda from official advertising.
Without being directly "naive" to me, the response was extensive consideration of what seemed to be my ignorance of "the true character of the media as evil companies whose sole interest is money."
It was 2006 and the then Chief of Staff justified the decision to remove the media from the media with a long and professional historical consideration, without a minimum recognition of the role of the press in a democratic system. This confessed contempt for journalism betrays an authoritarian conception that was manifested in the cancellation of press conferences, the "mother of all battles" and the hired scribes who constructed the account of the "national and popular" government that made rights human flag but ignored the mother of all rights, freedom of speech, without persecution by opinion.
My first legislative action was, also, to denounce the telephone espionage of many journalists, the most critical of the government. An electronic engineer proved in the Freedom of Expression Commission that the very center of Congress had the phones "pricked". A long time passed, we advanced in the legislation that ended with the so-called press crimes, contempt, slander and injury; We debated the right to privacy and the protection of sources, officials are no longer prohibited from speaking to journalists, but the authoritarian culture that distrusts the press and continues to see ignorant or naive women survives. Journalists who were spied on yesterday are accused in spy courts today.
Women journalists, in a time marked by claims and discourses of equality, are treated by the President in a paternalistic manner with advice from male superiority: "you have to study a little more to express your opinion ...", "the political problem is you because they make a bad reading of reality ”he tells Luciana Geuna and Maru Duffard; He sends Cristina Perez to read the Constitution and he reproaches Silvia Mercado for not understanding.
To go beyond the anecdote, the truth is that the great democratic novelty is the emergence of women journalists in the columns of political opinion and as conductors in political television programs, until recently, an absolute domain of men. .
Just as in Parliament, the legislative commissions on education and health are still reserved for women and those on the Budget and Constitutional Affairs for men, on television, women journalists were those who dedicated themselves to gossip and entertainment with an aesthetic of Transparencies and necklines more similar to that of the models and the vedettes.
Faced with these brave new professionals who do not make seduction power, intellectually trained, who investigate, investigate and report honestly, without reverence or fear of power, many men do not know how to act.
The President who built intimacy with male journalists whom he would never send to study or publicly accuse for misunderstanding, by treating journalists as girls who should be taught, expresses that male paternalism that badly coexists with that woman who is presents as an equal. It happens that he is the President of a country, for now, democratic, which forces him to respect the press that mediates between the information of the State and the citizens, in compliance with the same Constitution that he sends to read.
You should also understand that many women have chosen to have authority in what we do rather than be feared by the power of screaming and complaining or extorting victims as women have traditionally done. For this reason, we must demand respect to finally build a true culture of equality that does not need so much of the penal teachers but of respectful pedagogues of the constitutional rights to equality and free speech.
Norma Morandini is a journalist and a former national senator.