“I have decided to give this interview because the public channel is the first contact that Colombian society has with a media outlet,” former paramilitary commander Salvatore Mancuso said with admiration this week, when he decided to give his first exclusive to RTVC, the media system. largest public service in Colombia, with two television channels, dozens of radio stations throughout the country and journalists reporting in the most forgotten regions.
They are not the media with the largest audience
,
but they are a team that can work without the commercial pressures of private media.
But there is something more behind Mancuso's phrase.
RTVC is where you would be interviewed by someone with a direct line to the president, journalist and politician Hollman Morris.
According to several journalists at RTVC consulted by EL PAÍS, it is also the media system with the greatest Petrist focus.
Far from the independence of the British BBC, the exemplary public medium for its independence, RTVC is managed by the president's bishops, which has created a complex editorial crisis.
“There are journalists who are censoring themselves,” says one of the people consulted for this article, who worked on one of RTVC's main newscasts.
She spoke only on condition of anonymity, for fear of losing her livelihood.
In fact, EL PAÍS contacted more than a dozen reporters, and only seven agreed to speak, all under that condition.
The others, not even with her.
Behind this silence is the fear of retaliation from their bosses—such as not renewing their contract if they say something critical—a point on which all those who agreed to speak agreed.
A journalist who covers politics confirms that this environment leads them to self-censorship.
The two separately comment on the little interest there is at RTVC in covering the news from the control bodies “because they almost always beat Petro and that news does not appear many times,” says the first person consulted.
“If the Constitutional Court criticizes the Minister of Health, for example, the news does not come out until it speaks with the minister.
That cannot be like that because there is news of the day that has to come out right there, and it cannot be stagnant because the minister cannot speak to us,” he adds.
The editorial boards, where reporters propose their stories to editors, “are insufferable.
They ask you who is talking to you and what party that person is from, without much confidence.
Editorial boards must start from trust,” he concludes.
RTVC is divided into two worlds—radio and television—and in each of them a figure dominates.
Nórida Rodríguez, formerly an actress and today manager of RTVC, has worked mainly in the field of radio.
And Hollman Morris, an activist and friend of the president, is assistant television manager.
The two were appointed there by Petro and that is why they have to live together, although they do not get along.
Rodríguez has managed the radio with two allies: the assistant manager of Corporate Support, Jorge Arzuaga;
and the contractor María Cristina Estupiñán.
The latter is the one who has intervened the most in the radio's editorial process, according to five reporters consulted.
One of these tells, regarding the morning news program
La Signal de La Mañana
, that Estupiñán “gets to give the line: he tells the journalists, explicitly, 'let's do this story with a left-wing line' or 'with a Petro line'.
She does not hide her activism.”
Estupiñán, who is a social communicator, came to RTVC a few months ago, after working in the press in the Risk and Disaster Management Unit, and much before in the Petro mayor's office.
Her name became known in the media when, off the air, she called some members of the political opposition 'bad fucking clowns' when commenting on a news story.
“Although he is a contractor like all of us, he has said that he has a direct line with Petro and arrived with the pretense of a boss,” says one of the radio journalists.
Estupiñán has been rumored to be deputy radio manager, the head of the entire radio team, a position that has been vacant since February, when Dora Brausin left, who lasted seven years in that position and more than two decades at RTVC.
“I don't agree with the way they want to handle the content,” Brausin told La W after her departure.
She did not agree, for example, that RTVC wanted to hire the Petrista influencer Wally to lead an informative segment.
“I think there is an orientation to generate information about what is done in the Presidency, in the Government,” she added.
EL PAÍS asked Estupiñán about these issues, but she explained that she could not say anything because she was not an official spokesperson.
Rodríguez, the manager, did.
He explains that RTVC has the mission of providing “truthful, timely and neutral” information and that, in his year in office, he has carried out audits “to fulfill the entity's mission, these processes have inconvenienced and in some cases created resistance.”
Although she accepts there is discomfort, she denies a bias in favor of the Government.
“At no time has my directive or that of my advisors been to pressure or force the generation of any inclinations or favoritism,” she says.
The Government of Gustavo Petro is not the first to be accused of manipulating RTVC's editorial line in its favor.
The previous Administration, of right-wing Iván Duque, was denounced for the censorship of the RTVC manager of
Los Puros Criollos
,
because the leader of the program, Santiago Rivas, had criticized the Government.
“At that time there was more attention on the situation, Rivas made a very public fight.
Now we lack that heroic figure who fights the same way,” says a reporter, who considered Brausin a retaining wall that managed to protect reporters from political pressures.
Silence prevails, those interviewed say, because dozens of journalists do not have an employment relationship but rather a service provision contract, which bosses can renew or not.
“There is a feeling among journalists that we have been around for a long time.
Those who arrived look at us as if asking: 'Who are you?
You have to be a Uribista.'
It is a hunt to get activist people in, when many of us not only were not Uribistas, but we voted for Petro and resisted the era of Uribismo,” says a radio reporter.
Recently, a journalist said goodbye to several of her colleagues after her contract was not renewed.
“I understand that silences also communicate,” she wrote in a farewell email.
“No one gives me news about my contract but instead, through other media, I find out about people to whom they open the doors of Radio Nacional and who are alien to the journalism that I know how to do and that I defend,” she added.
Juan Pablo Calvás, a columnist for this newspaper, has denounced on W Radio that Jorge Arzuaga has been handling the contracts in a non-transparent manner.
Rodríguez has publicly denied these allegations.
“The only irregularities that exist in @RTVCco are those that we have been finding and dismantling since our arrival in the public media,” she said on Tuesday in X. On Friday, after new complaints at the station, she said she felt “harassed and persecuted.” , and assured that “all contracting at RTVC is appropriate, public and transparent.”
Beyond the contractual, the consequences of the changes are seen in the audience figures.
Three reporters told El PAÍS that in a recent meeting Lina Marcela Moreno, director of the Institutional Channel, said that the audience for the morning news had fallen by 50%.
“People are complaining about this new editorial line,” says one of the reporters.
Moreno did not respond to an interview request to discuss the issue, but earlier this year he formally complained about the way RTVC's channels—Señal Colombia and Canal Institucional—are being run by Hollman Morris, the deputy television manager. .
Moreno and Silvana Orlandelli Uruburu, director of Signal Colombia, denounced the former councilor of Bogotá for workplace harassment.
"Mr. Morris never saw us as allies or teammates, he stigmatized us and for him we were always those of 'the other administration', he disrespected and transgressed the group's morals all the time," says Orlandelli's complaint.
One of the television reporters told EL PAÍS that in January Morris was able to hire many people close to him, with whom he has previously worked.
Although this is usual for an assistant manager, the source explains that Morris “works only with them, ignoring directors, the Colombia signal director.
He does not want to be questioned about his editorial decisions” which, he adds, include broadcasting the president's events that last for hours on Signal Colombia, breaking programming.
Morris has defended himself in the same tone as Rodríguez.
“I consider that they are voices of people from past administrations who are not happy with the changes,” he says in conversation with EL PAÍS.
“We assume an editorial line, which is to promote the Constitution of 91, a culture of peace and human rights, and deepen the social rule of law,” he adds.
Regarding a drop in audience, he says he has other information.
“People are very happy,” he says, and mentions firsts: the first images of the indigenous children who were lost for more than a month in the Amazon, or the recent interview with Mancuso.
Finally, he says that when talking about editorial line there is usually discomfort because “there is always something subjective.”
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