QCOSTARICA Opinion by Rod Hughes, iNews.co.cr – There are times when one wonders if the salad the politicos eat for lunch is made up of lemon, mayonnaise and locoweed.
So it is with Kattia Martin, president of the Citizen Action Party (PAC) , who called Friday for a party boycott of the press on her personal Facebook account. Apparently what got doña Kattia’s nose out of joint was the coverage of the Soley-Brenes dustup.
Tuesday, lawmaker Jorge Rodriguez called out the press in blistering — some say insulting — language. And it isn’t even Rodriguez’s ox that’s supposedly being gored — he’s a Social Christian Unity party man and the person under the magnifying glass was former Deputy Minister of the Presidency Daniel Soley, once part of President Solis’s cabinet.
Rodriguez felt there had been a rush to judgment by one media organ in condemning Soley — you’ll forgive us if we hazard a guess that it was La Nacion. (La Nacion tends to get this kind of rock thrown at it if only because it is the biggest target on the media horizon here.)
But to get back to Martin and her explosion, she labeled the press as “mercenary and hit men.” Apparently, this was because the press reported the attacks on Soley made by opposition party members and his own party’s Otton Solis.
But Martin did not stop there — she urged all reading her Facebook rant to cancel subscriptions and advertising contracts. (Lawmakers cancelling a subscription risk going from being misinformed to being uninformed — about the last thing a voter wants of his representatives — voluntary illiteracy.
As for stopping advertising, this is purely a business decision and is the quickest way we know to let the competition to one’s business take over the biggest share of market slice. Anger at a medium is one thing, bankruptcy is quite another.
Minister of the Presidency Melvin Jimenez blasted La Nacion last week for constructing a “journalistic fairy story.” But he engaged in no personal attacks.
But, like Rodriguez, Martin went directly for the jugular: “The press isn’t interested in anything else other than their agenda and capital (wealth) and friends,” she wrote. La Nacion mentioned that Martin has a Master’s degree in communications — we wonder if she learned her hatred of the press there.
Supposedly, Martin is a representative of her PAC party, but congressional president Henry Mora, floor leader Emilia Molina quickly condemned the attack, along with the press association and opposition lawmakers. (Wait until PAC is up for re-election; well see if Martin proposes a boycott when the party needs every word on the page.
Otton Solis of PAC called for Martin’s resignation as chief of her party. He has been doing a lot of that lately; he also wanted — and got — Soley’s resignation. But, then, the PAC side of government tends to be restive these days.
Solis is well aware that a political party can ill afford to have the press shut them out. If Sra. Martin does not understand this simple dynamic then we rather agree with lawmaker Solis — she just is too dense to run a political party.
