During this period there has been a continuation of the discrimination of denying official advertising to independent media which had started during the first term of President Daniel Ortega (2007-2011). This policy has been particularly harmful to small radio stations.
At the present time, the government party maintains iron-fisted control over information and advertising through numerous government-owned media outlets, among them radio stations Ya, Sandino, Primerísima and Nicaragua; web pages like El 19 digital, Nicaragua Triunfa; and TV channels 4, 6, 8, 13, and 91.
This situation has led the few independent media and their journalists to take an attitude of self-censorship in order not to confront the political power. This has reduced attacks on the press.
Secrecy and lack of access to public information continue to be strong. During presidential elections in November no action was taken that would physically affect any media, but the government candidate gave a constant refusal to grant interviews over discussions of government plans.
Through a judicial agreement, picketers were removed who had marched in front of the entrance to the newspaper La Prensa, two or three times a week, supposedly representing a union supported by sectors linked to the government party; there were also obstructions of the doors of the newspaper to prevent the presses from rolling.
Silvia González, a correspondent for El Nuevo Diario in Jinotega, is still living abroad through fear of threats she received, which she made pubic through human rights organizations. In September 2011 González felt obliged to quit the paper and leave the country, after continual threats received against her life since July 30 on the part of a government sympathizer, without response from the National Police.
At the end of March, a correspondent for La Prensa, Luis Eduardo Martínez, in Matagalpa to the north of Managua, was the object of a slander campaign through a broadcast station that belongs to a high official of the Nicaraguan government. A televised message of supposed public interest shows the danger of driving in a state of drunkenness and it includes a clip where journalist Martínez is sitting with friends around a table, and then images of his automobile after an accident that occurred when he was returning from covering a news event, with the message that it was the La Prensa correspondent who was driving drunk.
Before that campaign, La Prensa had published a report on Nelson Artola, an employee and owner of the station, also from Matagalpa, about his past as a convincer of mayors and councilmen who had been elected from the slates of democratic parties, but who had switched to the government side.
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