Discrimination in Government Advertising and Corruptions

DISCRIMINATION IN GOVERNMENT ADVERTISING AND CORRUPTION WHEREAS several governments and public agencies in the hemisphere use official advertising to reward or punish the media, ignoring any technical standards or efficiency in the use of public resources in some cases, the granting of credits and other economic-administrative benefits is handled in the same way and without any technical basis the goal of this practice is to reward news companies politically linked to government officials or submissive to them and to punish independent news outlets that do not comply with the conditions, wishes and requirements of governments and political leaders in many cases this discriminatory use of the taxpayers' money is the government's and political leaders' response to news reports about corruption or is the price of silence for some unscrupulous journalists or news outlets these policies are clearly violations of Principle 7 of the Declaration of Chapultepec and constitute an obvious and very serious attack on freedom of the press, freedom of expression and the right to information and at the same time are a form of corruption because they use public funds to benefit officials' private interests this has been resolved by IAPA in the Caracas General Assembly of October 1995 and reiterated at other assemblies THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE IAPA RESOLVES to reiterate its condemnation and repudiation of the placement of official advertising in a discriminatory way and without any technical basis and any other type of administrative economic measures used as a tool to benefit or punish the media and to influence editorial decisions and political news to denounce this kind of conduct as a serious attack on press freedom as well as corruption because of the improper use of public resources to benefit the private interests of temporary leaders to condemn media or journalists who benefit from these irregular and illegitimate practices or who by their own conduct become accomplices to these corrupt practices. to recommend to the members of the IAPA and particularly to the regional vice chairmen that they report on and make public these policies, which threaten their basic freedoms and make bad use of the taxpayers' funds to demand that the governments of the hemisphere eradicate these unlawful practices and punish those responsible for them.