Official Advertising and Corruption

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OFFICIAL ADVERTISING AND CORRUPTION WHEREAS various governments, institutions and public enterprises in the hemisphere use official advertising as a tool to favor or punish the media, ignoring technical and efficiency criteria in the expenditure of public funds these policies are carried out with the clear purpose of rewarding media that are obedient to government authorities and to penalize those independent journalistic institutions that do not submit to the conditions posed or the viewpoints held by governments and political leaders in many cases these discriminatory policies, for which the citizens' public funds are used, represent the reply of governments and political leaders to news reports dealing with public corruption indulging in such discriminatory policies clearly violates Point 7 of the Declaration of Chapultepec, and constitutes a clear and serious assault on freedom of the press, freedom of expression and thought, and the right to information, and itself amounts to corruption since it involves the use of public funds, provided by citizens, for the private interests of government officials THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE IAPA RESOLVES to condemn and repudiate the discriminatory manipulation, without any technical justification, of official advertising, and its use as a tool to favor or punish the media and to influence editorial decisions to denounce this kind of conduct as an attack on freedom of the press and as an act of corruption because of the unjustified use of public funds for the benefit of transitory officials to recommend to the members of this Association that they denounce and expose to the public these policies that assault basic freedoms and take wrongful advantage of the funds that the public contributes to urge governments throughout the hemisphere to eradicate these kinds of illegitimate practices and punish those responsible for such acts.

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