Election Day: On Presidents and the Press

It’s election day in Ecuador. Long, thick lines of people round the contours of the streets, with crowds ebbing and flowing all around them. Vendors sell sodas, snow cones, sandwiches, hats, bracelets – you’d think there was a festival going on. The entire country is out today. That’s hardly hyperbole; voting is compulsory here.

There’s a heavy uncertainty stirring the nation, a deep turbulence far beneath the superficial resignation at the top… an uncertainty over what to do, and an uncertainty over whether the choice even matters. Ask anyone who they think will win, and they’ll tell you: Lenin Moreno, the natural successor of the party in power. Ask anyone who they want to win, and they’ll tell you: not Lenin. In Quito, at least, that has been the consistent response among those I meet on the street. Right now, most people are just hoping for the elections to go on to a second round, which will happen if none of the eight candidates wins more than 40% of the vote. Even if a second round does happen, the general perception is that the chance of anyone but Lenin winning remains slim.

The people of Ecuador want change, but they don’t know how to go about getting it. In the past two weeks, I’ve conversed with several people voting for Lenin merely because they figure he’ll win anyway and they’re required to put down a name. Many are disillusioned and don’t trust any of the candidates. If a voter chooses to nullify his or her vote, however, that vote automatically counts in favor of the leading candidate.

Organizing change is not easy: the mainstream news reminds the country daily of all the good President Correa and his party (including Lenin) have done for the country, and meanwhile highlights every failure, scandal, or suspicion connected with every other candidate. These are not lies per se – Correa has accomplished some good, and the other candidates do have flaws – they are simply incomplete truths. And together, they form the controlled version of the truth propagated by the major news sources, which are regulated by the government.

For a democracy to represent the will of the people, the government must remain accountable to the populus. This can only happen when the media is free. The government is responsible to the people, and therefore the people must have the practical resources to hold the government responsible for its actions. One of those resources is the secret ballot; the other is information.

Unhindered information maintains the power equilibrium between the people and the government. Can there be a true democracy if people do not have information? How can people establish their will if they do not have the information to shape that will? How can improvement happen without critique?

In 2016, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranked Ecuador 109th out of 180 countries for freedom of information. In comparison, the United States was ranked as 41st. Protecting democracy requires protecting existing journalistic freedom while pushing for increased transparency. Any government that believes in giving power to the people would do well to welcome free press, which means press that does not always support its actions.

In the United States, last Friday, President Trump retaliated against the negative image of himself in the news by calling the media (or “FAKE NEWS media,” which seems to broadly refer to any news source that does not speak in favor of him) the “enemy of the American People.” But the media may in fact be our single greatest ally and needs to be respected as such. As Senator McCain firmly countered, “democracy as we know it” requires “a free – and many times adversarial – press.” If the government is to remain accountable to the people, if we in any way believe in the ideal of a democratic republic, the media must remain free to criticize the government. An administration that seeks to silence its critics treads the well-worn path of authoritarian regimes.

There is a bias. The media in the United States is known to lean left overall. Perhaps the issue is not so much in its calling a spade a spade, which is necessary and laudable, but in not also calling a rake a rake or a pick a pick. As one sage woman I know commented, the Economist and the Wall Street Journal could use some company in high quality conservative news coverage. (Of course, all political persuasions should be comfortable criticizing the government, whether they tend to share its ideology or not.) The existing liberal-leaning media sources, however, are not to blame for that lack. They have a role to fill, and they must continue to fill it, for all our sakes.

No news source tells the whole story, unbiased and complete. Any photographer can explain this: the way you frame a scene with your lens defines the image you produce. Ten photographers can get ten different images of the same moment. The photographers will do their best to make the image accurate and compelling, and some will surely be better than others, but even the best images will almost certainly differ. The viewer’s understanding is richer because of those differences. Most often, the photographer is not intentionally misrepresenting the scene, but simply framing it, as must be done in order to share it at all.

Nevertheless, occasionally images do systematically misrepresent the situation, typically by omission. Those sorts of misrepresentations are far more prevalent when the photographer always arrives determined to accomplish a single particular goal before even considering the scene… a particular goal like upholding the government. The fact that preset goals exist is not in itself dangerous to journalism; even those views provide us with a valid perspective. I don’t aim to stop reading government-regulated news, but rather to read it critically. The danger comes when the reporting cohort is overwhelmingly dominated by a single goal, and the stories produced become uniform, and most of all, regulated. Unfettered news is vital to maintaining the balance of power between the people and the government, just as each branch within the government must check and balance the others.

There is no such thing as a complete, unbiased news story. There is only the ability to recognize bias and take it into account in our understanding. We all strive for objectivity, and it is a noble goal. It helps us to temper our prejudices and weigh alternate opinions. It keeps us from rushing to extremes, but it does not make us unbiased. It provides a standard for us to attain – the perfect communication of objective reality – but that standard is illusory.

We must accept bias. In order to understand a situation, we need multiple perspectives. And to continue to get those perspectives, the media must be free. Those who talk politics with me know my approach to researching a controversial happening: take two mainstream sources, then one far left, and one far right. That approach demands critical thinking, but that’s something we could all use a bit more of anyways. It’s also the approach that tends to yield a more complete picture.

Unhindered media coverage does not solve a nation’s problems; it merely exposes them, whereas regulated media shrugs off their existence. President Correa and Lenin Moreno took to the news today to praise the virtues of democracy. Meanwhile, last week, my companions and I talked with with 19 random students at a local university and learned that 16 of them believed fraud was likely in the Ecuadorian vote count – not simply campaign interference, but physical, logistical fraud in the actual count. That is not primarily an issue of information; that is an issue of process and power. Nevertheless, before the situation can shift, the concerns must be brought openly before the public eye. The people must be collectively aware of them. This is fundamental to the ability to hold the government accountable.

Ecuador is fortunate in this: alternative private news sources do exist. Smaller, with less power, and sometimes radically skewed to attack the government even more than may be warranted, but they are there. They provide an additional perspective. They remind people to remain conscious of the government’s mainstream regulation. In recognizing the biases, there is hope for obtaining a fuller picture of what is truly happening. Only from that understanding, and only by protecting and expanding those channels of information, can a nation expect to change for the better.