Havana, Cuba.- Participants in an international forum hosted by Prensa Latina remembered Monday the Argentine journalist and revolutionary Jorge Ricardo Masetti, one of this news agency”s founders.
Now more than ever, the concept developed by Masetti is still valid: ‘We are objective, but not impartial. We consider to be impartial, between good and evil, to be cowardly’ , said his grandson Santiago Masetti on the opening of the event hosted by the National Hotel of Cuba to debate the current challenges of journalism.
Speaking at the forum dedicated to the 60th anniversary of Operation Truth and the Prensa Latina foundation, also six decades ago, the social communicator defended the legacy of militant journalism left by his grandfather, amidst a situation in which media manipulation and fake news have become political tools.
Unfortunately, lies manufactured by Washington-based media monopolies against popular governments such as Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia or Nicaragua are still in force, and in what way, just to mention these cases in Latin America, because otherwise the list would be much longer, he warned.
According to Masetti, historical distortions, lies or destabilizing operations now include new tools or platforms used to achieve information colonization, which is confronted and defeated with audacity and originality.
This scenario inspired Operation Truth and the founding of Prensa Latina, he stressed.
This operation took place when the January 1 Revolution was less than 20 days old, and consisted of a meeting of 400 foreign journalists invited to Havana by the leader Fidel Castro to learn first-hand the trials against the war criminals of the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship overthrown, amid campaigns and lies.
Prensa Latina was born in June 1959 from Operation Truth, with Jorge Ricardo Masetti as its first general director and the liberating vision of Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara, to guarantee that Latin America had its own voice in the face of the big media monopoly and its subordination to U.S. domination interests in the region.
We must remember: Operation Truth and the foundation of Prensa Latina continue to be teaching and guidance in these times when algorithms, artificial intelligence and big data, among so many others, force us to rethink ourselves as journalists, as communicators. Surely Che and Masetti would be at the forefront of this battle of a new kind’, Santiago said.
For the grandson of one of the founders of Prensa Latina, talking about that agency and Masetti’s personality is synonymous with militant, consistent and revolutionary journalism.
The Latin American news agency, in the communicator’s opinion, represents for him a master who left him the importance of thinking and narrating his own country, our America and the world in the Latin American language, ‘with all that this implies’.
He also bequeathed to me that it is not possible to practice journalism understood in this way outside of a revolutionary project, because the Prensa Latina my grandfather thought and set up, the Prensa Latina of today can only be explained by the transparent presence of Fidel, Che and the Cuban Revolution in general’, he stated.
