The General Directorate for State Media (Dirección General de Media del Estado) is part of the Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies (MITIC) in Paraguay. Three state media platforms are administered by the Directorate: Paraguay TV, National Radio and the Paraguayan Information Agency.
Of the three, the National Radio in Paraguay is the oldest, with 58 years of history. The television station and the agency were created in the 21st century. In August 2011, the public television began broadcasting, two years after the launch of the Paraguayan Information Agency. The state television and radio programming includes sports, news and educational and cultural content. The news agency covers general information.
Media assets
Television: Paraguay TV; Radio: Radio Nacional del Paraguay; News agency: Agencia de Información Paraguaya
State Media Matrix Typology: State-Controlled (SC)
Ownership and governance
In 2018, the Paraguayan Congress approved the creation of the Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies (MITIC), which absorbed the administration of the Information and Communication Secretariat (SICOM), a state body in charge of both institutional communication of the government as well as the state media.
The state-controlled media (TV Paraguay, National Radio and the Paraguayan Information Agency) are part of the General Directorate of State Media, which is subordinated to the MITIC. The Law No. 6207 establishes in its article 12 that the General Directorate of State Media depends on the vice-ministers office at MITIC that decides who runs each outlet. The vice-ministers are appointed by decree of the executive power (presidential decree). The current structure of the public media was defined through the MITIC resolution No. 67 of 2019.
Source of funding and budget
Almost all of the funding of the General Directorate for State Media comes from the government (they also received donations during their first years of activity). The annual budget of the Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies (MITIC) for the year 2020 was PYG 241.6bn (US$ 34.3m). The public information available does not specifically mention how much is allocated to the media institutions as part of the ministry, but local journalists and experts indicate that the media are fully covered from the state allocation. In 2012, by decree, the government created a Directorate responsible for generating commercial revenue for state media as a way to balance its finances (that depend entirely on MITIC). Paraguay TV and National Radio each have their own ad tariffs approved by MITIC.
Editorial independence
No state media in Paraguay has independence from the government in charge. In November 2019, during an interview on the Paraguayan public radio show Primeras Noticias, an MITIC official, Ingrid Villalba, said that the government was going to strengthen the state media because “the mission of MITIC is to provide all the tools to the State media so that they can facilitate and bring official information to the citizens.” In other words, the logic of the public media is to deliver official information to the population. This has been confirmed by an ad hoc analysis of content published by the state media outlets of Paraguay. Headlines on the web portal of the Paraguayan Information Agency, for example, only highlight statements by officials and ministers who rate their own government actions as positive and successful. Such glowing reporting about state officials and institutions is common on all of Paraguay’s state media.
No domestic statute and no mechanism of assessment or oversight to validate the editorial independence of state media in Paraguay have been identified.
August 2023