PUBLIC SERVICE VS. AUTONOMY, THE DILEMMA OF CUBAN JOURNALISTIC CULTURE

• Published in: SEECI 2000 2022-01, Vol.55, p.123-146
• Main Authors: Pérez, Dasniel Olivera, Hernández, Carlos Fernández
• Format: Article
• Language: eng ; spa
• Subjects: 20th century; Culture; Education; Higher education; Inflection (Morphology); Journalism; Journalists; Mass media; Multiculturalism & pluralism; Politics; Society; Sovereignty; Transnationalism
• ISSN: 1575-9628; 1576-3420
• DOI: 10.15198/seeci.2022.55.e778

Discussion: The meaning of Cuban journalistic professionalism seems to be more associated with the ideals of social justice, citizen participation, political commitment, and national sovereignty, and with a formative model of a humanist and critical journalist, than the autonomy or the consistency of the media system rules. Among the most used factors to explain this behavior, are the ideology and the Sovietization of the press model in the 1970s (Garcia, 2013; Garcia, 2017), censorship practices, the economic organization of the media (Elizalde, 2014; Franco, 2016; Terrero, 2018), the historical tradition (Arencibia, 2017; Salazar, 2017), the communicative inflection of the US political conflict against Cuba whose effects have been associated with the notion of "state of siege" (González, 2017; Vidal, 2017), the quality of university education, the socializing role of politics (Estrada, 1996) and associationism (Oller et al., 2016), generational differences (Natvig, 2019), the accumulation of unfulfilled expectations concerning the transformation of the media system (Garcia, 2013), among others. Journalistic professionalism is an interconnected process, among other elements, "with the constitution of a particular conception of what the public really is" (Hallin and Mancini, 2012, p. 292); and with competitive values such as freedom of the press, national security, privacy, stability, consensus, among others. [...]the meaning of "professionalism" differs between societies (Hallin and Mancini, 2012, p. 290), in practice, and perceptions (Roudakova, 2012). [...]the nature, social structure, dynamics, and duration over time of the political conflicts in society shape the pluralism and political action of the media (Hallin and Mancini, 2008; Voltmer, 2013), which in the Cuban context goes through taking into account the US conflict against the country, and associated with it, migration and transnational information flows (Cearns, 2021).