Amid the struggle against disinformation, manipulation and “fake news”, the Latin American news agency must also face the concentration of the ownership of the mega-media that monopolize the distribution of content and create uniform opinion matrixes.
There are many alternative media, especially in Latin America, that also currently face the deformation of the world’s reality in order to impose a single message of domination.
In times of enormous technological advances applied to journalism and in the face of growing real and virtual threats, the efforts revive to restore to this profession its commitment to truth and its loyalty to users and readers.
In 1960, Jorge Ricardo Masetti, the first director of Prensa Latina, explained to an international forum of journalists that telling the truth was (then, as now) the greatest “sin and crime” of the emerging agency, according to the criteria of Washington and the Inter American Press Association (IAPA).
When Prensa Latina transmitted its first news dispatch to the world, on June 16, 1959, the US Government gave it barely a month and, along 63 years, the 13 US administrations have tried to silence it.
When it emerged, after the so-called Operation Truth, in which 400 journalists of the region participated to learn the reality of the new Cuban political process, Prensa Latina was initially described as “the agency that was needed” and its founders thus set up the first alternative media in the Americas.
The agency has become, with the passing of several generations of men and women, a multimedia center that transmits more than 400 news dispatches daily, publishes some 20 publications, boasts an extraordinary photo library, provides radio and television services and participates in several digital media.
Its own Cuban, Latin Americanist, third-world message is reflected in several languages.
Its correspondents, accredited in the five continents, provide direct testimony from the most newsworthy scenarios, despite the risks and difficulties, often revealing information that others hide.
Today, after 63 years, the current US Government continues to hinder their journalistic work, within the framework of the economic, commercial and financial blockade that it is tightening against Cuba amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
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