We focused our day today on media and the effect that it has on the Ecuadorian people. In class we learned that Media has three key components. The first is production, which if we go back to the transactional model, is the sender. Within production can be found ideology and agenda setting. We learned during the group facilitation that the government has the right to surveillance any media and punish those that say something against the government. I was not as surprised as I expected to hear this because of the strong presence of the government that can be seen throughout the city. The next key component is the message, which involves encoding. In Ecuador, the messages are homogenous and the subjects hardly ever change. The last component is reception, which is what the receiver interprets. As we have learned, though, the government controls what the media portrays which restricts the Ecuadorian freedom of speech. After class we went to visit a local television station, which only airs shows in Cuenca. It was fascinating to see a live cooking show, as well as be filmed as part of the show. The space where everything is filmed in the studio was versatile and the backgrounds changed when they needed them. This specific station was privately owned by a corporation, and was known as a Christian station. Many of their shows were aired live such as family and cooking shows. Our guide had told us that there were some shows which non-Christian people were asked to come in, and he said that most of these needed to be edited. It would have been interesting to ask if they had run into any problems with the government. Overall, it was interesting to see the constant work that goes into running a television station.
Later, during the group facilitation, someone said a quote stating, “It is a death certificate for freedom of speech”. After this conversation I thought to myself how unfortunate it is that the Ecuadorian people who work in the media have to be extremely careful with their information that they give out, while back at my college, our newspaper writes many appalling things about the school and its president. I also viewed this as a scenario from the Hunger Games. Anything bad that is said against the government can be punishable and although it is not as extreme as the movie, without freedom of speech a person can be living in fear of saying the wrong thing. This is a scary thought to have because even a joke may get someone thrown in jail. Freedom of speech is a right that I do take for granted and I hope to appreciate this more from now on.
