Caribbean & Central America - June 2007 (ISSN 1741-4458)

Three weeks after promising the country's media owners a "fight with no quarter given" on 6 May, President Manuel Zelaya went to war. On 28 May he ordered 10 media channels to broadcast government propaganda for two hours a day. He said he was left with no option because the media was responsible for putting out "misinformation", sensationalising violent crime and neglecting to report on his government's many achievements.

Zelaya announced his plan while inaugurating a water-treatment plant in the Caribbean coastal city of La Ceiba. He said the plant provided an archetypal example of his government's many 'positive' projects which, he claimed, the media has completely ignored. The broadcasts were designed to showcase the government's achievements by showing interviews between "journalist friends" and Zelaya and his cabinet ministers. The first government broadcast on 28 May, called The Forum of the People, was similar to Aló, Presidente of Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez , with Zelaya appealing to Hondurans to come together to solve the country's problems.

Zelaya's decision was severely criticised by the Colegio de Periodistas de Honduras (CPH), which said that governments representing democratic countries around the world only resorted to broadcasting on private television channels when national sovereignty was at risk. The opposition Partido Nacional also criticised his decision.

In the face of this criticism, Zelaya backtracked slightly and on 28 May announced that television and radio stations would have to show fewer hours of government propaganda than he had previously ordered: one hour every Monday and Friday until the end of June.

• Prize-giving
  Ironically, on the same day he made his media announcement, President Manuel Zelaya attended a prize-giving ceremony of the Asociación de Prensa Hondureña (APH) as a special guest to celebrate the Day of the Journalist.  

Zelaya presented a prize to José Marí­a Leiva Leiva, a columnist for the national daily La Tribuna, who promptly said that in his opinion the political class was responsible for all the problems in the country, that no government could change this and it was his duty to report it.