Belen Bogado, a blogger and journalist who covers news about Paraguay, interviewed fellow Paraguayan blogger and journalist Carlos Rodríguez for Global Voices. Rodríguez helped develop R.E.S.C.A.T.A.R., a multimedia blog that fills a void left by so few mainstream media outlets in their home country.
Rodríguez said he enjoys his journalistic pursuits through R.E.S.C.A.T.A.R. because he doesn’t have the same commercial considerations the mainstream media have. He is also free of constraints relating to political or sectarian interests.
He also uses the blog as a podium to criticize the mainstream media, such as ABC, the largest distributed newspaper in Paraguay. Rodríguez discovered what he calls “distortion of information” in ABC‘s reporting and he took the paper’s owner to task. Rodríguez feels it is necessary to keep an eye on the Paraguayan press because he feels the media don’t have strong journalistic ethics.
Because there are so few media owners within Paraguay, Rodríguez feels that blogs are an important medium to help diversify information disseminated within the country. He says,
Our goal is to rescue civil society’s experiences and generate a debate based on them, because in Paraguay there are important things being done and many valuable experiences of the people, but no one finds out about them because they take place on a community level. Applying these experiences into other areas of the society can help solve the many problems that the country is going through.
Source: “Paraguay: Rescuing Citizen Experiences Through the Use of Blogs,” Global Voices, 03/27/10
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