Buenos Aires — The military government plans to use the Argentine press and public opinion polls as a substitute for the congress which has been dissolved and the political parties which have been banned.
“We must find new channels of communication to the people now that we no longer have a representative democracy,” said Federico Frischknecht, the new secretary of broadcasting and tourism in an interview yesterday.
There has been growing concern here that the government wants to use the mass media to express only its views and to suppress even the cautious kind of criticism that now appears regularly in newspapers and magazines.
Mr. Frischknecht denied that he had any intention of becoming a kind of supercensor of Argentina’s press and broadcasting.
“The only way we have to establish channels to the people is through the newspapers and radio and television,” he said. “If we don’t make that communication, then we will have a totalitarian regime and this government does not want to be that.”
Many of his plans are still unformed, Mr. Frischknecht said, but his primary job, as he sees it, is to “see that the newspapers here get much more information about how the government is thinking, what the meaning of the government’s moves are, and even where the disagreements are centered.”
Mr. Fischknecht said that in the past, government press officials and government officials themselves have tried to hide many of their blunders “behind a lot of meaningless talk.”
“I am going to see to it,” he said, “that they now disclose full information.”
It is Mr. Frischknecht’s theory that “by helping the news media get absolutely truthful information without suppressing anything but security secrets we can be in better contact with the public and they with us.”
He said his office would expect public reaction to government plans and actions to appear in the press in the form of letters, editorials and other published comment.
“But we are also going to rely on public opinion polls like those that are used so effectively in the United States,” he said. — International Herald Tribune, June 1, 1967