The Spanish version of RT is intended as an antidote to the toxic influence of foreign media channels “that transmit news based on their interests,” as Mrs. Kirchner put it. The Spanish-language RT deal mirrors the Venezuelan-Argentine venture in the public news channel Telesur, in which Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador and Uruguay also have minority stakes. Like Telesur, RT is presented not merely as an option in a pluralistic media landscape, but as the channel representing the true national cultures of each country in which it broadcasts.

From Ecuador to Venezuela, the conflation of state media, private media ownership by politicians and their cronies and party propaganda has been a prominent aspect of Latin American populism during its first decade of ascendancy. As the recent re-election of President Evo Morales in Bolivia shows, these populist leaders continue to enjoy broad support. But in Bolivia, as elsewhere in Latin America, these leaders have also manufactured their support by co-opting the power of state media and by marginalizing more critical elements of the independent media.

In Argentina, Venezuela and Ecuador, the typical strategy is to use antitrust laws to force commercial media groups to break up and sell off assets, which are then acquired by pro-government investors. For example, just days before Argentina’s deal with RT became public, the government agency assigned to enforce the country’s new media law announced that it would seek to dismember the audiovisual arm of the Clarín media group (which also publishes Argentina’s principal newspaper of the same name, where one of us works as a journalist).

In Venezuela, the influential opposition newspaper Tal Cual, edited by the veteran left-wing politician Teodoro Petkoff, has announced its imminent closure — a situation described by the Inter-American Press Association as symptomatic of “the siege on the critical or independent press in Venezuela,” where almost all TV channels and radio stations have come under government control. In Ecuador, after the newspaper Hoy was forced into partial closure when the government imposed an advertising boycott, its director attacked the country’s new media law for “criminalizing journalistic work.”

The populist rhetoric against critical newspapers and journalists is that they must be penalized as part of a struggle against the “economic interests” of private owners that are opposed to the common good. The roots of such populism can be traced to widespread grievances about the failures of the “Washington consensus,” which made the continent a laboratory for neoliberal economics and imposed considerable hardships. With charismatic leadership, populism has proved remarkably successful in electoral terms. But there is a difference between winning elections and a truly democratic culture, and Latin America’s populist leaders have amassed enormous power even as they expanded social rights.