Censorship,clientelism and bureaucracy: Production cultures in Colombian state-owned media system

Abstract

Working conditions in the creative industries are a growing academic concern among researchers in the Global South, particularly in Latin America. However, beyond the celebratory narratives that dominate the field, more study is needed to understand the sector’s actual impact on employees’ lives. The working circumstances of state-owned television producers in Colombia are the subject of this article, as public media have long been important actors in the local creative economy. The opinions and experiences of producers are investigated using empirical evidence and survey data collected between 2014 and 2019. It is argued that precarity, an intrinsic descriptor of creative work, takes on a different hue when put into a Latin American setting, where clientelism, censorship and bureaucracy propose new contextualized understandings of creative work in a non-commercial industry and a specific national context

Keywords

bureaucracy censorship clientelism Latin America media production cultures state own-media

Introduction

This article examines the working dynamics of media workers in Colombia, using the audiovisual production field as a context. Specifically, it focuses on workers for state-owned media, key players in the cultural and creative industries (CCI) and the configuration of the current media production ecologies and production cultures in the region (Ministerio de Cultura, 2003).

The study of working conditions in the CCI is gaining traction among media academics in the area and in the larger Latin American (Latam) environment. The most generally referenced research, on the other hand, concentrates on the CCI’s contributions to GDP, emphasising the importance of economic performance in key creative industries sectors (UNCTAD, 2016: ii) to highlight prospects for enhancing productivity and stimulating investment (UNESCO, CISAC, E&Y, 2015). In the region, the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) has been a key promoter of creative economies through several reports that aim to leverage the economic impact of the industry, which has employed more than 11 million people in Latin America and generated over 174 billion dollars in revenues (IADB, 2017b). The IADB-commissioned guidebook Orange Economy, an Infinite Opportunity (2013), published by Ivan Duque, Colombia’s current President (2018–2022), and Felipe Buitrago, Duque’s former Secretary of Culture, is one of the most widely read and quoted reports among media, policymakers, and CCI managers. The authors argue that the cultural sector is creative per se, but other sectors retain a high level of creativity and innovation in their final products (such as architecture, software, advertising, ICT services), which can also exploit intellectual property rights. Thus, it is argued all CCI sectors can profit from ingenuity and innovation, and the extended cultural and creative field can benefit from the generation of new jobs. These high-profile publications make little mention of specific aspects of working circumstances, other than to advocate creative labour as innately good and desirable. Other publications commissioned by the IADB, on the other hand, strive to go beyond the celebratory narrative and present a little more nuanced view of what it means to work in the creative sector: ‘In the span of a single generation, the digital economy has transformed the nature of work. (. . .) Creatives can take on microtasks in their spare time, building contacts, portfolios, and reputations. . . The downside? Work is now more fragmented, unpredictable, and insecure than ever before’ (IADB, 2017a: 3).

The continual emphasis on the CCI’s economic advantages, in contrast to allegations of informal labour patterns and precarity in the sector, has piqued Latam researchers’ interest in the issue. Critics have begun to offer a more critical and reflexive account of media/creative workers’ experiences and perceptions of the field, paving the way for a new path for the study of creative work in Latin America that includes both a political economy focus and a much-needed detailed study of workers’ agency from a cultural studies perspective (Castano-Echeverri, 2017, Castano-Echeverri and Correa-González, 2021; García-Canclini and Piedras, 2013; Jongbloed and Corredor-Aristizábal, 2020; Piñón, 2016). Nevertheless, there is still a pressing need for more empirical data that delivers evidence about the working conditions across the different fields in the Latam CCI to establish how local specificities add to the existing knowledge on the topic (Alacovska and Gill, 2019).

A group of TV professionals’ experiences and perspectives of media work are investigated to fill up the gaps. The initial focus is on their impressions of employment in a state-owned media environment. The scope is then expanded to include workers in the Colombian film and television sectors. State-owned Colombian broadcaster Radio Television National de Colombia (RTVC public media system) is under the control of the Ministry of Information Technology and Communications (MinTIC). RTVC includes two state-run and state-funded television channels (Señal Colombia – SC, and Señal Institucional), four radio stations, and one online video platform (RTVC Play). Colombia’s film industry is likewise heavily reliant on government support (Jongbloed and Corredor-Aristizábal, 2020), and the government’s current intentions to make the nation the CCI’s heartland on the continent have opened up financial opportunities to new participants like software and game developers. Governments in Latin America have a long history of owning, supporting, and generating media material, some of which is referred to as ‘public’ (Fox, 1988), having a substantial effect on media production ecologies, cultures, contents and outcomes (Matos, 2012). When put within the context of Colombia’s screen industries, where the state is a significant and distinctive participant, precarity takes on a new tint. The article also aims to fulfil a need to dewesternize the concept of ‘precarity’ (Alacovska and Gill, 2019) by exploring what such a term might differently and precisely mean in the Colombian CCI context.

This article also attempts to add to the Latam CCI’s regional analysis of work quality. It focuses on how workers in the film and television industries feel and perceive precarity, as well as how governmental and organisational systems influence their view. The experience of CCI workers in the setting of state-owned media is said to be substantiated by three key contextual elements: censorship, bureaucracy, and clientelism. These three factors are crucial to comprehending how the term ‘precarity’ plays out in Colombia.

Precarity in CCI: what we know

Studies on labour in the CCI explore, among other aspects, ‘the consequences of casualization of employment, the nature of creativity, and the division of work roles as well as questions of ethics and diversity in media production’ (Paterson et al., 2016: 6). This focus is also fuelled by the popular upbeat narrative of the creative economy, which offers a celebration of entrepreneurship, ‘creativity’, freelancing, ‘portfolio careers’ and social networking as features of avant-garde forms of work (Bakhshi and Cunningham, 2016; Buitrago and Duque, 2013; IADB, 2017a, 2017b; Newbigin, 2010). However, as in the Orange Economy study, the upbeat narrative rarely emphasizes creative employees’ rising individualization, which frequently leaves them alienated, underpaid, without job stability and subject to a constant state of precarious uncertainty (see Banks et al., 2013). Beyond the glitter, buzz, and potential for self-realisation offered by the CCI narratives, critical studies in the subject have evidenced that creative labour is characterized by:

‘a preponderance of temporary, intermittent and precarious jobs; long hours and bulimic patterns of working; the collapse or erasure of the boundaries between work and play; poor pay; high levels of mobility; passionate attachment to the work and the identity of the creative labourer (. . .); an attitudinal mindset that is a blend of bohemianism and entrepreneurialism; informal work environments and distinctive forms of sociality; and profound experiences of insecurity and anxiety about finding work, earning enough money and “keeping up” in rapidly changing fields’ (Gill and Pratt, 2008: 33).

The notion of precarity, then, has been constantly used as a more encompassing concept to describe the downsides of creative work. For Ross (2009), for example, this concept is a ‘shorthand for the condition of social and economic insecurity’ (p. 34). For Cohen (2012), work precarity is promoted when employers offload the companies’ financial risks and setbacks onto individuals, trading ‘autonomy for the ability to extract higher value through the contract and freelance status, protecting capital from risk, lowering labour costs, and intensifying competition for work’ (p. 148). These practices are directly linked to concentration strategies, outsourcing, disenfranchisement and international divisions of labour which have been effectively adopted by states and corporations through privatizing measures (Foti, 2017; Lull, 2000). The very well-known features of precarity in the CCI gained global attention during the SARS COVID pandemic. National lockdowns severely affected the processes of content production, exposing the instability and fragility of the sector (Banks, 2020; Comunian and England, 2020; Jongbloed et al., 2021).

Precarious work in the Colombian CCI

This study began in 2014 with the goal of investigating public-value narratives among producers in the context of Colombian state-owned television. Over time, the emphasis turned to the workings of television practitioners and the constraints imposed by their unique working environment (Castano-Echeverri, 2017). Issues of work in Latam public media have been neglected by academics in the region, even when Latam state-owned media systems have been pivotal in constructing and developing local media ecologies (Fox and Waisbord, 2002). The study published in 2017 provided insights on cultural work in a previously unexplored context and revealed a production culture where bureaucracy, clientelism and censorship have created and promoted an ecology of production based on the constraint of workers’ creative autonomy.

The study was subsequently updated with material from press releases, as well as a follow-up survey and interviews (2019) to better evaluate the influence of the then recently elected rightist government on Colombian state-owned media. Moreover, the interest in studying issues of work in public media was extended to the more comprehensive screen industries in Colombia.

The findings and analyses presented in the sections below are based on data collected from both studies. Initially, 49 participants were individually interviewed, among them: commissioning editors, independent producers, directors, researchers, production assistants, camera operators, technical assistants, and representatives from senior management at RTVC Colombian public media system (PMS), and the Colombian Ministry of Culture. Then, between November 2014 and January 2015 the daily production routines at RTVC facilities and some location productions were observed. The then-Director of SC granted access to the facilities and introduced the researcher to senior management and the creative team. Finally, between August and March 2019, 296 audiovisual industry workers were surveyed in order to update and enhance data on working conditions in the Colombian screen industries. In this follow-up stage, eleven practitioners working for state-owned broadcasters were interviewed from among these participants. The participants initially agreed to their names being revealed but most of them then rescinded their consent. They requested to remain anonymous when it came to their criticisms of the government or their working conditions. Their concern was getting blacklisted or facing political retaliation for ‘biting the hand that fed them’. Accordingly, I did not include the dates of the interviews since doing so would allow establishing the identity of the participants if the date was matched to the position they held.

The need to continue this line of study stems from a lack of scholarly literature on working conditions in the Latam CCI, as well as recent political developments that have placed Colombia at the centre of the debate about the influence of CCI on national economies.

A President for the regional CCI

In 2018 Ivan Duque Marquez, co-author of the IADB commissioned report The Orange Economy: An Infinite Opportunity was elected President of Colombia. One of his first tasks was to sanction the Creative Industries Law, which he had proposed as a senator, in 2017. The law enshrines the development, promotion and protection of the Colombian CCI, focusing on the creation, production and commercialization of goods and services based on intangible content of a cultural nature and those protected under intellectual property rights. Colombian CCI sectors took the law cautiously, as important issues were being left behind, such as the great symbolic value of culture, and the focus was put mainly on entrepreneurship and large capital investment (Botero, 2019). UNESCO (2019) recommends that the CCI be viewed as cultural organisations, rather than focused solely on capital development, so that commodities, services, and activities with cultural, artistic or heritage content reach the public or market through activities of circulation, conservation and training. These challenges have yet to be addressed, despite the fact that job creation and the influence of CCI on GDP are recognized as major priorities for the law. According to Duque, entrepreneurship is the key to attaining these goals, and integrating platform economies is the fastest way to get there. In the end, he wants Colombia to be known as the ‘Silicon Valley of Latin America’: ‘We also wanted to have more startups in the creative and technology sectors, and we embraced a policy of zero income tax for the first seven years with a minimum amount of investment and a minimum amount of jobs being created’ (Interview for Latin American Business Stories, 2019). Jobs and the quality of jobs in the creative sector are not an issue here.

According to Duque’s Orange Economy, out of the total of 1,160,000 people in the sector, 136,223 are employees, meaning they have a full-time contract, and 220,619 work full-time but as independents (DANE, 2017). Other workers have a mix of formal and informal jobs that may or may not be tied to the CCI. As a result, 69% of Colombian CCI workers do not rely on fixed contracts to perform their jobs.

Overall, quality of labour in Colombia has deteriorated consistently, which is evident in the ‘rise in underemployment; temporary, seasonal and subcontracted employment; income insecurity and inequality, insufficient social protection and occupational safety and a grave lack of workers’ representation and participation’ (Ferreira, 2016: 140). All of these characteristics are the result of previous labour reforms that promoted flexibility by introducing fixed and short-term contracts, reducing severance pay, lowering the nightly surcharge, and implementing a tax package to cover social security (a total of 22.4% of an independent’s income is required to be allocated for private health insurance and a pension fund); all in an effort to reduce tax evasion and promote formalisation (Muñoz-Cardona, 2014).

The low-quality job protection contrasts with the perception shared by entry-level professionals that the CCI will offer financially secure careers and a glamorous status very quickly. Only a few weeks into the job, they discover that they will be working longer hours for relatively short-term projects lasting less than 4 months, and earning less than they anticipated:

‘We have no schedules at work, we must be available on weekends, holidays, and there is no paid leave. . . Yes, you have a few months with a stable and “good” income, but it is still exhausting. On top of that, the amount of taxes you have to pay is outrageously high, therefore no matter how high your income is, it is just an illusion. . .’ (‘Monica‘, Commissioning Editor).

Furthermore, outsourcing for projects is the most common hiring practice, adding further financial concerns to workers who constantly struggle to find financial stability: ‘These outsourcing companies charge [us] with administrative fees, it is like paying to work. On top of that, projects are very short so that you are always on the look for the next project (. . .) the money is not enough to live on between jobs’ (‘Juan’, Freelance Director).

Quality of life is considerably affected, forcing workers to work more for significantly less income and stability. However, with a staggering 62.1% of informal employment in Colombia, some workers see a silver lining in their situation: ‘I have a fixed-term contract; no days off; no health care; no pension scheme. I have two children, and when they are on school holidays, I have to bring them to the office sometimes; this is not an ideal way of working, but I must feel grateful and lucky that I have a job’ (‘Elena’, programmer).

Her working circumstances are far from unfavourable as compared to independents and freelancers. Independent producers, for example, do not rely on a monthly income; yet, when state grants are used to support their initiatives, the money becomes a bursary that must be administered. Most of the time, the grant does not cover all of the elements or phases of the production, thus independents stretch the funds to keep the technical and narrative quality acceptable.

The scenario depicted so far is similar to comparable studies from Global North settings where flexible forms of work are the norm in the CCI. We see in the Colombian context a greater reliance on lower-paid, more precarious work, which places a higher demand on personal resources (Castano-Echeverri, 2017; Jongbloed and Corredor-Aristizábal, 2020). However, we may see unique colours to the well-known picture of precarity in the CCI in the connection to, and dependency on, government organisational cultures.

Precarity: Colombian add-ons

Colombia’s public service television history began on June 13, 1954, during one of the country’s most bloody eras. To commemorate his first year in power, dictator General Gustavo Rojas (1953–1957) gave a live-broadcast address to start the television programme. The inauguration had the political goal of glorifying Rojas’ administration and controlling audiovisual representations of Colombian reality, specifically by avoiding the production of comprehensive reports on the civil war known as La Violencia (1954–1958), which claimed the lives of 200,000 Colombians, in order to sell a positive international image of the country (Benavides-Campos, 2012; Galván, 2013).

There were no studios or sets, only improvised sites; there were no defined scheduling principles; the majority of TV technicians and engineers were brought over from Cuba; and talent was borrowed from radio (Benavides-Campos, 2012: 125–126). Furthermore, the government failed to build a clear organisational structure for the TV system’s operation, leaving it completely reliant on other government organisations till now. Nowadays, Colombian state-owned television is supported by taxes levied on private television companies. The Law 1978 of 2019 establishes that the funds are sent directly to MinTIC and disbursed to the Communications Regulation Commission (CRC) and the Superintendency of Industry and Commerce (SIC) via Fund for Information and Communication Technologies (FONTIC). On an annual basis, RTVC requests an operating budget from the CRC.

The lack of autonomy and independence of the Colombian PMS from the government has allowed it to be used as a political platform for awarding employment as unstated quotas among members of the ruling coalition. Here, prominent political patrons utilize their weight to have their clients appointed to government posts (high or low, depending on the client’s ability to get votes) in order to increase the patron’s political clout and gain privileged access to information and resources. The allocation of state resources is governed by a clientelistic distribution mechanism, which legitimizes the establishment of informal networks rated by political capital rather than merit, such as Colombia’s PMS, which hires managers based on unstated political agreements (Restrepo-Echavarría and Piedrahita-Bustamante, 2021; Rincón, 2004; Zuluaga et al., 2012).

Clientelism, labour laws, and underhanded censorship and bureaucracy (Bailey, 1976; Eaton and Prieto, 2017; Martz, 1997) exacerbate the field’s already insecure character. These characteristics, as described in the following sections, are expressions of state authority within state-owned media production cultures: Clientelism is evident in the appointment of directors for the PMS and its networks based on political negotiations rather than strategic development plans; authoritarianism can be found in censorship and self-censorship practices. Finally, the various processes and procedures that impede the characteristic speed of screen creation are examples of bureaucracy.

Clientelism

According to Archer, clientelist practices emerged in Colombia after the Spanish colonisation when Colombian peasants were ‘tied to the land through peonage arrangements . . . (and were) often dependent on (their) patrons for protection from the outside world’ (1990:11). This practice became deeply entrenched at the beginning of the 20th century due to the state’s weakness and absence from most rural areas. Here, deficient levels of socio-economic development and a lack of market relations allowed patrons to control peasants’ economic livelihoods. The creation of client-based unprofessional armed forces whose duty was to protect the patron’s property and defend them from their enemies developed. These armies became the patron’s political capital to make arrangements with politicians in exchange for favours. If the patron’s party ‘won the national elections, (their most notable clients) would most likely be given the opportunity to serve either as local or departmental notary publics, judges, departmental assemblymen, municipal councilmen or mayors, and in some cases substitutes to, or as, representatives’ (Archer, 1990: 12).

Every time there are national elections, the political cards are shuffled, with new political appointments made using updated versions of the patronage system. The new appointments are chosen based on political ties and clientelist relationships (Martz, 1997). This strategy benefits the political party in two ways: it enhances its government representation and guarantees that the appointee’s appreciation and loyalty will favour the party whenever its interests are compromised. Furthermore, this exchange of favours and services makes those who benefit from clientelism reliant on the government for resources, enhancing their reputation and legitimacy as they carry out their newly-assigned duties. As a result, new bosses are free to reorganize their work teams discretionarily, resulting in more chances to grow the clientele network by providing positions, because, as Robinson and Verdier (2013) explain it: ‘a job is a credible, selective, and reversible method of redistribution, which ties the continuation utility of a voter to the political success of a particular politician’ (p. 285).

There is an extensive body of work that studies the prevalence of clientelism in state-owned media with a focus on Latin America and the Mediterranean (Hallin and Papathanassopoulos, 2002), South African (Beck, 2008; Mabweazara et al., 2020), and post-communist countries (Roudakova, 2008). These studies are primarily concerned with investigating the link between political clientelism and the development of national media systems. Nonetheless, there is much uncertainty concerning the link between clientelistic practices and their influence on media production routines and media practitioners’ professional identities. In this article, clientelism is highlighted as one of the most important variables determining the working circumstances and professional identity of Colombian state-owned media professionals, since this practice exacerbates their perception of job precarity and de-professionalization.

When it comes to state-owned broadcasters in Colombia, every time management positions are reshuffled, producers’ experiences and perceptions of the job are profoundly impacted, especially if they fail to recognize political appointees as legitimate players in the media sector, which is frequently the case because these appointees typically lack professional experience in the audiovisual field but are laden with political baggage. Furthermore, these appointments have an impact on producers’ workflows, since they are frequently required to terminate projects they have been working on in order to begin new ones in accordance with new management plans. Furthermore, employees interpret these actions as a sign of the government’s disregard in the PMS’ goals and objectives: ‘They only care about using their role as a political launchpad for achieving other political appointments, such as working in an embassy’ (‘Monica’, Commissioning Editor).

Clientelism is a type of symbolic power manifested in interactions between agents distributed in a social space (in this case, a state organisation), where capitals are weighed, recognized and legitimized, reinforcing the power relations that make up the structure of that space, and where agents comply with objective structures that make sense of the world of social structures they are in (Bourdieu, 1989). In this case, clientelism offers fresh perspectives on subjectivities, socialities, and new forms of politics (Gill and Pratt, 2008) that have not previously been identified in the (mainly Anglocentric) area of cultural work.

Workers’ perceptions of insecurity and instability are heightened by the Colombian PMS’s continuous management changes, which occur more frequently than the expected 4 years (six managers over the past 10 years, 2011–2021) because they have no way of knowing whether the new manager will remove them from their positions. If not, they must adapt to new managerial styles and projects. Furthermore, under new management, processes, deadlines, and even the channel’s name change, obscuring months, if not years, of creative input and hard labour, adding a sense of demoralisation and insignificance to the already fragile environment cultural work implies.

Editorial control a.k.a censorship

The Colombian Congress passed a new legislation on information and communication technology in June 2019. (ICT Law 1978 of 2019). According to Colombia’s Foundation for Freedom of Expression (FLIP), the law allows the government to exert total control over the media through the MinTIC, which is in charge of determining which broadcasters have access to the airwaves, as well as controlling public television spending and funding, effectively suffocating the limited editorial independence that some public broadcasters still have (Observacom, 2019). Furthermore, it limits the independence of the new communications regulating agency by selecting seven of its eight members directly (Pérez and Lombana, 2019).

However, even before the ICT Law was approved, a board of government agencies that supervise and monitor the PMS’ strategic direction, financial execution, and timetable adherence with national government plans specified all public media goals and operations in Colombia. In practice, this means that public-funded media production is supposed to cover the subjects, storylines and images of the country that the government wishes to promote.

Some media organisations and prominent personalities expressed their discontent with the ICT Law months before it was approved. Santiago Rivas, the most well-known presenter for the state-owned channel SC, exacerbated the issue by appearing in a short video explaining the most contentious aspects of the ICT law. His TV show, Los Puros Criollos, was abruptly pulled off SC’s lineup after widespread social media coverage. The order to withdraw was made by Juan Pablo Bieri, director of RTVC and former campaign manager for President Duque, according to an audio clip obtained by FLIP. Bieri officially rejected all censorship allegations, stood down to become President Duque’s communications advisor, and initiated a lawsuit against Diana Diaz, the SC’s then-director, for unlawfully recording a work meeting. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights heard the case after FLIP fought extensively to have it heard. As a result, Diaz’s case was included in the most recent Interamerican Commission on Human Rights report on Freedom of Expression in the Region, along with other acts of monitoring and profiling of journalists, activists and opponents by the Colombian state (IACHR, 2021).

In September 2021, the Prosecutor’s Office dismissed Diaz’s case, citing that she did not use the information for her or a third party’s benefit, and that it could not be shown that Diaz was responsible for sharing the information. Santiago Rivas, on the other hand, did not recover his job, and his canned shows have stayed off the SC schedule ever since.

In an authoritarian endeavour to demonstrate its dominance, the government restricts employees’ creative freedoms by limiting representations of national reality and confining them to a small selection of approved themes that correspond to national development objectives (Bourdieu et al., 1994: 1). Surprisingly, workers accept the covert censorship as a necessary aspect of the job, and some even ensure that their coworkers follow the government’s rules. The truth is, they are so committed to their professions that they choose to downplay the intrusion of political powers into their conditions of work. The following description of how ‘editorial control’– as they prefer to call censorship – operates summarises the rules of the game:

‘In this field, you have to do everything they ask you to do and, in the end, that works for your benefit. They [bosses] will see you as someone they can rely on, and your chances of being offered positions in further projects increase. You see others [colleagues] who come and want to do what they please; they just don’t last long. If you get along with them, you warn them, show them how things must be done if they want to keep their jobs’ (‘Milton’, Commissioning Editor).

In short, ‘no one bites the hand that feeds them’, as many respondents put it, revealing a perpetual state of intensified unease and uncertainty, fuelled in part by the sector’s inherent volatility and the fear of upsetting paid labour sources.

Bureaucracy

The Colombian PMS is characterized by authoritarian control over its content and by bureaucratic management structures unresponsive to the nuances and dynamics of its cultural and creative production function, such as workers’ opportunities for developing their creative autonomy and participation in the company’s ethos (Ross, 2009). Instead, these structures observe ‘complicated formalities of official procedures’ (Williams, 2011: 41) such as inquisitive cross-examinations and repetitive tasks, more adequate to slow-working, repressive state institutions which are ‘insensitive to individual’s wishes and heavily constrains their freedom of action’ (Sarangi and Slembrouck, 2014: 49). The extensive bureaucratic processes that producers must go through across the whole production chain demonstrate this, leaving them with very little space to express their professional/creative autonomy:

‘We bid for the tender that was published in February; we were told we had won it in June, and it took another two more months to finalize all the paperwork. In the end, we had less than 6 months to produce a documentary series that was conceived to produce seven episodes over 11 months’ (‘Ferney’, Independent Producer).

Every time state-owned media employees go through a maze of paperwork for each project, bureaucratic processes underestimate their creative abilities. They believe that too much time is wasted filling out forms when it should be spent developing new high-quality results. In this case, bureaucratic processes are a government strategy for masking the inefficiencies of managerial and administrative support for television production caused by clientelism by reducing it to bureaucratic paperwork. Bureaucrats may have little knowledge of television, but they are well-versed in the workings of the state, which allows them to thrive inside the system. This is a daunting and disappointing environment for most participants, since bureaucratic procedures such as a lack of decision-making authority and lengthy paperwork result in lost work time spent drafting up initiatives that may never see the light of day: ‘everything is so slow, and so many people have to authorize your work, that the process wears you out. Sometimes there are so many previous processes that you end up losing passion for your project. Besides, you always feel on the edge because if you make a mistake, you might end up in jail for misusing the public’s money’ (‘Jason’, Production Manager).

Moreover, it only gets worse for independent producers: ‘It’s been six months since they [the broadcaster] announced that we won the tender, but I haven’t seen a dime yet. To meet the deadlines, I have already started working on my project, but I don’t know for sure when I will be paid. Paperwork takes a lot of’ (‘Leandro’, Freelance Director).

Bureaucracy, as a technology of power and a form of social organisation, is based on administrative habits and hierarchies that assure adherence to norms, rules, and procedures in order to ensure the most efficient execution or completion of a job. Its dynamics are legitimized by the state’s symbolic authority, even though processes have occasionally proven ineffective. In state-owned media, bureaucracy is the norm, and people put up with it. It also emphasizes its power by certifying an individual’s acts and processes to get official recognition. It is all done through technical administrations and paperwork, to put it frankly. Individuals weave a lengthy and tedious road to certification that discourages and hinders them. Bourdieu (1997) sees this process as a type of domination: ‘Making people wait (. . .) delaying without destroying hope, adjourning without totally disappointing’ (p. 227), since keeping individuals in a continuous state of insecurity forces them to comply with mandates.

However, as Du Gay (2000) argues, behind this negative representation, there is a bureaucratic ethos that ’includes the possession of enough skill, status and independence to offer frank and fearless advice about the formulation and implementation of distinctive public purposes and to try to achieve purposes impartially, responsibly and with energy if not enthusiasm’ (p. 146); that is, bureaucracy assures adherence to standards and institutional principles that cannot be left to chance. The bureaucracy that comes with the type of clientelism described in this study, on the other hand, works against du Gay’s values, promoting organisational cultures that, rather than being efficient, are inefficient, delaying outcomes and adding lengthy and sometimes unnecessary processes to the television production workflow.

Precarity and self exploitation

Despite the precarity of the job and the government’s sneaky authoritarianism, state-owned media employees think they are working in the finest possible environment. They find themselves working under less stress than in commercial television and producing programmes that they perceive to be of intrinsic value. Furthermore, employees identify with a narrative of value and worth at some point, which increases their overall satisfaction: they link themselves with the defence of state-owned media networks and the contents produced, and demonstrate a narrative of enthusiasm and love for what they do: ‘I feel that I’m contributing to my country, that I’m working for something worth watching’ (‘Cindy’, Commissioning Editor).

Workers in the media create a sense of belonging. They identify with a narrative that justifies their value as producers of public service television, which contributes to the development of a selfless professional identity, which can be defined as a refusal of tedious, repetitive, exploitative and mundane work (McRobbie, 2002), as well as the belief that they are producing something good, worthy and socially valuable (Banks, 2007; Bennett, 2015; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011).

Surprisingly, this mentality is more popular among most independent producers, who may push their enthusiasm for the profession to new heights, such as performing many roles or relying on their own financial resources to complete their projects. An independent producer, devoted to his craft, ended up in debt to meet production expenditures not included in the initial budget, all for the joy of making a show to his complete satisfaction:

‘I had to shut down my production company, but I would pay from my own pocket again if I’m not completely satisfied with the outcome. In any case, I love working for SC, because it is the only place where you can talk about the topics you like to talk about’ (Néstor Oliveros, director Los Puros Criollos. Interview 22 January 2015).

Satisfaction and commitment can also function to ‘mask exploitation, insecurity, and raise question marks over the long-term sustainability of a creative career within the current context’ (Lee, 2012: 483). According to Throsby, an aspect of cultural workers is that they in general ‘do not regard work as a chore where the only purpose is to earn income. Rather, their commitment to making art means that they have a positive preference for working in their chosen profession, and (. . .) they often forgo lucrative alternative employment in order to spend more time pursuing their creative work’ (Throsby, 2010: 81). In other words, they are the ‘voluntary poor’ (Ross, 2000). Both ideas are at the root of most cultural workers’ working conditions: they would rather be underpaid if it meant they could focus on something they care about, rather than possibly higher-paying professions that would swallow up the bulk of their time and provide little personal fulfilment.

Commitment and sacrifice can compensate for generosity in addition to gaining possibilities for self-expression and autonomy. The difficulty is that this behaviour, along with their conviction in the idea that ‘media and cultural industries have cultivated their importance as the bards of social meanings and values’ (Mayer, 2014: 60), only works against them, as Diaz, Rivas and Oliveros demonstrated.

The broadcaster’s dependence on the state is not deemed an aggravating factor for the precarity of practitioners’ working conditions in terms of the actual extent to which they can exert their creative autonomy. On the contrary, complying is seen by most practitioners as a display of good work. Consequently, they overlook and tolerate government control over their creativity so long as they can create content they deem valuable. As they put it, only through producing educational and cultural content can they make an essential contribution to society while keeping themselves employable.

‘I haven’t left the job because I love it, and that’s a problem. This is a passion, a passion that devours the rest of your life’ (Diana Diaz, then Communications Advisor for the Ministry of Culture, 11 January 2015).

Conclusions

In this article, we looked at the topics of precarity and creative autonomy in the context of Colombian state-owned media. The findings both corroborate and modify what we already know about the characteristics of work in the CCI. In terms of precarity, this study supports the notion that labour in the creative industries is marked by poor working conditions that keep workers in a state of financial shortage and uncertainty. Furthermore, it has demonstrated that precarity is an unavoidable aspect of Colombian labour. Employment for the government can make working circumstances even more unstable and precarious, since more taxes are levied. Furthermore, bureaucratic processes shorten contract term; workers must contend with a culture of unpredictable management and both overt and covert censorship.

Clientelism, censorship, and bureaucracy, which are at the core of the management of Colombian state-owned enterprises, operate as forms of symbolic and actual power that maintain the political status quo by keeping producers compliant with norms and procedures, according to one of the study’s key findings. Producers, in turn, accommodate to this environment in their search for creative self-realisation. Study participants intentionally make the decision to work for a state-owned broadcaster, and most of them choose to remain after learning about the negative aspects of their environment. They use work to seek ‘self-realisation’, yet their desire for autonomy does not disguise the structural factors that define their working lives. They are deeply concerned about the quality of their working environment as well as the quality of the cultural products they are contributing to creating.

Overall, cultural work precarity, as seen in the setting presented here, is a highly contextualized term in which TV professionals are constantly negotiating their own agency as persons and practitioners in order to meet the organisation ’s goals and realize their own potential. This connection is largely based on editorial and financial reliance, with the government serving as both a source of money and a primary client of state-owned media outputs, prompting producers to focus their creative efforts on what the government wants. Producers compromise the potential public service value of programmes in the quest of professional and financial survival, resulting in a paradoxical production culture characterized by deference, submissiveness, and high levels of love for the job.

This case study not only represents the country and the Latin American region, where several TV channels resemble the Colombian state-owned media system (Arroyo et al., 2013), but it also contributes to the existing literature on the dynamics of creative labour by focusing on a relatively unexplored setting such as a non-free market creative industry in a Global South country. This study contributes to the body of media production studies concerned with problems of organisational influence on creative workers’ autonomy by providing a larger picture for a deeper and more thorough conversation about media work and cultural industries in general. More study is needed to analyse and assess the similarities and variations in cultural production mechanisms in various geographical and industrial settings.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Colfuturo [2012] and Colciencias [Grant 646, 2014].

ORCID iD

Alejandra Castano-Echeverri

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