Ortega Regime Will End TV Monopoly : Media: The move opens the way for the Sandinistas to set up a station before Chamorro takes over.

President Daniel Ortega, preparing to move into the political opposition, announced Tuesday that his government will abolish a controversial media law that gave the state exclusive rights to operate a television station.

The move would open the way for the Sandinista National Liberation Front to set up a television channel before Ortega turns the government over to President-elect Violeta Barrios de Chamorro on April 25.

It also would leave Nicaragua without government censorship or media controls for the first time in more than a decade. The Sandinista government had argued that such laws were necessary during the U.S.-backed Contra war.

Ortega said he will ask the Sandinista-dominated National Assembly to approve a decree repealing the controversial media law, which allows the Interior Ministry to suspend broadcasts and publications deemed “contrary to state security, national integrity, peace or public order.”

Under the law, the Interior Ministry can also order media to publish corrections or retractions of stories deemed false or injurious.

“Now there will be no restrictions of any kind on the exercise of journalism beyond the responsibility of the journalist,” Ortega said. “It will depend on the sensitivity of each journalist for this to become not the law of the jungle but the law of reason, maturity and patriotism.”

Repeal of the media law “automatically makes way for private television stations to exist in Nicaragua,” Ortega said.

Ortega made the announcement to more than 100 newspaper editors and publishers attending a meeting of the Inter-American Press Assn. “Ortega’s announcement is stupendous, although now it benefits them (the Sandinistas) in the opposition,” said Pablo Antonio Cuadra, director of the newspaper La Prensa.

It was La Prensa’s publisher, Chamorro, who dealt Ortega a stunning blow in the Feb. 25 presidential election. The campaign platform of her National Opposition Union (UNO) promised to abolish the media law.

“One of Violeta Chamorro’s first measures as president will be to open an independent channel, and it is possible that UNO will have its own channel too,” said Cuadra.

Currently, there are two television stations under the state-run Sandinista Television System. Cuadra said one of those had been expropriated by the Sandinistas and will be returned to its original owners.

The law that Ortega plans to overturn was approved by the legislature last April in place of an even tougher censorship law. Previously all three daily newspapers were subject to government censorship before publication, although in practice the anti-Sandinista La Prensa was the only newspaper routinely affected. The government had little cause to censor the party newspaper, Barricada, and the pro-Sandinista Nuevo Diario.

Under a nationwide state of emergency, La Prensa was shut down for 15 months beginning in June, 1986, after the U.S. Congress approved $100 million in military aid to the Contras.

Since the elections, both Chamorro and Ortega have called for the demobilization of the Contras.

Managua Mayor Carlos Carrion, who lost his bid for reelection, allowed that Ortega might be repealing the media law now for the Sandinistas’ political interests.

“There’s definitely a different perspective when you’re in the government than when you’re in the opposition,” Carrion said.

Asked why the Sandinistas should be allowed a television station when they denied it to their opposition, Carrion said: “That was part of the UNO’s platform. Our platform was no, theirs was yes. They won.”