The irony of Chile’s media is that there was more ideological diversity and journalistic energy in the printed press in the late 1980s, in the waning years of the hard-line dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, than now when he is long gone and proponents of democracy are firmly in control. Two daily newspapers, El Mercurio and La Tercera, dominate. Both are politically right of center. Their virtual monopoly is a legacy of the scorched-earth ideological repression that took place when Pinochet took power in the 1970s, confiscating or closing all media organizations that did not cheer on his military government. Chile’s newspaper market became what one study called a market ”duopoly… accompanied by an ideological monopoly.”

One might think that such an unbalanced press would have been remedied in the sixteen years since Pinochet left power, especially considering that the center-left Concertación, a coalition of moderate Socialists and Christian Democrats, has won all the elections. But one would be wrong.

”In sixteen years of democracy, clearly we have a failure in this area,”said Ricardo Lagos Weber, a government minister and spokesman. ”We have a debit, as they say, a debt. The majority that voted for the Concertación still does not have a print medium with which it can fully identify. But what can the state do about this? That is a delicate question.”

Doing nothing–a hands-off policy–perhaps would be defensible. But fighting tooth and nail against the re-emergence of a paper shut down by Pinochet is harder to understand. Consider the Sisyphean struggle of ninety-two-year-old Victor Pey. Pey wants to relaunch Clarín, the raucous, left-leaning tabloid that was the largest-selling weekday paper in the country until it was confiscated by Pinochet as part of his military takeover in 1973.

Pey had purchased the paper a few months...

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