Introduction

The media in Colombia is a fundamental political institution in the complex public policy process. Among other things, it exposes and helps define public problems, is a forum for public debate, shapes public opinion and influences government agendas. However, in order to do all this, and given the need for facts, information and interpretations, it needs to draw on key sources within the technical and political policy process. We know that its strength lies in the political, but what of the technical dimension?

Both the informative and public policy processes are information-intensive in all senses, and while often everything is important, regardless of where it comes from, when we look at government decisions in particular, public administration demands evidence in the form of information processed by serious, verifiable and reproducible methods that sustain and provide even a minimum level of security regarding the underlying causal theory of a measure proposed to solve an issue. Where, then, does this type of information come from in the Colombian public policy process? What factors (restrictions) come into play regarding the use of the information by the media? And how is information processed by the media in public policy discussions?

This chapter answers these three questions in order. Regarding the first question, it argues that in Colombia there are three main qualified sources of policy information: the government, think tanks and universities. With respect to the second question, the chapter documents how the media generally face various difficulties that affect their functioning, particularly regarding the intensive use of evidence and policy analysis. These difficulties are generally of two types. On one hand, they are institutional, linked to the historical configuration of the country's media system combined with the current realities of the sector that has been corporatized, and that is still unable to adapt to the challenges of a more digitalized world in which the media has largely lost its monopoly over the news. On the other hand, they are cognitive, which would allow for an understanding of the difficulties involved in managing their agenda spaces and to handle new or specialized information of the kind referred to in this chapter.