LATIN AMERICA

MS7095 COMPARATIVE JOURNALIS - M STUDIES

Alejandra Castano
ace14@le.ac.uk

Comparing media systems

COMPARING MEDIA SYSTEMS: SOUTHERN EUROPE

AND LATIN AMERICA (IN HALLIN AND MANCINI, 2000)
Historical perspectives: State intervention in South America has reinforced
governmental power (Waisbord, 2000)
Market liberalisation and political democratisation have assigned new
roles for state (more democratic participatory) and market (liberating
versus oppressive of debate)
Similarities between Latin American media systems and Southern
European (Hallin and Papathanassopoulos (2002, 3):
1.

1. the low circulation of newspapers;

2.

2. tradition of advocacy reporting;

3.

3. Instrumentalization (political use) of privately-owned media;

4.

4. politicization of broadcasting and regulation;

5.

5. limited development of journalism autonomy.

 In

most of Latin America mass circulation

newspapers never developed. UNESCO
circulation figures for Latin America for
1996 showed rates (probably inflated) of
97 per thousand in Mexico, 49 per
thousand in Colombia and 40 per thousand
in Brazil.

Low levels of
newspaper circulation

 Tends

to emphasize
commentary from a distinct
political perspective ()

Modified

both by diffusion of
the Anglo-American model of
journalism and by traditions of
passive reporting that
developed during periods of
dictatorship.

Emphasize

opinion and
commentary and newspapers
to represent distinct political
tendencies.

Tradition of
advocacy
reporting

 Late
It

transition to democracy.

is not simply a matter of

lifting censorship and holding
competitive elections, but
involves the transformation
of many political
institutions--including the
mass media--and of the
relationships among political,
social and economic
institutions.

Democracy,
Clientelism,
Civic Community and
Rational-Legal
Authority

 There

is a strong tendency for media to be controlled by private interests with political

alliances and ambitions who seek to use their media properties for political ends.

In

Brazil, instrumentalization is most evident in the case of the regional media: regional
newspapers and broadcasting companies are typically owned by local oligarchs who
use them to solidify their political control. In Colombia, "the press which was originally
born as privately owned united family control with political affiliation in an almost
indissoluble manner" (Rey, 1998: 164). The families that owned the newspapers were
the same that dominated the Liberal and Conservative parties, and the press was first
and foremost a vehicle of party politics.

In

Mexico newspapers have been highly dependent on state patronage, and their
owners generally associated with factions of the ruling Partido Revolucionario
Institucional. The dominant private television company, Televisa, meanwhile was more
or less openly allied with the ruling party until the death of Emilio Azcrraga, Jr. in
1997.

Instrumentalization of privately-owned media

 Savage

deregulation: policies of withdrawal of the state

1980s,

Latin America joined a global trend of liberal-ridden market reforms

.The already prevailing commercial media structures in Latin America both
in the press and in broadcasting were given a boost by these new liberal
reforms, which eventually favored not those market conditions necessary to
promote pluralism but a broader expansion of predominant corporate groups.

Thus,

in a context that combined new conditions for political power

competition, historical trends toward clientelism, and neo-liberal reforms that
reduced states regulatory capacities, the new ruling groups of post-transitory
Latin America ended up exchanging benefits and support with traditional
media groups that, far from having changed with the transitions, found better
conditions for accumulation and concentration at the expense of pluralism.

Economic reforms and market

deregulation

TREND TOWARD
THE
CONCENTRATION
OF MEDIA
MARKETS

It is estimated that the largest media

corporations own the production,
storage,
commercialization,
and
distribution processes and units of
over 80 percent of the contents that
citizens receive.

Politicization of public broadcasting and

broadcast regulation

Politicization

of regulatory bodies coexists with relatively

weak regulation of private broadcasters in the sense that few
public service obligations and few restrictions on
commercialism are imposed, and many regulations are laxly
enforced.

"savage

deregulation, - market logic has in recent years

been allowed to develop essentially unchecked--as it has
over a much longer period in Latin America.

"states

have been too big for the small and too small for the
big things" (Rey, 1998: 103).

COLONIZATION OF
MEDIA
STRUCTURES BY
THE POLITICAL
CLASS AND OF
POLITICAL SPACES
BY THE MEDIA

Transformation of politicians
into media entrepreneurs

Domestic media in Latin

America depend, at different
levels, on official advertising
for their survival.

DISCRETIONAL
GOVERNMENTAL
PUBLIC SPENDING
IN THE MEDIA

 Instrumentalization

of the news media by oligarchs, industrialists, parties

or the state obviously implies that journalistic autonomy will be limited.

"The

press is free; the journalist a slave."

Not

strongly developed as an autonomous institution, differentiated from

other institutions--the family business, the political clique, the party--with
a distinctive set of professional values and practices. Manifested in the
overlapping of journalistic culture with that of party politics.

5
Limited

development of institutions of journalistic self-regulation

Limited development of journalism as an autonomous

profession

 Weak

development of private capital and dependence of the latter on an

interventionist state.

Subsidized

media.

Limited development of journalism as an

autonomous profession

The notion of journalistic professionalism, which forms the basis

for journalists' claims of autonomy, is connected with the idea
that journalists serve a public interest that transcends the
interests of particular political parties, owners and social groups.
A sense of a public interest transcending particular interests has
been more difficult to achieve in societies where political
clientelism is historically strong, and this contributes to the
difficulty of developing a culture of journalistic professionalism.

Medias
capturing
of
regulatory spaces and the
states lower efficacy in
applying media regulation

CAPTURE OF
REGULATORY
SPACES BY LARGE
MEDIA GROUPS

Clientelism refers to a pattern of social organization in which access

to social resources is controlled by patrons and delivered to clients in
exchange for deference and various kinds of support. It is a
particularistic and asymmetrical form of social organization, and is
typically contrasted with forms of citizenship in which access to
resources is based on universalistic criteria and formal equality before
the law.

Clientelism

The emergence of clientelism represented not simply a persistence

of traditional hierarchical social structures, but a response to their
breakdown, in a social context in which individuals were isolated,
without independent access to the political and economic center,
e.g. through markets, representative political institutions or a
universalistic legal system, and in which "social capital" was lacking.

 During

Authoritarian rule: Double standards

1970s

pluralistic regimes; recognizing fundamental guarantees

(freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and so on).

Arrangements

between the new political groups and the

established media: politicians needed the media for conveying
their message and competing for power whereas traditional media
needed politicians to maintain their privileges (Mastrini and
Becerra, 2006; Corrales and Sandoval, 2005; Matos, 2012).

Relations between new ruling elites and

traditional media elites

Historical clientelism and informality

Clientelism

affects the efficacy of the legal frameworks both

normative and regulatory (Eisenstadt and Roniger, 1984). In the case
of the media, clientelism brings them directly into the political process
both by enabling their owners to forge alliances with certain political
groups and by pulling their strings to reduce the consequences of
regulations contrary to their interests.

For

Hallin and Papathanassopoulos (2002), clientelism defines the

relationship between the media and the political system in Latin
America. Moreover, clientelism ends up reducing the effectiveness
and efficacy of the regulation, creating conditions that allow for undue
interference of the media groups in politics and that play a part in
undermining the development of professional informative practices.

Economic elites in southern Europe and Latin America are often

deeply enmeshed in party politics, and this encourages
instrumentalization of the news media. The politicization of
business is a result not only of the important role the state plays
in the economy, but of the nature of the political process.

Clientelism and the Development of the News Media

 The

persistence of a culture in which evasion of the law is

relatively common means that opportunities for
particularistic pressures also are common: governments can
exercise pressure by enforcing the law selectively, and news
media can do so by threatening selectively to expose
wrongdoing.

In

clientelist forms of social organization, on the other hand,

information tends to be treated as a privately-held resource,
to be exchanged only within particularistic relationships.

Clientelism

also tends to blur the lines between the public

and private domains, privileging the private, with the result
that politicians in cultures tending to clientelism will tend to
see as intrusions into private affairs kinds of reporting that
would be taken for granted in more liberal societies.

CAPTURED MODEL
(Guerrero & Mrquez, 2014)

The media
model in
Latin
America

Media

regulation and the watchdog role of

journalism.

Non-pluralist
Prevalence

mediascape

of clientelism

Characteristics that affect the aspects where regulation should

be expected to work
market
discretional
the

concentration;

public spending on advertising,

colonization of media structures by political actors and of political

spaces by media corporations,
and

the capture of regulatory spaces by large media groups.

Consequences for Journalism Practice

1.

Inadequate mechanisms to protect journalistic performance and

practice

2.

Difficulties for research and investigative journalism as current

practice in the region

Limited

freedom of press (according to the Committee for the Protection of

Journalists, in 2010, censorship in Latin America reached one of its highest levels
since the regional democratization process took place 30 years ago (CPJ, 2010))

Persecutions
Violence

on critical journalism

against journalists

Consequences for Journalism Practice

1.

Inadequate mechanisms to protect journalistic performance and

practice

2.

Difficulties for research and investigative journalism as current

practice in the region

 Powerful

oligarchs manipulate politicians, shape institutions, and

control the media to advance and protect their own empires at the
expense of the social interest.

Hellman

and Kaufmann clearly identify state capture with

corruption and define it as the efforts of firms to shape the laws,
policies and regulation of the state to their own advantage by
providing illicit private gains to public officials (2001: 1).

The captured liberal media system

model

 The

term to state capture refers to a condition where some

aspects of the policy-making process and of the design of the rules
of the game are twisted in favor of certain specific private
interests. Here we use the term capture to underline both the
capacity of groups to twist the rules in their favor or make their
application selective and ineffective, and the condition where
extra-journalistic criteria shape, determine, and limit the watchdog
role of the media. These capture pressures may be coming either
from politicians and state agencies, or from the political or
economic interests of the owners (and sometimes also editors) of
the media corporations.

The captured liberal media system

model

The captured liberal model (Guerrero,

2014)

Professionalism and objectivity

News as a commodity increase of marketing

practices in newsrooms; media attending to citizenship
and consumerism rationales

Journalists assumed multiple journalism

identities:

a) objective detachment; b) militant journalism; c)

social responsibility within the reality of a more marketdriven media environment

Media as politicized institutions still balance in

political reporting contributed to diminish ideological
biases towards centre-left-wing politics and social issues
during the presidential elections

Professionalism and
balance since 2002

International

journalism trends: rise

of new technologies, increase of cynical
politics, human interest stories,
infotainment coverage and decline of
coverage of serious politics,
challenges to the objectivity regime
and rise of interpretative forms of
journalism (i.e. citizen journalism)

Conclusions
The most important core aspects of the political system
affecting the media are:
The

degree of closeness between new ruling politicians and

traditional media groups.

The

historical trend toward clientelism.

The

kind of deregulation and market reforms.

Conclusions
The two core fields of the media system affected by the
political system are:
(Low)

Quality of regulatory efficiency.

(High)

Degree of interference on the medias (and journalisms)

watchdog role.