Media Systems and Communication Policies in Latin America

Media policy is a contentious and highly political issue worldwide. In established democracies, the most heated debates nowadays revolve around the pertinence to more effectively regulate media when their perceived power is abused, the contemporary challenges yet continuing relevance of public broadcasting systems, or the threats that media concentration and marketization pose to press freedom, pluralism and ultimately to democracy (Iosifidis, 2011; Mansell and Raboy, 2011). Advocates of media reform often highlight the negative effects of commercialism and market forces in the weakening of media’s societal role and the importance of public broadcasting services in providing a forum of plural expression and debate and thus in the strengthening of democracies (Curran, 2002, 2011; Curran and Seaton, 2003; Gunther and Mughan, 2000; Keane, 1991; Matos, 2012; McChesney and Schiller, 2003; Raboy, 1996; Street, 2011).

In their seminal Comparing Media Systems (2004), Dan Hallin and Paolo Mancini put forth three ideal models of media systems predominant in Western democracies: the ‘polarized pluralist,’ the ‘democratic corporatist,’ and the ‘liberal.’ In some respects, Latin American media systems share certain features of the polarized pluralist model, especially regarding clientelism. However, this chapter proposes a series of compared criteria toward the definition of a general model of the actual Latin American media system. The model is anchored in the Weberian ideal types and lacks normative aspirations about the roles media must play in Latin American public and political life. The model is called ‘captured liberal’ due to the predominance of private commercial media organizations and to the conditions that hurdle states’ regulatory capacities and that afflict the watchdog role of journalism by economic and political interests. Of course, as is the case with all ideal types, there are varying degrees of similarities among the different countries and the model.

In the past decade, there has been an increased interest in the scholarly study of media systems as intrinsically and structurally linked to their political contexts. For example, Hallin and Mancini (2004) propose three models to categorize media systems in relation to political variables in 18 countries around Europe and in the United States and Canada that serve as ideal types and share systemic relations and patterns common to countries with similar historical, economic, and sociopolitical contexts. In another work, Hallin and Papathanassopoulos (2002) identify Portugal, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico with the Mediterranean or polarized pluralist systems. In particular, the authors argue that until the 1990s these countries shared a low level of development of the mass press, a partisan tradition in journalism, high instrumentalization of the press and public broadcasting systems, and weak regulation of the private sector, which facilitated the consolidation of monopolies (2002: 176–182). Political clientelism not only meant that information could be traded for deference but also that the journalistic autonomy, public service ethos, and the horizontal solidarity among media professionals were broken. Nevertheless, the authors identify urbanization and industrialization, the growth of the middle class and civil society since the 1960s, and the globalization of journalistic cultures as forces of transformation for media systems in the region.

In Latin America, where media-politics relations have historically been highly controversial, it is not easy for the local observer to free her analysis from personal preferences conditioned by context and experience. Exposed daily to infotainment, this observer — academic or otherwise — might easily generalize his or her interpretations, as the observer takes for granted personal preferences, regardless of any particular cultural framing. This is because it is difficult to watch the daily programing as if we were ethnographers in the field. However, if anything significant must be said about how the main Peruvian mass media articulates into political practice, then we must transcend common knowledge.

Recent Argentinian history has been marked by constant political, economic, and social alterations. The drastic changes, including periodic and deep crises, experimented and redefined the logics in the exercise of power, the role of the state, and the economic system, and even altered some aspects of national identity. Moreover, the population became used to an ineffective rule of law and to political discourses and actions that easily fell into extremes.

This chapter focuses on some of the contemporary challenges of media policy that El Salvador faces in the context of both the digital age and in the need to advance to a more democratic society. First, the chapter delineates a brief characterization of the Salvadoran media landscape in the traditional, digital, and telecommunications industries. In each sector, the text highlights issues of media property concentration and the consequences in terms of diversity and pluralism in El Salvador. Second, it discusses several considerations regarding a pluralistic media system and individual rights to communication, taking into account the UNESCO (2008) indicators to evaluate media development in each country. The rights to communication include a variety of rights and possibilities to ensure people’s participation and expression in society. Third, the chapter then considers the potential of digital television transition to strengthen pluralism in the national media system, and its actual developments both in El Salvador and in Central America as a whole. Finally, the chapter outlines five major proposals for media and cultural policies to tackle the current challenges to promote the right to communicate and a multicultural democracy in the digital age.

Guatemalan history, especially in the past 50 years, accounts for the forms and contents that define the relationship between the media and the political systems. As observed by Guerrero and Luengas (2013), it is the political system that shapes the legal and operational context in which the mass communications industry flows. However, in the case of Guatemala, one must take into account that transition to democracy initiated in the midst of an internal armed conflict that, as noted by Kruijt (1998), marked socially, economically, and politically the whole nation. This conflictive frame in which democracy was born is key to understanding the transition and negotiation of the new rules of the game (Munck, 1994. 2002: Mazzuca, 2002).

In the past 15 years, Venezuela has become one of the flagship states in Latin America in regaining and sustaining a strong dominance and presence in the shaping of media policy. But as a starting point, it is first necessary to clarify the concept of public policies and the process they entail in order to proceed to review the specific experiences related to communication and to study the events that occurred in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez’s administration (1999–2013).

On the evening of December 9, 2008, Bolivian President Evo Morales used a ceremony to commemorate the International Day Against Corruption as a platform to publicly accuse the national newspaper La Prensa of lying. During the event, the president rebuked the invited representative journalist of the newspaper on national public TV broadcast. The president’s reaction was in response to allegations in the reporter’s paper. That morning La Prensa had titled its headline ‘Evo authorized “green light” to smugglers two months ago’ — therewith directly involving the president in a notorious smuggling case with extensive news coverage that occurred in the border town of Cobija.¹ In spite of this grievous phrasing, the president’s involvement was not proved in the article. In the following days, the reactions polarized Bolivian public opinion. Many journalists, union leaders, communicators, and media entrepreneurs condemned the public humiliation suffered by the journalist. Some politicians and a few other journalists in La Paz questioned the newspaper’s editorial line of accusing the president without proper evidence.

Private, for-profit companies that feature concentrated property ownership and centralized production in large urban centers have traditionally dominated the media structure in Latin America. Much of its print and audiovisual content comes from the United States, rather than being domestically or locally generated. The size of the domestic markets and the low per-capita consumption of culture have created a profitable media model in which the state plays a major role. In a number of Latin American countries, governments have largely subsidized the privately owned media system, either directly or indirectly through state advertising. An unwritten arrangement takes place: in return, the media turn a blind eye to government excesses or abuses, in effect giving up their watchdog role.

Public service broadcasting (PSB) has been under threat in Europe for both ideological and technical reasons since the 1980s. The threat is the result of the expansion of media commercialization, the proliferation of new technologies, and the impact of the deregulation trends in the United States and throughout the world that resulted in the rapid growth of cable and satellite television. Following Jakubowicz’s (2006), it seems that a key role for PSB in democratization is one of assisting globalization and contributing to wider international dialog and understanding between countries, as well as functioning as a national public sphere for debate.

Content production has recently become a matter of policy concern in Brazil. In this country, significant advances have been registered in the areas of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), technological convergence, and the Internet. It is possible to affirm that a historic shift is underway that calls into question the hegemony of the symbolic production of culture. As it is argued, the configuration of cultural production and the media structure in Brazil have responded to accommodations and impacts from external and globalized processes throughout history.

In the past fifteen years, the concept of cultural diversity has gained renewed relevance — even if it has had a late arrival — both in the field of cultural industries and in the public policies orientated towards safeguarding such diversity as a result of strong processes of concentration and trasnationalization in the cultural field. In fact, diversity is the correct word nowadays, and by extension, the compulsory concept of discussion in the cultural field, be it on the discursive side of cultural policy, the researching of cultural policies, or in cultural management (Puente, 2011). While the concept of diversity has an immediate antecedent in ‘cultural exception,’ its use nowadays refers to the importance of plurality of actors, particularly local and regional, in the production and circulation of cultural goods, such as books.

In the Chilean case, there has not been strong enough questioning on the relevance that a prevailing idea of journalism, one that has certainly become the global standard — along its professional practices, norms and values — may hold on the social reality of the country. Hence, the interest in identifying the basis of this constituent discourse is based in its use as the standard and legitimizing force for the professional practice in Chile. By discussing deontological codes and also interviews with community broadcasters in Valparaíso, Chile, this chapter identifies core components of what I call here Eurocentric conception of journalism that henceforth will be referred to as ‘Reporterística.’ In looking at the core components of such dominant model of reporting and journalism, the chapter first identifies the aspects that underpin the univocal conception of journalism that the chapter traces back to the European Enlightenment and the Independent movements, and then calls for a ‘situated’ perspective of journalism that considers other possible models of reporting other than ‘Reporterística’. The chapter argues that the discussion on media democratization and pluralism needs to address the very core of the constitutive discourses with which journalism came into being in Chile.

For the past two centuries various influences have decidedly shaped the changing relations between Mexico’s private news media and the equally mutable state. Local forces and actors; the inevitable impact of global stimuli such as commercialism; and the absence, obsolescence, or non-enforcement of media regulation have profoundly shaped Mexico’s news media and journalism. Throughout this chapter, it is evident that a hybrid media system and a resulting post-authoritarian journalistic culture are in place. Both are better grasped through the understanding of cultural patterns, habits, changing interests, and under-the-table arrangements that have prevailed regardless of political democratization — and sometimes as result of it. Hence, the mere study of global forces, formal legal frameworks, ownership structures, discursive adoption of journalistic norms, or institutional structures can not fully account for the ‘captured liberal’ nature of Mexico’s news media.

More than two decades have passed since the start of the last wave of democratization in Latin American and though in broad terms the electoral component is now a regular and stable feature of public life, most countries are still characterized by strong disparities, income inequality, and a contested rule of law. During the 1980s and 1990s, the power clusters and groups — especially but not exclusively in the economy — that survived the transitions found better conditions for accumulation with the newly arrived political actors, who did not alter the property structures and the income distribution. Moreover, criticisms to state intervention and expansion coincided in time with democratization discourses just as privatization and liberalization policies coincided with the globalization trends.