Media,Politics,and Democratization in Latin America

Citizenship and the Media

In this day and age, talking about citizenship means talking about the media, while talking about the media entails talking about policies and standards (Barnett, 2003a: 4). The media have become permeable; we are now apparently represented by the citizens themselves, and consequently they are more present than ever. Paolo Gerbaudo (2012: 139) accurately summarizes this new reality: “It is communication that organizes, rather than organization that communicates.” For his part, Clive Barnett (2003a: 4) says that “the public philosophies of citizenship are embedded in media policy debates.” Undeniably, not only is our life largely organized by what the media tell us (from the weather forecast to “viable” political options) but models for behavior are shaped by things we do not: the correct ways of being, a sort of aura that surrounds us and tells us what to do. Mark Deuze (2011: 137) has termed this effect “media life”: “As media become pervasive and ubiquitous, forming the building blocks for our constant remix of the categories of everyday life, they become invisible.” In 1966, Herbert Marcuse (1995: 43) had already predicted that even our free time would be transformed into task-laden working periods and that technology would become a new form of domination. In the twenty-first century, in which new technologies erect “more complex multimedia environment[s]” (Papathanassopoulos, 2011: 1), transnational corporations are the ones competing for our time and attention with the “Googlization of everything” (Vaidhyanathan, 2011). And, as Alice E. Marwick (2013: 5) warns, “the technical mechanisms of social media reflect the values of where they were produced: a culture dominated by commercial interest.” An experienced oil baron decided to invest billions of dollars in building a media empire in India because “data is the new oil, and intelligent data is the new petrol” (Fortune, 2016).

Robert W. McChesney (2004: 218) suggests that there are at least three areas in the media or mediatized life that multimedia companies wish to control: intellectual property, advertising, and privacy. Jeffrey S. Juris (2008: 8) adds that this penetration by the corporate media is part of a neoliberal strategy for commercializing education, medical care, the environment, and “even life itself.” Countries under a new neoliberal attack have witnessed the commercialization of access to information. Institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank pressure developing countries for access to their information economies in exchange for loans and investment.

Some critics argue that in the past few decades we have witnessed a veritable information explosion. According to Sven Birkerts (quoted in Jacoby, 1999: 166), “The explosion of data . . . has all but destroyed the premise of understandability.” The experience of these decades seems to corroborate the conspiracy of liberalism at the dawn of modernity, as outlined by Immanuel Wallerstein (2000: 43), the intent of which was to persuade the marginalized sectors of society to abandon their demands for an emancipatory project “and invest their energies instead in the modernity of technology.” Gerbaudo (quoted in Barnett, 2003b: 34) reminds us that the media are responsible for “recasting the organization of the spatial and temporal scenes of social life, . . . opening new possibilities of public action.” What matters is whether our interventions in cyberspace can bring about real social or cultural transformations or are merely opportunities to attack an opponent. The comment sections appended to online articles have turned millions of users into what the Los Angeles musician Damon “Dam-Funk” Riddick calls “thunder thumb gangsters.” During the latest presidential campaign, newspapers and specialized magazines tried to measure the role played by the trolls who flooded forums with political propaganda. Some think that these spaces host the most important battles for political power. They should not, however, underestimate the mass demonstrations still popular on television and online.

The Media and Political Power

A paradigmatic case showing the state of the mass media in Latin America is Brazil’s Globo TV, later Red O Globo. The privileged links between the media and political power during the “founding moments of the new democracy” in Brazil can be traced in its history (Porto, 2012: 1). Democracy “has been deeply affected by the power of Globo TV” (Porto, 2012: 3), an oligopoly, according to Claudia Mellado and Claudia Lagos (2013: 12), that has not been restricted by either democratic or dictatorial regimes. The same could be said of Mexico’s Televisa, Grupo Clarín in Argentina, and the handful of millionaire families in Mexico, Venezuela, and Bolivia (Lupien, 2013: 227–228; Sinclair, 1999: 33–51). Democratic left-wing or even center-left governments have found the resistance of the powerful to thorough regulation of the mass media system very difficult to overcome.

In the Argentine case, the new media law forced the Grupo Clarín to sell some of its assets (Macrory, 2013: 178), and to implement the law the government had to face a significant number of judges who defended the group. This is no recent alliance; it dates back to the 1990s and the Carlos Saúl Menem administration and, beyond that, to the last dictatorship (Levitsky and Mainwaring, 2005: 79). Approval ratings for the Rousseff government in Brazil declined sharply, and although Argentines mostly approved of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s administration her intended successor lost to the champion of market deregulation Mauricio Macri. The Grupo Clarín employed all of its resources to promote Macri’s candidacy, accusing the opposition, sometimes falsely, of a variety of illegal and clandestine operations. The alliance between media corporations and political leaders bombards citizens with sensational headlines while dismantling the institutions and social programs that protect their rights. Is the dream of curbing the power of the hegemonic media over? As McChesney (2004: 243) points out, multimedia corporations have no desire to share their space with nonprofit and independent media “that would peel away ‘their’ audience.” Nor do they want citizens to employ the media to publicize their discontent and their proposals for social or economic reform. John D. H. Downing (2000a: 43) argues that the radical and alternative media are the main drivers of a truly democratic communication structure. A new neoliberal media assault is on the horizon: it is reformatting our usos y costumbres.

While it is difficult to measure with hard data the impact of the media on our daily lives, it is possible to say that “significant changes in media structure and practices can alter not only media content, but also the nature of the media’s influence on society” (Croteau and Hoynes, 2001: 183). It is logical that, if the media deeply influence society, a political change in society may exert pressure on the hegemonic media system and that of the alternative media that modifies the structures of power through legislation. This is not an easy task, since technology changes very quickly and users have a hard time determining whether their new practices are the product of hidden mechanisms (e.g., algorithmic journalism, which employs software to generate news stories [Diakopoulos and Koliska, 2016: 2]). Also, as some researchers in this issue remind us, new technologies offer cheaply and easily accessed spaces for debate and political organization. This is happening in Latin America: societies have undergone profound changes in terms of political democratization after dictatorial regimes; sooner or later, this expansion of rights has had to deal with the hegemonic (and often government-overthrowing) role of the mass media. “From the perspective of a commitment to democratic values, public debate on media regulation is therefore legitimate and necessary” (Sorj, 2012: 7). More democracy, more media.

The heated process of social democratization has given rise to an expanded field of studies that analyze, from different angles, the short-range media that have always been present: the alternative, popular, community media. According to Natalia Vinelli (2014: 40), “the Latin American tradition of the alternative has both theoretical and practical weight in the field of communication.” Until recently “the study of the working practices of alternative media [has been] absent from most research in the field” (Atton, 2008: 213), a trend that is starting to be reversed. “There has been renewed interest in the past decade and a half” (Vinelli, 2014: 45), and this is not merely a shift or extension of the field of communication but a transformation due to the growing visibility of nonconformist or radical media. Establishment politicians such as Alec Ross, an adviser to Hillary Clinton, have described the Internet as “the ‘Che’ Guevara of the twenty-first century” (Gerbaudo, 2012: 6).

Downing (2000b: 68) pays special attention to the configuration of media of this kind, which in his view can be classified as either Leninist agit-prop under the influence of trade unions or political parties or part of the self-management tradition, for which it is “vital for their internal democracy to be constantly responsive to the democratic trends and movements in society at large” (70). In the case of Latin America, the latter kind has generally been the most common (Cuba and Venezuela excepted) in this century. Therefore the media of the alternative, popular, and community spectrum are not necessarily opposed to the government but maintain a degree of autonomy from the party-based organizations that the government mobilizes.

In Latin America, indigenous movements have particular territorial and cultural roots. Interconnected “across the globe, [they] have emerged from geographically scattered, locally based production centers to become part of globally linked medium networks with increased effectiveness and reach” (Wilson and Stewart, 2008: 2). Indigenous media, though far from being always visible in the society as a whole or in the state, are more relevant now than in the past. Particularly, the new media laws now in effect in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Argentina seek to ensure this.

Focusing on the forms taken by community organizations’ efforts to communicate their issues inevitably leads to a series of fundamental questions: What policies and strategies, techniques and technologies are required to foster democratic citizenship? Are there effective ways of encouraging citizens to become more actively engaged in the political process (Coleman and Blumler, 2009: 139)? The concerns of the Latin American documentary filmmakers of the 1960s analyzed in depth in Latin American Perspectives in 1978 are once more a priority: How are consumers and users to be transformed into active citizens exercising their rights? As Nancy K. Baym (2015: 82) points out, “people tend to doubt the authenticity of social connections sustained through new media and question their impact on interpersonal, civic, and political engagement.” Undoubtedly, the intellectuals and artists active during the 1960s and 1970s can inspire a new praxis for new technologies and demands for greater economic and social equality.

Fetishism and Media Products

One of the great myths unveiled by the Frankfurt School, specifically by Horkheimer, Adorno, and Noeri in Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002), is the dilemma posed by the audience’s choice to consume mass-produced media products as if they were industrial artifacts. The capitalist myth says that citizens consume what they want and they want what the system (the media, in this case) provides them. “How do we know they offer what people want? People choose them. So, they must be popular” (Dean, 2010: 104). This myth has been updated and applied to the Internet, a presumed democratic panacea that allows us to choose what to see and to write and say. It is, according to Jodi Dean (2010: 110–115), a strange (but no less socially productive) link between democracy and capitalism. She terms this process, which makes us all citizen participants in the democratic game, “communicative capitalism.” In this game the winner is always capitalism. The game generates a series of fantasies, among them participation in the Web, technological fetishism, and “wholeness further animating networked communications.” In the end, however, as might be expected in these cases, “politics in the sense of working to change current conditions may well require breaking with and through the fantasies attaching us to communicative capitalism” (119). How are we to break with these fantasies, which subjugate us across applications, portals, and social networks? Will the upcoming generations of revolutionaries and militant political activists become experts in computer science—revolutionary hackers—exiting the maze from above, as did the first critical studies on communication by the Frankfurt School?

Just as some of the Frankfurt School tenets remain valid, the same can be said of Umberto Eco’s mid-1960s characterization as “apocalyptic” or “integrated” those who attack new technologies from both sides either as something malignant or as the standard of social progress. It is no longer possible to think about social communication without considering the Web, social networks, and access to information via mobile devices. Simplistic “integrated” stances point to the Internet as something that encourages the people’s democratic decision making: Maria Armoudian (2011: 291) says that the “Internet has enhanced connections and collaborations across borders and allowed people to take some matters and some aspects of framing their experiences into their own hands.” This claim overlooks the way the hegemonic media companies use Internet mechanisms. Cyber-imperialism is no joke.

Others warn of the dangers of focusing on the democratizing power of the Web. Matthew Hindman (2009: 19) says that the “Internet has served to level some existing political inequalities, but it has also created new ones.” Tamara Villarreal Ford and Geneve Gil (2000: 202) prophetically stated more than 15 years ago, when the Web had not reached its current size, that while “some Internet enthusiasts have hyped its democratic essence, we need to retain caution, thinking of its potential in this regard as partially realized but also . . . constantly in danger of being foreclosed.” Finally, the integrated vision of the democracy-Internet relationship lacks a critical perspective on a technology infiltrated by capitalism. The apocalyptic view is equally flawed: as in the above-mentioned studies, the Web and social networks can sometimes be employed to organize alternative or radical communication networks.

About this Issue

The articles in this issue address the concepts involved in the constitutional reforms and legislative changes undertaken in different Latin American countries in recent years. In “Media Democratization in Ecuador,” Tim Anderson assesses the scope of the 2013 Communication Act, which he considers exemplary for the protections it provides community media and its guaranteed access to political points of view that strengthen democratic institutions. One of the law’s goals, he says, is to redefine “communication” from a commodity to a popular right. One effect of the constitutional reform of 2008, which promoted the state as the representative and defender of citizens’ rights, was to provide legal and ideological support for the 2013 law. For Anderson, the promotion of diversity and pluralism is its distinctive feature.

Mauro Cerbino and Francesca Belotti, in “Between Public and Private Media: Toward a Definition of ‘Community Media,’” address the constitutional reforms in Bolivia and Ecuador with regard to communication. They pose questions about the concept of “community media” in those countries and find answers that point to new forms of citizen participation across the Andean region. They argue that these national reforms have produced a new political subject with greater rights of access to information and communication. For their part, Carla Rodríguez Miranda and Ornela Carboni, in “Communications Policies and the Production of Audiovisual Content in Argentina,” take readers along the winding paths by which the communication policies and the new Audiovisual Communication Services Law have polarized the positions of Argentine actors. They analyze the Argentine state’s efforts to break up media monopolies via public competitions that enable new actors to participate in the chain of audiovisual creation, production, and distribution. One of the main issues they discuss is the difficulty of federalizing the distribution of cultural goods in such a centralist nation. María Magdalena Doyle and Emilse Siares, in “Indigenous Peoples’ Right to Communication with Identity in Argentina, 2009–2017,” examine the sweeping reforms spurred by the Argentine Law of Audiovisual Communication Services in 2009 (Ley de Servicios de Comunicación Audiovisual—LSCA). The LSCA replaced legislation from the last dictatorship and, as the authors argue, gave indigenous people more representation in the media market. Doyle and Siares consider key moments since the 1940s in the struggle against the colonization of indigenous media in Argentina and Latin America. This historical commentary frames their inquiry and fieldwork in the North of Argentina. Through participant observation and interviews, they appraise the work of three radio stations in the provinces of Jujuy and Salta. Because of the important changes generated by the LSCA these radio stations were able to purchase new equipment, distribute media products, and support their staff. As the authors explain, these achievements were rolled back after Mauricio Macri came to power in 2015, and the enforcing bodies put in place by the previous legislation were dissolved.

Christian Tym’s “Whose Rights? Freedom-of-Expression Critiques of Ecuadorian Media Democratization” focuses on the reaction of global human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch to media reforms, which some of them viewed as threatening freedom of expression. Tym examines the discourse of these organizations and attempts to determine the impact of this “liberal” language on value judgments about the democratizing potential of the legal reforms affecting regulation of the Ecuadorian media.

Martín Becerra and Celeste M. Wagner, in “Crisis of Representation and New Media Policies in Latin America,” provide an overview of communications issues across a diverse subcontinent in constant change. Their critical study of the new regulations, which they see as involving unprecedented conflicts between governments and media groups, points to the problematic characterization of regional progressive governments as populist. In a brief commentary on it followed by a rejoinder by the authors, Rosalind Bresnahan argues that the dismissal of the leftist, programmatic dimensions of the media reform ignores the long history of demands for many of these provisions from political parties and movements as well as from democratic media theorists. Ariel Alejandro Goldstein, in “The Press and Classical Populism in Argentina and Brazil,” develops a comparative analysis of the relationship between the news media and the governments of Juan D. Perón and Getúlio Vargas. Having characterized these administrations as “classical populist,” he reconsiders the ideological conflicts between the new political classes and the “traditional media elites” to argue that this struggle generated “exclusionary visions”—what is now known as “the divide” or “the gap.” One of the most interesting consequences of this confrontation, he suggests, has been the interdependence between media entrepreneurs and popular governments that needed to publicize their social and economic achievements.

Another set of articles looks at the relations between regulations and content in the medium with the largest audience, television. Naomi Schiller, in “Changing the Channel: Class Conflict, Everyday State Formation, and Television in Venezuela,” argues that the restructuring of public television in Venezuela during the past decade has seen the dismantling of hierarchies rooted in the relations between the state and the community of audiovisual media producers. Her ethnographic study of production workshops reveals the tensions between social classes in the production of television programs. In “The Financing of TV Brasil: Limitation of Resources or Political Choice?” Sales Augusto dos Santos and Ivonete da Silva Lopes examine the Lula and Rousseff administrations’ decision to buy advertising on private networks rather than on the public TV Brasil, which was established in 2007 to democratize the Brazilian media market. They remind us that the Globo media conglomerate has a tradition of undermining democratic institutions and endorsing fraudulent elections and conclude that these administrations lacked political good faith in allocating resources to them instead of to public outlets.

Along with the above-mentioned articles by Cerbino and Belotti and Schiller, several other articles in this section approach communal, alternative, and popular media from an ethnographic perspective. James Anderson and Noah Springer, in “Zapatismo as a Resonant Public Pedagogy,” discuss the Zapatistas and their pedagogical practices. Innovative ways of employing new digital technologies place Zapatismo at the forefront of anticapitalist communication and democratic participation, a crusade that includes new protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street. Kathryn Lehman, in “Beyond Pluralism and Media Rights: Indigenous Communication for a Decolonizing Transformation of Latin America and Abya Yala,” deals with experiences elsewhere on the continent, analyzing the contribution of indigenous peoples to the new constitutions. In particular, her research addresses strategies for the production and dissemination of audiovisual materials by indigenous organizations. In a similar vein, Christopher Moore’s “Argentine Documentary Film and the Politics of Presence: Jorge Prelorán’s Valle Fértil ” studies the production and distribution of a documentary about a small community in North-Central Argentina. He reminds us that, whatever the technological innovations of filmmaking today, the recording of images still depends on the relationship between the person behind the camera and the eventual viewer. Cinema is still an art that depends on human relations.

Two articles probe the power relations in Brazil between national and municipal governments and the communications media and their considerable impact on the public sphere. In “Hall of Mirrors: Media, Democratization, and the Public Sphere in Maranhão, Brazil,” Julián Durazo Herrmann studies the region’s media during the troubled transition period between the José Sarney oligarchic government and that of the communist Flávio Dino. Although the election of a communist governor should have entailed a radical change in media administration, Durazo argues that the Sarney family and its allies continue to exert oligarchic domination. He concludes that the losers, as in other parts of Latin America, are student groups and unions. In “Failed Honeymoon: Dilma Rousseff’s Third Election Round,” João Feres Júnior and Luna de Oliveira Sassara consider whether the president of Brazil enjoyed a “honeymoon” period after her electoral victory in 2014 and conclude that opposition parties such as the Brazilian Social Democracy Party and the vast majority of the corporate media launched a campaign to taint her image and eventually discredited and unjustly impeached her. They see the impeachment as a clear demonstration of a chronic problem in Brazilian democracy: the monopolistic control exercised by private communication companies.

Finally, there are three studies examining the influence of different Internet mechanisms in social movements. Ana Cecilia Silva, in “Civic Organizations and Internet Social Networks: A Case Study in the Province of Buenos Aires,” addresses the various uses of the Internet in the construction of alternative spaces for new urban social movements. A study of what has happened in the medium-sized cities in Buenos Aires Province reveals strategies of positioning and mobilization that can be fostered by social networks. For her part, Catherine Morgans, in “New Media and the Disillusion of Brazil’s Radical Left,” deals with the difficulties encountered by historical anticapitalist movements such as the Landless Workers’ Movement. Her article contributes to the debate over the cyber-optimism that dominates a great deal of recent studies focused on the link between the Internet and social protest. María Elena Meneses and María Concepción Castillo-González’s “Digital Storytelling and the Dispute over Representation in the Ayotzinapa Case” analyzes the coverage of the murder and disappearance of 43 college students in Iguala, Mexico. It uses the social practice of storytelling to examine the narrative conflicts around the disappearances as these were presented in platforms such as YouTube and Twitter starting in 2014. The authors suggest that the national and international impact of this event exposed the discrepancies between official and popular discourse. As they remind us, Mexico has one of Latin America’s highest rates of murder of journalists, and this made a thorough investigation of the killings and forced disappearances in Ayotzinapa very unlikely. As a result, digital platforms served as an alternative means of disseminating information.

This issue offers an overview of the conflictive, heated, and creative state of the Latin American media sector and its social implications. During a time in which political and media discourses have merged, we can no longer understand one without the other. Another element that cannot be ignored is that what were once left-wing progressive governments are now in the hands of the right-wing business sector endorsed by the media conglomerates.