Media and Governance in Latin America

Questions about media plurality have a long history in Latin American communication scholarship, and this is not happenstance but the result of both the direct experience of global imbalances in communication matters, together with the persistence of local and national disputes over communication policies and the structure of media industries. Latin American scholars were central in the writing of the UNESCO’s MacBride Report (1980), an international milestone that underlined the consequences of communication disparities, and the dangers of the commodification of information. Nearly forty years after its publication, this report remains more declarative than anything else (Beltrán, 2006; Pasquali, 2005), and new media platforms are mostly organized by the same market logics as those of legacy media, far from the “information order” envisioned by the authors of the report (Fuchs, 2015).

In the series of conferences that precede this book, as well as in the title of this chapter, we have privileged the term “governance” and we believe some clarification is needed. We use governance mainly to signal that it is our belief that in order to critically assess how media and communications interact with social and political change it is important to go beyond traditional political institutions such as the presidency, congress or political parties, and to incorporate other groups—bureaucracies, corporate actors, civil society organizations—that interact with each other through the media and are regularly represented and self-represented in different media platforms. We acknowledge that “governance”, and in particular “good governance”, is a loaded term in the region because it has become a rhetorical device frequently used by international organizations such as the World Bank or the OECD to assess the performance of Latin American democracies. We are not necessarily associating the term “governance” with such normative expectations about states’ behavior but expanding the potential locus for enquiry at the time of problematizing the relationship between media pluralism and democracy.

Media Pluralism and Democratic Expectations

The aspiration to pluralism in the media is frequently linked to that of democratization, yet the concept of media pluralism has been built around different and sometimes conflicting narratives. For this reason, instead of taking for granted the normative value of media pluralism for democracy it is important to make some qualifications.

Broadly speaking, the concept of media pluralism refers to the extent to which the media contributes toward the existence and safeguarding of a pluralistic public discourse. There is not a single monolithic approach to media pluralism, neither theoretically or empirically; yet it is primarily concerned with mechanisms through which differences in society are mediated; how diverse mediated representations are, and how feasible is the circulation of pluralistic discourses, which connects with matters of inclusion and exclusion, as well as the possibility of contesting hegemonic discourses in the public debate (Raeijmaekers & Maeseele, 2015).

Over the past decades of the 21st century, assessments on the capacity of the media to act as a democratizing force have been frequent. Most authors highlight the limitations encountered on the road toward media independence and plurality, and some key conflicting areas are often identified as problematic. Among others are the oligarchic nature of media ownership and the persistent trend toward media ownership concentration (Becerra & Mastrini, 2017; Hughes & Lawson, 2005; Mastrini & Becerra, 2006; Sunkel & Geoffroy, 2002); uneven adherence to journalistic standards, and the limitations and threats encountered by Latin American journalism to fulfil watchdog roles (Dinatale & Gallo, 2010; Hughes & Mellado, 2016; Mellado, Moreira, Lagos, & Hernandez, 2012; Waisbord, 2000); scarcity of civic-oriented media outlets and the under-representation of disadvantaged social groups, together with disputes, achievements and failures around media policy reforms, understood as regulatory mechanisms expected to address some of these persistent problems (Becerra & Wagner 2018; Segura & Waisbord 2016).

Because assessments on the relationship between media and democracy are multi-factorial and context-dependent, conclusions on these areas vary among countries. Jebril, Stetka, and Loveless (2013) note that although an independent and plural media is expected to contribute toward democratization and political accountability, there is little research exploring how the media fulfil this normatively ascribed role, and scarce evidence supporting these claims. Interestingly, they call for theory-building rather than theory-testing research on this matter, acknowledging that the application of universal models may turn out to be more limiting than enlightening. We could argue that country differences make more difficult the possibility of a shared assessment about the relationship between media and democracy in the region. However, that would be a simplistic and deceitful answer. Latin America is a complex and heterogeneous region that cannot be treated as a unity, yet there are shared historical, political and socio-economic aspects that make the enquiry plausible. The identification of common areas of concern has opened the space for common characterizations of the Latin American media, as represented by the captured-liberal model proposed by Guerrero & Márquez-Ramírez (2014), a framework for analysis that acknowledges clear patterns in the region, particularly the way in which media environments mostly dominated by commercial media organizations are characterized by capture, either by corporate interests or political groups.

Assessments about the relationship between media pluralism and democracy in the region are difficult for two main reasons. Firstly, because this is in itself an over-arching question that has to be disaggregated and acknowledge political variance across the region in order to offer some meaningful answers. Secondly, because media pluralism—as much as democracy—are normative standards toward which societies can strive but never fully achieve. Normative absolutes are ever-moving targets, and that is not exclusive to Latin American countries nor a consequence of “late” development, but a result of persistent inequalities and ever-present power struggles that makes the metaphor of the road toward democratization and development somehow inaccurate. Discussing the basic tenets of democracy, Dahl (1999) poses that meeting the demands of a fully functioning democracy is an aspiration rather than a reality, and therefore the gap between ideal and real democracy is deemed to remain quite large in every society. How we observe and assess the relationship between media pluralism and democracy will be, therefore, largely dependent on citizens’ demands and expectations of the democratic process itself.

How could we accurately account for this democratic deficit in the media sphere? Can journalism and a pluralistic media contribute to fostering good governance and, thus, contribute to establishing the bases for a healthy democratic culture? To what extent has this connection mostly emphasized a western expectation that imposes some priorities upon other journalistic and media contexts? To what extent the use of social media platforms compensates for the shortcomings of legacy media in order to foster the proliferation of actors and voices in the public debate? Without the intention of fully answering these questions, we next turn our attention to identify relevant strands of research about media pluralism in Latin America, which may shed light about how media pluralism has been empirically observed in the region and why it matters for democracy.

Media Pluralism and Why It Matters for Democratic Governance

In order to pin down some of the ideas that we have so far developed, in this section of the chapter, we aim to discuss how media pluralism has been observed in practice. That is, how research about media pluralism and democratic governance has recently been developed. In order to do so, we identify two main areas that have been used to assess media pluralism, and around which it is possible to organize recent work about media pluralism in Latin America. These are (1) market structures and media policy reform and (2) social inclusion and communication inequalities. Instead of being a comprehensive account of all the research developed in and about the region, we aim to identify key areas of research that amass important bodies of empirical development, and pose questions yet to be answered in the relationship between media pluralism and democratic governance.

Market Structures and Media Policy Reform

From the turn of this century, the focus of attention on media policy has shifted altogether with a renewed interest in this area. In a commercially oriented media environment, an important group of Latin American countries has recently developed policy discussions and enacted fundamental changes, mostly oriented toward the regulation of privately owned media organizations and the stimulation of alternative forms of media, such as citizen, indigenous or state-owned media platforms. These discussions have revolved around distinct notions of the values that states are to protect through media policy: whether media policy should be articulated around the idea of the protection of liberties (free press, free speech) or around a human rights framework (rights to communication), in which not only individual liberties are protected but also the values of inclusiveness and equal opportunities of communication.

Discussions about media policy reform have been highly polarized and attempts at reform—mostly coming from progressive governments—have been often resisted by media corporations and some sectors of the population. Segura and Waisbord (2016) have extensively documented how media policy reforms in the region were fueled by limited pluralism and elite-captured media policies, supported by years-long citizen-led initiatives that found windows of political opportunity in governments led by sympathetic political elites. Becerra and Wagner (2018), in turn, argue that media reforms in countries such as Ecuador, Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia were foregrounded by populism and tensions between governments and media organizations, a crisis of representation and permissive regulations that promoted historical media concentration.

Beyond policy discussions, politicians’ verbal attacks against media outlets are present throughout the ideological spectrum, from Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela to Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Attacks not only take place in a discursive sphere, but they materialize in discretional support for sympathetic media and journalists, while critical ones are victims of economic pressures, lawsuits and defamation campaigns.

The question that arises is whether media policy reform in the region has created a regulation that favors democratization, significantly shifting power relations toward more horizontal, collective and people-centered ownership and decision-making processes. The relationship between formal policies and informal practices has left many suspicious of the degree to which media reform has been so far able to dismantle unequal power relations. Or, rather, reforms have simply reinstitutionalized political control by shifting the composition of traditional networks of political patronage. Lugo-Ocando and Garcia Santamaria (2015) concluded that the new Latin American left appealed to the need of media reform in order to overcome past imbalances while in practice consolidating their own media hegemony. After all, it would be naïve to think that well-established elites have been completely removed from the equation. Even when regulation addresses power imbalances, other elements of journalistic culture, polarization, political parallelism, corporate interests and flawed governance models tend to persist over time.

The discussion about pluralism and media policy in the region extends also to new media platforms. As discussed by Segura and Waisbord (2019), rights-based public policies in new media platforms are currently being pushed forward by data activists around agendas such as open access to public information and cultural goods, as well as the protection of civil rights on the Internet: the protection of personal data, rights to privacy, rights to be forgotten or the avoidance of unwanted forms of commodification, surveillance and data extractivism.

Plurality of Voices and Communication Inequalities

Most of the discussion on media pluralism in the region has been built around the idea that the oligarchic organization of media markets and different forms of media capture by powerful actors conspire against both fair representation, visibility options and media access of vast sectors of society: vulnerable populations, dissident organizations, and ethnic and gender minority groups.