Crisis of Representation and New Media Policies in Latin America

• Author: Celeste M. Wagner,Martín Becerra
• Date: 01 May 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18766895
• Published date: 01 May 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 220, Vol. 45 No. 3, May 2018, 86–102

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18766895

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

86

Crisis of Representation and New Media Policies in

Latin America

by

Martín Becerra and Celeste M. Wagner

Translated by

Victoria J. Furio

The emergence of new communication policies in Latin America from 2004 to 2015

took place in the midst of an unprecedented public antagonism between governments and

media groups in Latin America. To understand the emergence of this conflict, the follow-

ing variables are proposed: (1) the populist features of the governments involved, (2) a

crisis of representation, (3) high levels of media concentration in a context of historically

permissive regulation and a crisis of the traditional media, and (4) the governments’ per-

ception of the media as opponents and even as threats to their power.

La emergencia de nuevas políticas de comunicación en América Latina desde 2004 a

2015 tuvo lugar en medio de un conflicto público inédito entre gobiernos y grupos de

comunicación. Con el fin de explicar la emergencia de este conflicto, las siguientes vari-

ables de análisis se plantean: (1) las características populistas de los gobiernos, (2) la crisis

de representación, (3) la concentración mediática en escenarios de históricas regulaciones

permisivas en conjunto con la crisis de los medios tradicionales y (4) la percepción de los

medios como fuerza opositora o destituyente por parte de los gobiernos.

Keywords: Media, Latin America, Populism, Concentration, Re-intermediation

After a history of limited presence on the public agenda, the regulation of the

communications media in Latin America has emerged as a public issue in the

past decade. While media regulation in the region in the twentieth century was

determined by political actors and media owners in settings remote from pub-

lic scrutiny, this tradition was broken in a number of countries, with antago-

nism between governments and large private media groups leading to public

discussion of new rules of the game for this sector and the questioning of estab-

lished policies. Although it is more visible, conflict between governments and

large media groups couched in terms of arguments about freedom of the press

Martín Becerra holds a doctorate in information sciences from the Universidad Autónoma de

Barcelona and is a tenured professor at the Universidades Nacionales in Quilmes and Buenos

Aires, an independent researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y

Técnicas, and the author of De la concentración a la convergencia: Políticas de medios en Argentina y

América Latina (2015). Celeste M. Wagner is a Ph.D. student at the Annenberg School for

Communication and a research fellow at the Center for Advanced Research in Global

Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Victoria J. Furio is a translator living in New

York City.

766895LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18766895Latin American PerspectivesBecerra and Wagner / Representation And Media Policies

research-article2018

Becerra and Wagner / REPRESENTATION AND MEDIA POLICIES 87

is not as new as its regulatory consequences. These consequences cannot be

generalized to all of Latin America, but in 2004–2015 countries with govern-

ments of different political orientations such as Venezuela, Uruguay, Argentina,

Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico enacted fundamental modifications to

the regulation of private commercial media. This in turn resulted in new roles

for state-run media and for community, alternative, and indigenous media (in

Argentina since 2009 termed the “nonprofit” sector). The regulatory reforms

have taken shape in the tension between the economic logic of media owner-

ship and the logic of freedom of expression and the ability to produce, impart,

and receive different views.

Studies of communications policy in contemporary Latin America agree in

identifying the principal variables of analysis as the structure of the sector,

technological change that has undermined the classic rules of operation of the

traditional media, societal processing of the organic crises experienced by

many countries in the region over the past two decades, and the ideologies and

leadership styles of the governments that have promoted legal changes.

Researchers differ in the degree of emphasis they place on these variables. Thus

some stress political leadership styles (Kitzberger, 2008; Natanson, 2012;

Rincón, 2014; Vommaro, 2008; Waisbord, 2013) while others underline the effect

of digitalization and technological change (Carlón and Scolari, 2009; Ruiz, 2010;

Sorj, 2010). Others focus on social pressure for regulatory change (Segura, 2011)

or on structural, economic, and technological change in the communications

sector (Becerra and Mastrini, 2009; Trejo, 2010).

In a broad sense, as Lessig (1998) suggests, regulation of the area of commu-

nications technology and the mass media has four levels: the legal or normative

level, social customs (communications culture), the configuration of markets,

and the morphology of the information sector. The regulatory changes dis-

cussed here include all of these levels. Therefore, while we recognize the

descriptive and sometimes explanatory validity of the variables mentioned in

the literature, we suggest that studies have generally focused on the conflict

itself, the degree of concentration of the multimedia system, or the intentions

associated with the new regulations—approaches that limit the possibility of

understanding their causes and effects.

In contrast, we intend to produce a coordinated view of the material condi-

tions that contributed to the emergence of the conflict. Therefore, in the context

of disputes between governments and media groups, we propose the following

four independent variables: (1) the nature of the so-called populist govern-

ments, (2) a crisis of representation, (3) media concentration in a setting of his-

torically permissive regulation and as part of an unprecedented technological

transformation in the mass communications sector and a crisis in the tradi-

tional media system, and (4) governments’ perception of the media as oppo-

nents or even as threats to their power.

In the next section of the article we discuss the regulatory reforms of recent

years, which have developed in the context of technological convergence and

political crisis that have been catalysts of these initiatives. In the third section

we explain why it is the type of leadership (populist) rather than ideology that

is useful for analyzing the conflict. We maintain that populisms, which foster a

binary logic of friend-or-foe, create the notion of a virtuous and undivided