Rejoinder

• Author: Martín Becerra,Celeste M. Wagner
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18765960
• Published date: 01 May 2018
• Date: 01 May 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 220, Vol. 45 No. 3, May 2018, 107–108

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18765960

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

107

Rejoinder

by

Martín Becerra and Celeste M. Wagner

We are grateful for the opportunity to respond to Bresnahan’s critique of our

paper. We believe that her response reflects a biased understanding of our argu-

ments in two significant respects: (1) empirically, as many of the criticisms

either are unrelated to the objectives of our paper or lack a substantive basis,

and (2) epistemically, as her assessment of our research indicates an approach

in which a monocausal and partisan explanation of recent media reform history

in Latin America prevails.

Bresnahan asserts that “anti-neoliberal governments introduced legislation

dramatically transforming the radio and television landscape” (our emphasis).

To the contrary, on the basis of the empirical record and consistent with the

literature cited, we argue that no dramatic transformation has occurred. In fact,

the concentration of media ownership in Latin America is as high today as it

was in 2008 (Becerra and Mastrini, 2017).

She goes on to contend that we avoided “questions of power and the central

role of the media as a keystone of the dominant power bloc and as protagonists

in the struggle to defeat the various leftist projects.” In contrast, we historicize

and cite reliable scholarly sources about the relationship between media con-

glomerates and political power in the context of the region’s high concentration

of media ownership. Furthermore, we suggest that a reaction to this history is

one of the factors that may explain media reform agendas in the period.

Moreover, we also pointed to the crisis of journalism’s ideology of objectivity,

for decades its professional shield, as a catalyst of the reform processes.

Underlying Bresnahan’s critique is a defense of monocausal explanations

for recent Latin American media reforms, processes that are complex, diverse,

and inherently multicausal. By her account, the main factor explaining the

turn in the region’s communication policies is the retrograde political right.

First, we argue instead that no single mechanism can explain a process as his-

torically complex as these reforms. Second, cases such as Bachelet’s Chile and

Chávez’s Venezuela indicate that there were substantive differences in this

realm. Therefore, we offer four main variables that have greater explanatory

power. One of those variables is the degree to which a government displays

populist features. Our variable selection here does not suggest that the bino-

mial “left/right” has been irrelevant to this historical process. Quite to the

contrary, the vast literature from which we draw, grounded in the seminal

work of Ernesto Laclau, argues that polarization is an inherent strategy of

populism. The fact that Mexico conducted one of the most profound and per-

sistent legal reforms of its communication system (more than in Argentina, for

example) strongly suggests that the binomial left/right is reductionist and

otherwise insufficient.

765960LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18765960Latin American PerspectivesBecerra and Wagner / REJOINDER

research-article2018