Media systems in Latin America

Hallin, D. & Echeverría, M (2025). Media systems in Latin America. In A. Casero-Ripollés & P. C. López-López (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Political Communication in Ibero-America (pp. 32–48). London: Routledge. Chapter 2 Media systems in Latin America Daniel C. Hallin https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8531-832X Martin Echeverría https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6071-8725 Abstract This chapter outlines the broad contours of Latin American media systems, organizing and critiquing extant literature about the subject. Based on the four comparative categories of Hallin and Mancini (2004), it reviews the region’s media market—a weak press and powerful, concentrated broadcast media—the multifold parallelism between media and political entities—involving collusion among vested interests, alternative ideologies, or populist movements—the dual role of the state— interventionist on the one hand and often laissez faire in regulating and in the structuring of the public sphere—and the fragmentation of a professional journalism that is underfunded, menaced by the state and organized crime, and subject to intervention by outside interests. Further, the chapter reviews endogenous proposals about Latin American media systems, such as those that revolve around presidential systems, the issues of peripheral status, imperialism, and colonialism, the influence of populism, the liberal-captured model, and the historical view of multiple modernizations. Concluding remarks and further research recommendations close the chapter. 1 Introduction The term media system refers to the ensemble of institutions, practices, and actors that make up the media in a society, understood in terms of the relationships among them and between them and the wider social structure within which they operate, including, most centrally, political and economic institutions (Hallin & Mancini, 2004). Media systems are the institutional scaffold for the flows of journalistic political communication and hence, for how the shared exercise of power is interpreted by the public (Kenski & Jamieson, 2017. The media systems approach is holistic, historical, and macro-institutional in character, seeking to explain patterns in the behaviour of media institutions and actors and their interactions with actors and institutions outside the media in terms of their structural and cultural context and historical development. Typically, the study of media systems focuses on the news media and on political communication, setting aside for the most part the study of cultural industries and popular culture, and we will follow that focus here, though it is worth noting that there are important places of overlap worthy of attention, as for example in work on infotainment shows and political satire in Mexico (Echeverria & Rodelo, 2021), parodies in Argentina, and talk shows in Peru (Alonso, 2015). The systematic study of media systems in Latin America is of recent origin and leaves many questions still unanswered. Nevertheless, it has made important strides in recent years. We will offer here an overview of the existing research on Latin American media systems, with two caveats. First, from the 18 countries comprising the region, we excluded Cuba from the analysis, given its deep structural divergence from the rest of the region, with a mostly communist economy and one-party political system. Second, most of our review is focused on countries with ample scholarly production, such as Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, or Peru, and less on countries like Paraguay, Nicaragua, or Panama, where scholarly work on media systems is unfortunately scarce. Nevertheless, many of our assumptions could apply to those other countries, and we hope that reviews like this stimulate further research on them. The discussion is organized into two parts. In the opening section, we offer an overview of the principal characteristics of Latin American media systems, organized in terms of the four domains of comparison proposed by Hallin and Mancini (2004). In the second section, we summarize a number of recent proposals intended to advance the analysis of the specificity of Latin American media systems by identifying additional variables relevant to understanding media systems in the region, topics of distinct relevance, proposed additions to the typology of media systems and new theorizing about elements of the historical context that distinguish Latin American media systems from those of other regions. Among the issues covered in the second part are the significance of presidential political systems, populism, the concepts of “media 2 capture”, media imperialism and colonialism, and the perspective of multiple modernities. The four domains of media systems in Latin America: Media markets, political parallelism, journalistic professionalism and role of the state Hallin and Mancini (2004) propose a basic framework for comparing media systems that is now widely used, focusing on the structure of media markets, political parallelism, journalistic professionalization, and the role of the state. Each domain will be defined and explained in the respective section. Here, we summarize the principal characteristics of Latin American media systems using this framework, incorporating research and data from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Structure of media markets In general terms, Latin American media markets are characterized by weakly developed newspaper and strongly developed broadcasting markets. Latin America inherited from Iberian colonial powers a counter-Reformation culture suspicious of literacy and printing. This combined with high levels of economic inequality, elitist political systems with limited development of mass politics, racial and ethnic divisions and linguistic diversity to limit the development of the mass press. Efforts began in the late 19th century to experiment with more popular forms of journalism, and these expanded in the 20th century, connected with urbanization and often the rise of new forms of mass politics and transformations in public education. In Mexico, for example, while 14% of the population was literate in 1920, the number rose to 42% in 1940 and 76% in 1970 (Smith, 2018, p. 14). In this context, while much of the gran prensa in Mexico City continued to address elite audiences using language that required insider knowledge of politics to understand, increasing numbers of Mexican citizens read tabloid and provincial newspapers. By the 1950s, Smith asserts in an analysis of the relation of the press to civil society in Mexico, “urban literate Mexicans read the papers on a regular basis”. Calvi (2019) similarly shows the expansion as early as the 1920s of Argentine newspapers which addressed popular audiences, often adopting a service model in which they connected with the audience not only by delivering news but through institutions like medical clinics and libraries. These newspapers would come to be seen as a powerful force in mass politics. Overall, however, newspaper circulation has remained low across the region, and newspapers have often been shaky economically. 3 The story is very different when we turn to broadcasting. Mexico, Brazil, and Cuba introduced television in 1950 and Argentina in 1951, among the first countries to do so. All already had strongly developed broadcasting industries centred around radio, and television, due in large part to the considerable transnational geo-linguistic market in the region, would develop into a powerful cultural industry with great influence in both culture and politics. During the period of neoliberalism starting at the end of the 1980s, there was a particularly strong expansion of multi-media conglomerates, as well as greater transnationalization of ownership and a new influx of global investment in regional cultural industries. Broadcast media in Latin America, in contrast to newspapers, are in general “market-powerful” institutions. Latin American media markets, which are overwhelmingly commercial in character, are concentrated in a few private conglomerates, mostly tied to powerful families, and mainly in the large urban capitals, where most of the content is produced (Mauersberger, 2015). Hence, market concentration is a strong focus of both media scholarship and policy discussion in the region (Hughes & Lawson, 2005; Becerra & Mastrini, 2009). The media are of a commercial nature, funded by advertising, at the expense of public broadcasting and community media models, which, unlike in other regions, do not help mitigate their dominance (Mendel et al., 2017). Latin American media markets are characterized by a coexistence of market models that involve sale of audiences to advertisers—standard in wealthier countries—and markets organized around clientelist patronage, involving, in effect, sale to patrons of favourable coverage or at times silence. As they exist mainly for profit or to serve political interests through clientelist ties—rather than to represent or bridge plural interests—they operate in a deregulated, loosely regulated, or unenforced regulatory environment (Becerra & Wagner, 2018). As a consequence, the level of market concentration is among the highest on the globe. As of 2016, Mexican America Movil and Brazilian Telemar were the 10th and 11th largest platform operators in the world, whereas Brazil’s Globo was the 4th and Mexico’s Televisa was the 11th content company globally. Mexican mogul Carlos Slim was the most valuable media billionaire, and the Brazilian Marino family was the 7th (Noam, 2016). According to the CR4 index, which measures the market penetration of the four main operators across six countries in the region, those companies boast an 88.8% share of dominance, confirming their oligopolistic nature (Mastrini, 2019). Under the same index, Argentina is 92% concentrated, and the rating of the four main television companies accounts for 56.7% of the metropolitan zone rating (Media Ownership Monitor-MOM, 2019). Brazil has 69% concentration; out of 50 media, five belong to Grupo Globo, five to Grupo Bandeirantes-Band, and five to Grupo Record, controlled by a Protestant church (MoM, 2018). The Mexican concentration index is 100%, led by Televisa, whose content accounts for 8% of global content exports 4 (Mastrini, 2019), and the index is close to the 92% in Colombia. Chile is 91% concentrated, and the four main media groups account for 91% of the television audience (CNTV, 2016). In Costa Rica, the groups Retrepel and Tetelic account for 80% of audience share on television (Jiménez & Voorend, 2019). Contrary to the earlier promises of media diversity, digital convergence only exacerbated concentration. The study by Mastrini (2019) of the 2000–2015 period confirms that the domination of the main groups strengthened and concentration tended to increase. This is exemplified in the case of Argentina, where Grupo Clarín has grown in comparison to other groups since its 2018 merger with Telecom, a dominant phone and internet provider (Monje et al., 2020). Likewise, the deep reforms enacted from 2004 to 2014 by leftist governments in several countries (mainly Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, and Bolivia) to counter concentration had ambiguous results: while alternative and community media did grow (Lupien, 2013), these initiatives yielded a “polarized concentration” whereby old media were replaced by new concentrated media close to the government (Becerra & Wagner, 2018). The high market concentration has consequences on a structural level, as it precludes an egalitarian distribution of communication power and limits the plurality of the public sphere—which scholars call “economic censorship” (Mauersberger, 2015; Mendel et al., 2017); it also hinders the organizational underpinnings of media, such as journalistic labour, where the ongoing shrinking of competition has led to layoffs and precaritization of journalists (Monje et al., 2020). As in other parts of the world, Internet penetration has expanded greatly in recent years. It is still characterized in Latin America by a large “digital divide”, with considerable inequality in access to broadband connections. But it has clearly changed the media landscape in ways which are just beginning to be explored. The most evident effects in the region include the growth of independent journalistic enterprises outside of established media structures (El Faro in El Salvador, for example, or Aristegui Noticias in Mexico), the facilitation of social movements, and the circulation of misinformation, often carried out systematically using bots and “trolls” during election campaigns. Political parallelism The concept of political parallelism has to do with “the extent to which the structure of the media system parallels the divisions of the political party and interest group system” (Hallin, in press). Assessing the prevalence and forms of political parallelism in Latin America is complex due to considerable variation in the region, and also due to conceptual issues involved in translating between the European context explored by Hallin and Mancini and other authors and the significantly different context of Latin America. Political parallelism in Europe is historically associated with the strong mass 5 political parties of the 20th century, rooted in social interests and relatively stable ideological perspectives associated with these—though it is worth noting that there was variation in Europe as well. Traditional Scandinavian social democratic newspapers, tied to a highly organized class-based movement, are very different from Silvio Berlusconi’s Il Giornale, which was a vehicle for promoting the populist leader. Albuquerque (2012) argues that because Latin American politics is not in general characterized by strongly institutionalized parties with clear ideological identities, the concept of political parallelism doesn’t apply to the region. This distinction is clearly important to understanding the relationship between media and politics in the region. For purposes of comparative analysis across diverse countries and regions, however, it is probably better not to tie the concept of political parallelism narrowly to the context of 20th-century Europe where it was first developed, but to use it to explore more broadly the relation between media systems and the system of competition among political actors and interests in its various forms. And from this point of view we can say that political parallelism is indeed often quite strong in Latin American media systems though its forms do not necessarily coincide with those familiar from the European context. Journalism began to develop as an institution in Latin America in the period of the rebellions against colonial rule, and throughout the 19th century was strongly connected with the struggle for political power between factions of the elite. Newspapers were typically run by political figures who used them to mobilize support for political organizations in competition with rival factions; journalism was a means of political action and was typically fused with political, economic, and military power (Ruiz, 2014). By the 20th century, newspapers were typically owned by elite families who continued to play important roles in political life. Market forces would complicate the relation between media and politics, particularly with the rise of broadcasting, but the involvement of media elites in politics and of political elites in media has remained strong to the present (Guerrero, 2023). There is significant variation, both over time and across countries and media, in the degree and forms of political alignment of Latin American media, and there is some degree of debate among Latin American scholars about how to characterize media partisanship in the region. Guerrero observes, consistent with Albuquerque’s point, that the political arena has not been able to consolidate party systems but has been defined by electoral coalitions which emerge around strong political figures which then dissipate with defeat or succession (2023, pp. 47–8). Thus, except in specific moments or conjunctures … the alignment of journalism with groups in power has lacked clear ideological content (Waisbord, 2000, p. 9). 6 Other scholars see more ideological consistency in Latin American media alignments in many cases, as they reflect ties to particular factions of the elite, progressive/conservative divisions related to the role of the church, or other kinds of divisions—even if these may be modified at times by accommodations to particular alignments of power. Thus Lawson (2002), in a content analysis of Mexican newspapers, showed that they reflected the diverse ideological currents that made up the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institutional. Ponce and Santangelo (2022) describe the principal newspapers in Uruguay as having clear partisan affinities and ideological tendencies—while broadcasting does not. As we will see in a later section, the rise of populist leaders in the region has often been associated with a sharp division of the media into camps opposing and supporting populist leaders. A fairly high degree of fluidity is clearly characteristic of media-politics relationships in the region. Lugo-Ocando and Romero, for example, describe the alignment of Venezuelan media for and against Hugo Chávez in his initial campaign for office, and then add, “support to more than one of the leading parties in the same election was a common practice … in many cases dependent on specific agreements and interests for each electoral process” (2003, p. 5). Therefore, a medium that supported a candidate or party in one election could be supporting another in the next one.” Shifting political partisanship is still partisanship, however, and needs to be distinguished from forms of journalism in which media remain more neutral in reporting politics. As Guerrero writes, “excessive politicization of front pages and lead stories of news broadcasts results from conflicts among political groups themselves … and to closeness between political and media elites, and not necessarily a new media commitment to initiate a broad debate over public life with the citizenry” (2022, p. 54; Waisbord, 2000). Pluralism comes and goes in Latin American media systems, and this is another complication in conceptualizing political parallelism there. There are some periods in which all major media essentially either become pro-government media, or at least shift toward passive coverage reflecting official discourses. Diversity in voices essentially disappears. This happens, obviously, in authoritarian periods. But not only then; to take two examples, this happened in the later years of the Evo Morales presidency, when dominant media shifted from opposition to acceptance of the hegemony of Morales’ party (Schuliaqer, 2020), and in Ecuador in the period after the populist rule of Rafael Correa, when the media aligned with a new president who renounced the populist regime, and both supporters of the Correa regime and protesters against the new regime were excluded from media fora. How do we make sense of this in terms of political parallelism? Probably we can say that this is indeed a form of political parallelism, involving a media system that reflects shifting patterns of political power and alignment over time. State-run media in Latin America usually fit this pattern, that is to say, their political orientation shifts as different forces come to dominate the state. Political alignments are often asymmetrical in Latin America, 7 reflecting the high level of general inequality that characterizes the politics of the region; since media are typically closely aligned with traditional elites, and the later tend to dominate politics as well, conservative media tend to prevail. This may in part reflect the nature of commercialized media systems in general; media scholars in Britain—where the concept of party-press parallelism originated—have made a similar point. High levels of political parallelism are often associated with forms of “advocacy” journalism in which opinion and news reporting are not strongly separated. Latin American media systems are somewhat mixed in this regard. Strong traditions of activist journalism definitely exist, and in certain periods of polarization, the tone of journalism is often highly partisan. At the same time, much partisanship in Latin American journalism is concealed. Thus Lugo-Ocando and Romero (2003, p. 5) write, “media in Venezuela has always tried to maintain the appearance of objectivity and has very rarely manifest openly its partisanship. The support to parties and candidates during elections has been [manifest] instead through positive headlines, wide coverage and friendly editorial approach…” The concept of political parallelism is closely related to that of differentiation. Hallin and Mancini make the point that in the polarized pluralist model prevalent in Southern Europe, where political parallelism is high, the media system can be seen as close to the political system, not strongly differentiated from it, with political logics and political actors strongly influencing the operation of media. As Guerrero’s observation about the “closeness between political and media elites suggests”, this is also true of Latin America. Media owners are often involved in politics, at times in passive and at times in highly interventionist ways (Albuquerque, 2005), and politicians become media owners; media are highly dependent on resources and accommodations from the state; and politicians and media personnel—journalists included—are frequently involved in clientelist exchanges and negotiations, which strongly shape the content of news coverage. In all these ways the media in Latin America can be said to be strongly politicized, most often in ways that tie them to elite politics. Professionalization of journalism The development of journalistic professionalism in Latin America has faced many challenges and is uneven. As noted above, journalism in the 19th century was typically an instrument for political intervention, not a distinct occupation carried out in service to a general public. As commercial newspapers developed in the 20th century, journalism began to develop more strongly as a distinct occupation, and a variety of different journalistic approaches developed. Some of these were influenced by the informational and storytelling approaches of the mass press in the United States or 8 Britain; others more closely resembled the political-literary approach common in the French tradition, which was also influential in the region (Waisbord, 2000, p. 8). The tradition of the crónica, a genre of long-form, often politically-engaged literary journalism typically carried out by celebrity journalists who had high public profiles and considerable autonomy, was one notable and distinctive form (Calvi, 2019). In the period after World War II, when the influence of the United States in the region was particularly strong and the US was carrying out a campaign to export its model of journalism around the world, professional norms of U.S. commercial media were widely diffused, even if often practiced quite differently than in their original context (Albuquerque, 2005; Albuquerque & Gagliardi, 2011). In Hallin and Mancini’s analysis, journalistic professionalism is defined by three criteria: autonomy of journalists from outside intervention in their work; consensus on ethics and standards of practice; and the prevalence of an ideology of public service. These have been limited in the case of Latin America by a number of factors. Periods of dictatorship and in some cases persistence or reemergence of authoritarian intervention has slowed the development of the profession, and by many accounts left a cultural legacy of passivity. Journalists frequently are obliged to defer to the political and economic interests of owners. Journalists themselves may also have entanglements in clientelistic networks, and may receive particularistic benefits from politicians or other powerful actors. Commercial pressures on journalists are often strong. Pay and job security are often low for journalists, which limits their ability to be assertive about professional autonomy. Collective organization of the profession, in the form of unions or professional associations, is limited. Heavy workload and to some extent lack of training makes it difficult for journalists to practice more active forms of reporting, and Latin American journalism is often characterized by passive reporting based on public statements by officials. Polarization, on the other hand, pushes in certain contexts towards highly partisan reporting. There is a wide heterogeneity and even fuzziness across the region as to the roles and practices, as well as the values and their meanings, that a professional journalist should abide by. A significant body of research on journalistic roles illustrates the lack of consensus and homogeneity across the region. Despite their cultural and political differences, for example, Mexican and Brazilian journalism share the predominance of the watchdog role and the endorsement of universal ethical values (Mellado et al., 2012, 2017); yet Brazilian journalists are more prone to interpretative and critical roles (Paiva et al., 2015; Weiss, 2015), whereas Mexican journalists are closer to the populist mobilizer role (Weiss, 2015) and separate facts from opinion (Mellado et al., 2012). In Chilean journalism the infotainment role is dominant and the watchdog role is practically nonexistent in comparison with four other countries in one study, while in Ecuador the service role predominates, probably as a response to the demands of government reforms under the populist Correa government (Mellado et al., 2017, Humanes et al., 9 2017). Meanwhile, in countries like Argentina or Uruguay, the disseminator and adversarial roles are the dominant ones (Arroyave et al., 2007). In general, passive forms of reporting based on the use of official sources tend to predominate across the region, though they have been mixed with more active forms at certain moments. Freije (2020), for example, shows that Mexican journalists, even at a time when they were strongly integrated into the power system of the ruling PRI, did at certain moments reveal scandals or provoke major debates in the public sphere. Often these forms of journalism were carried out by a subset of prominent journalists who had the visibility and financial resources to act more autonomously than rank and file journalists, and who balanced silence and revelation in order to maintain the relationships with powerful actors that gave them access to information. Waisbord (2000) writes about the practice of denuncismo, a Latin American adaptation of the practice of watchdog journalism, but one which often involves poorly documented and researched indictments against certain factions, often tied to acute partisanship or clientelistic arrangements. “War journalism”, related to divisions over populist leadership, represents another highly active form of journalism (Kitzberger 2023); other very different forms survive in the crónica tradition and in independent, internet-based media. In the 1980s and 1990s, following the return to democracy in most of the region and the economic expansion that characterized the initial period of neoliberalism, there were significant signs of a shift toward greater journalistic professionalism, with many news organizations shifting away from deferential models of reporting and clear alliances with those in power; signs of greater consensus on ethical standards, often centering around U.S.-influenced norms; a shift towards college-educated reporters trained in journalism and communication; and a desire to break with identification with parties, which had a bad image in this period (Waisbord, 2000; Hughes, 2006; Lawson, 2002; Porto, 2012). The changes initiated in this period, however, did not go as far as many imagined they would. They were undermined by worsening economic conditions for news organizations, which produced a return to dependence on clientelist ties, and also by polarization in many countries, which undercut professional solidarity and consensus on ethics. At the same time, the development of the Internet has opened space for new journalistic enterprises to be created with considerably less dependence on outside interests. Violence against journalists has also limited professional autonomy in the region, and has affected particularly the ability of journalists to report on organized crime, corruption, human rights abuses by security forces, and environmental conflicts. It is worth noting that the high level of violence against journalists in the region is in some ways a complicated phenomenon: it clearly limits press freedom, but also demonstrates that assertive journalism persists—since powerful actors don’t need to 10 kill journalists unless those journalists are threatening their interests. In many cases journalists have responded to the threat of violence by moving towards new forms of cooperation and professional solidarity (Gonzáles de Bustamante & Relly, 2016). Role of the state The relation between media systems and the state in Latin America is characterized by a duality that distinguishes it from many other systems. On the one hand, the region is characterized by a strong dominance of privately-owned commercial media. Latin America is the only part of the world, along with the United States, in which broadcasting developed according to the model of private commercial media, and public service broadcasting has always been relatively marginal in the region, with small audience share and generally dependent on commercial revenue (Arroyo et al., 2012). Even in periods of dictatorship, authoritarian governments, rather than taking direct control of the media, instead encouraged the growth of commercial media, particularly television, and built alliances with them. And regulation of media industries has generally been limited, with little state intervention to control market concentration or impose public service obligations on market participants. Weak regulation of media industries has often been attributed to the power of large media companies to influence the political process, and the interest of power-holders in maintaining close relationships with media industries. At the same, time, the state has, in general, a central position in Latin American societies, playing a central role in economic development, often concentrating considerable social resources and intervening in many aspects of life. State actors have typically seen media as crucial to their goals for development and construction of national identity, as well as for maintaining political power, and have encouraged the development of large-scale commercial media, as well as making efforts to control and co-opt them. A principal means of control and cooptation has to do with the use of government advertising, since many media in the region are weak economically, and depend heavily on government advertising. Given the nature of the state in the region where rational-legal authority is weak and clientelist relationships prevail, transparent criteria for the allocation these resources are rarely present, and they are frequently used to reward media owners for cooperation and punish those who refuse to play the game (Guerrero, 2022; Alianza de Derechos Civiles, 2008). In the 1990s, with the shift to neoliberalism and the growth of media industries, there were predictions that dependence on state advertising would fade. But this has not happened; governments, intensely concerned about the importance of exercising control over media in an era when political power is often fragile, have continued to devote substantial resources to media control, and market conditions have worsened for many media—mainly because of digitalization—increasing their dependence on the state. Media owners, for 11 their part, often engage in negotiation, which may involve bursts of critical coverage, to increase their share of state resources. Other kinds of state resources are also similarly used to co-opt media owners and sometimes individual journalists, including subsidized newsprint allocation in some periods, jobs for individuals connected to media enterprises, benefits for other businesses owned by media moguls, and the like. Weak regulation of media industries, as well as weak and selective enforcement of regulation, is also a means by which political actors can co-opt media. Political actors also have other means to exercise pressure on journalists and media enterprises. Many countries still have legal mechanisms left over from authoritarian periods, such as laws on criminal libel or desacato, that is, disrespect for official institutions (Hughes & Lawson, 2005); and in general the weak independence of judicial institutions creates possibilities for political use of judicial power. In the period since the shift to democratic rule, significant social movements have arisen focused on “media accountability” and reform of media policy (Segura & Waisbord, 2016). Latin American constitutions typically have two different constitutional provisions related to media, one, rooted in the liberal tradition of “negative press freedom”, resembling the U.S. First Amendment, and another establishing a public “right to information”, invoking a positive conception of the role of the state in promoting free speech more similar to European social democratic traditions, and related in part to the New World Information and Communication Order debates of the 1970s, which questioned the dominance of commercial media and freemarket media policy. These social movements have produced significant debate over media policy in recent years, and some changes, including laws on government access to information and institutionalization of community media. More extensive reforms have tended to come during populist governments, which have increased the role of the state in the media system in many ways. Reforms undertaken by populist regimes have often been politicized however (Waisbord, 2012) and undermined by polarization, and have proven transitory as they have failed to survive a transition of regime. Liberal conceptions of the relation of the media and the state normally understand that relation in terms of the dichotomy between media independence and state control; social democratic conceptions emphasize the positive role of a neutral state in encouraging a free and plural media system. Latin American media systems, by contrast, are most typically characterized by collusion between media and the state, with conflict occurring when collusive relationships break down. Endogenous frameworks Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) work on media systems proposed the four domains of comparison outlined above, and also three models which were intended to summarize 12 in a holistic way distinct patterns of development in the systems they studied, which in turn were tied to different patterns of historical development. At the end of their book, Hallin and Mancini note that media systems in Latin America have similarities to their Polarized Pluralist model, rooted in the colonial influence of Spain, Portugal, and France, and to structural similarities with southern Europe (also Hallin & Papathanassopoulos, 2002), and also to the Liberal model, rooted in the influence of the United States. Many scholars within the region have similarly noted these parallels, noting, for example, the pattern of low newspaper circulation, politicization of media, weak professionalization, and strong state intervention which the region shares with the cases covered under Hallin and Mancini’s Polarized Pluralist models. (Azevedo, 2006; Campos-Freire, 2009; Humanes, Mellado & Márquez-Ramírez, 2017). As scholarship has advanced in the region, however, many scholars, as well as Hallin and Mancini (2012) themselves, have made the point that the application of Hallin and Mancini’s models provides a thin basis for theorizing Latin American media systems, which diverge from them in many ways (e.g. Albuquerque, 2012; Mellado & Lagos 2013; Segura & Waisbord, 2016). In this section we review recent initiatives to theorize the specificity of Latin American media systems. Peripheral systems, media imperialism, and colonialism Albuquerque (2012) proposes the axis of central versus peripheral media systems as an important variable beyond the Hallin/Mancini framework for comparative analysis of media systems, arguing that postcolonial media in regions like Latin America constantly adopt and adapt journalistic models and practices from the dominant Western models (the centre). Foreign countries directly intervened in the foundations and shaping of the Latin American media systems, particularly broadcasting, building much of the initial infrastructure, shaping the economic and institutional structure of the media system, and fostering certain professional models of journalism. “Most Latin American media companies grew … in cooperation with their US counterparts”, which subsidized “technology, know-how, and media content in exchange for market access” (Mauersberger, 2015, p. 30). This led to the foundation of a partially imported commercial model of broadcasting. In terms of journalism there was an attempt particularly from the 1960s onwards to transfer the American journalistic model, centred on practical skills instead of ideological views and motivations, through college education and curriculum, training centers, American and European lecturers, and textbooks, mainly sponsored by the UNESCO-funded International Center of Higher Education in Journalism (CIESPAL in Spanish) (de Mello, 1988). Its outcomes are not clear cut, but, for example, foreign training in the liberal model was crucial to developing the civic model of journalism that fostered Mexico’s transition to democracy (Hughes, 2006). These phenomena were analysed in the tradition of the “media 13 imperialism” theoretical strand of the sixties and seventies in both the leftist US and Latin American scholarly communities. Theorists of media imperialism regarded such transfers of communication hardware and cultural values from a dominant country to Latin American ones as an attempt to impose the former’s values at the expense of the latter’s cultural integrity (Beltrán & Fox, 1981), though the media imperialism perspective has been qualified in much recent scholarship, due, for example, to the development of powerful cultural industries in Latin America and to the rise of the “active audience” perspective in media studies. Nowadays, aside from foreign capital investments, there are other forms of intervention such as journalist training, grants, and awards to outlets or prominent journalists, or reports and condemnations of violations of freedom of the press (such as the French Reporters sans Frontières “Freedom Index” or the frequent statements of the US State Department). Whether those are a softer form of imperialism or a natural consequence of the globalization of the journalistic profession, it is still a much debated issue in Latin American academia. Recent scholarship focuses more on the broader cultural and institutional legacy of colonialism (Albuquerque, 2005) and on the need to break away from conceptual frameworks rooted in research on the countries of the global North, rather than on specific foreign interventions (Mellado & Lagos, 2013). Presidentialism Albuquerque (2012) also observes that Latin America is distinctive in the dominance of presidential as opposed to parliamentary political systems (see also Mellado & Lagos, 2023). Presidentialism, he argues, alters the nature and the function of news, since the latter does not focus on the parties, which are less active in government, but takes a more personalistic and administrative view of politics. Albuquerque adds that presidential systems give the media an intermediary function of communication and dispute resolution between the three branches of government and a catch-all nature. Thus, they do not speak on behalf of any faction or the objective “truth” of the liberal model, but from an imagined “national interest”. Other works of the same author (Albuquerque, 2005, 2019) have found empirical evidence in Brazil for these assumptions, yet they have seldom been tested in other countries. Populism Closely related with presidentialism is the prevalence of populist politics in the region. Latin America has a long history of populist politics, and an important wave of populism began in the early 2000s. Unlike other regions, populism in Latin America tends to be 14 on the left politically—though right-wing forms do also exist—and the wave beginning in the 2000s was associated with reactions against neo-liberalism. Populist leaders often come to power with the support of much of the media in periods when the existing party system is in crisis and strong “anti-politics” sentiments are widespread. Typically, however, populist leaders have eventually come into conflict with most of the established media. Once that occurs, leftist and populist governments typically seek to alter the landscape of media systems in order to get their leaders a wider and permanent exposure among the populace, control the framing of their messages by bypassing the filters of the mainstream media, and counter opposition from corporate and elite media. Populist leaders typically stigmatize corporate media as part of a perverse privileged elite that exploits the good people and that embodies the opposition, and often compete with established media by creating their own forums to address the public directly, through television, radio, and social media. They use various tools of state power to harass oppositional media—withdrawing state advertising, for example, requiring transmission of government content, or in some cases revoking broadcast licenses. In many cases they ally with pre-existing media accountability movements to create new regulatory regimes with authority over media ownership and in some cases content. They also work to create an “alternative media system” that would support the government in its battle with opposition media. This involves directing government resources to sympathetic commercial media, and giving legal recognition and support to community media, a sector that has long demanded communication democratization and pluralism. Government media and public service media, a marginal platform in most Latin American media, are also often created or strengthened (Kitzberger, 2012). Often, the relation of populist regimes to the media has been understood by scholars according to the standard liberal framework of press freedom, as an attack by the state on independent media (Kellem & Stein, 2016). And indeed, populist leaders, seeing themselves as embodiments of the popular will, have typically been hostile to the idea of an independent media, as they are to other institutions of “horizontal accountability”, and have reproduced patterns of instrumentalization of media (Waisbord, 2012), often indeed damaging press freedom. At the same time, many scholars have questioned what Cane characterizes as the narrative of “a sudden authoritarian intromission into the otherwise progressive development of an internally coherent, autonomous press” (2012, p. 4). Kitzberger (2012) notes the wide variation in media policies enacted by populist regimes, distinguishing between nations where the collapse of representative institutions was extreme or moderate and arguing that radical reforms took place in the former cases. Palos-Pons and Hallin (2021) point to evidence that populist rule had complex effects on Ecuadorean journalism, forcing changes in what had been weak professional standards. Samet (2019) stresses polarization of journalism, rather than state suppression as characteristic of the 15 populist era in Venezuela. Kitzberger and Avila (2020) similarly stress polarization, and Kitzberger (2023) points to the central political role of the anti-populist media, developing an argument that a new form of political partisanship developed in Argentina around the confrontation between these media and their populist adversaries, one which continued to shape Argentine journalism and politics following the end of populist rule. Kitzberger’s analysis also suggests a decline in political pluralism in the media following the end of the media conflicts of the populist period. The liberal-captured model One comprehensive attempt to articulate a general interpretation of the distinctive characteristics of Latin American media systems is the liberal-captured model proposed by Guerrero and Marquez (2014; 2023). This model posits that after transitioning to democracy, many Latin American countries established media policies aligned with the liberal ethos of freedom of the press, a commercial business model, and watchdog reporting. Nonetheless, in the context of clientelistic practices, weak regulation, and “coincidence of interest between the political classes and media elites” (Guerrero & Marquez, 2014, p. 61), media are muzzled or weaponized, with extrajournalistic interests prevailing over autonomous journalism and public interest criteria. This model offers a framework for understanding the widespread bias and selective scandals that characterize the region, the media concentration, and the lack of investigative reporting; it represents an important start towards conceptualizing Latin American media systems in their own terms. Nonetheless, it may be both too specific and too general in important ways. It may be too specific in focusing on certain mechanisms of power that fit within the concept of capture—clientelist transactions, interventions by particular elites—and passing over others that may be important in many contexts—ideological hegemony, for example (more central in countries like Chile or Uruguay, where clientelism is less strong) or violence against journalists. And it may be too general in abstracting from the considerable variation across the region, and among media. It doesn’t distinguish, for example, between powerful monopolies, which even influence elections and policies, and small-market media that depend almost entirely on government budgets. Guerrero and Marquez (2023) consider populist regimes as a variant of the captured liberal model, but the purported public service ethos and strong state intervention in these systems might seem to call into question whether they can fit within the same model. Echeverría, Gonzalez, and Reyna (2022) question more broadly whether the liberal elements of captured liberal system are more de jure than structurally central in these systems. 16 Multiple modernities Another effort to offer a broad theorization of the distinctive characteristics of Latin American media systems is Echeverría, González, and Reyna (2022), who argue that more than the adaptation of Western models, a comprehensive media systems theory in the region would need analysis and critique of core historical processes that are key to their evolution and their institutional legacies. Drawing on the literature on “multiple modernities”, and, like de Albuquerque, foregrounding the legacy of colonialism, they argue for a divergent process in non-Western regions that combines Western institutional characteristics with local ones. This specific form of this divergent modernization process in Latin America, they argue, has four enduring consequences for media institutions. First, under a postcolonial understanding, elites struggle to impose competing models of modernity, which different factions believe best resemble the West. In terms of media systems, this competition lies at the root of the instability of media institutions and the heterogeneity of different ideals of journalistic practice. Second, the colonial heritage is also connected with highly centralized, patrimonial structures of power with weak legal-rational authority and rule of law, that lie behind the clientelistic practices and instrumentalization that pervade media in the region. Third, unlike the West, the modernization process involved a preeminent role of the state; hence, differentiation of other institutions, including the media, from the state is often superficial or compromised. Fourth, the late integration of Latin America into global capitalism was connected with strong regional differences in integration into the modernization process, which is again connected with heterogeneity in the development of media institutions, with regional media subsystems characterized by illiberal practices impervious to national changes. Concluding remarks The development of an all-encompassing media systems theory for Latin America faces certain empirical, theoretical, epistemic, and institutional challenges that should be addressed in the future. First, scarcity of empirical data in most Latin American countries precludes fuller understanding of their dynamics and theorization of the variety of Latin American media systems. This stems from the weakness of the state agencies in charge of generating it, which lack the funding and/or professionalization, and the general lack of resources in Latin American universities for research. Cross-country collaborations between scholars have been on the rise lately and could possibly compensate for this issue. Second, from an epistemic point of view, there is an additional challenge in the Latin American case. While Western Europe or the US benefited from a long period of stability 17 during the postwar era, Latin America has seen in the past few decades the upsurge of democratic regimes, dictatorships, and restored democracies, as well as the subsequent transition from state-led economies, neoliberal policies, and socialist readjustments. This constant shifting of elite alignments and ideologies sometimes yields radical changes in media policies and practices, with relatively short periods of stability and frequent recurrences or cycles. Instability needs to be theorized as a structural characteristic of Latin American media systems; certainly, however, it presents challenges in the research process and the development of theory. Latin American media systems are characterized by both volatility—with regimes and political alignments of media sometimes shifting rapidly—and important elements of continuity, as elements like clientelism and concentration of ownership often persist across regimes. Finally, for an overarching theory to emerge and typologies to be inferred, a thorough, consistent, and multidisciplinary endeavour has to be carried out. This, for example, requires that scholars have command of certain literatures from political science, political sociology, and political economy to understand the structural, extra-media conditions and how the political and economic domains interact with media institutions. Such efforts run counter to the current political economy of knowledge production (Hallin, 2020), which imposes high productivity requirements on scholars that leave little room for the kinds of long-term projects needed to understand media system development. 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