Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Latin American 24/7 News Battle for Honduras

2010; Purdue University Calumet; Volume: 9; Issue: 16 Linguagem: Inglês

1835-2340

Claudia Boyd-Barrett, Oliver Boyd‐Barrett,

Media Studies and Communication

Abstract International 24/7 television news channels have proliferated in the past two decades. Sometimes hailed as a democratization of international television news-space, the perspective of media imperialism theory counsels that this 24/7 trend is more usefully seen as a continuation of a global system of unequal relations in the business and politics of information exchange and diffusion going back at least as far as the establishment of the first international news agencies in the early nineteenth century. The authors assess this perspective in the context of a three-way comparative analysis of coverage by CNN en Espanol (based in Atlanta), NTN24 (based in Bogota, Colombia) and TeleSur (based in Caracas, Venezuela) during the first days of the aftermath of a coup in Honduras at the end of June 2009, which forcibly removed President Manuel Zelaya from office. The results, largely confirming those of the authors' earlier analysis of how these channels covered 2009 riots in Iran and Peru, lends support for the application of the terms hegemon, subaltern and counter-hegemon to actors in the domain of 24/7 television news. Keywords 24/7 television news; international communication; Latin American media; media imperialism; news agencies; news flow Hegemonic, subaltern and counter-hegemonic relations in global news Analyzing South American international 24/7 television news channels (Boyd-Barrett and Boyd-Barrett, forthcoming) we applied media imperialism theory to a three-way comparative analysis of US-based CNN en Espanol (CNNEsp), Venezuelan-based TeleSur, and Colombia's NTN24. Not all international news media are usefully analyzed with reference to power inequalities among nations, but we believe many of them are ripe for such analysis. Building on overviews of scholarship (Boyd-Barrett, 2006 and Thussu, 2006), we reasoned that international 24/7 television channels, whose market share is dominated by western enterprises such as BBC World and CNN, indicate structural continuities from the global news system initiated by 19th century news agencies Reuters, Havas and Wolff, over one hundred and fifty years ago (Boyd-Barrett, 1980, 1998). Within that system news agencies could be considered hegemonic, if they were founding members of the original cartel; subaltern, if they submitted to relations of unequal exchange imposed by the cartel on national agencies (e.g. Fabra in Madrid, Spain), or agencies of weaker empires (e.g. Korrespondenz Buro, for the Austrian-Hungarian empire); or counter-hegemonic if resisting the cartel from without (e.g. United Press) or from within (e.g. Associated Press, AP). Two forms of counter-hegemony were indicated: resistance rooted in power struggle among contenders for dominance of a capitalist international economy (e.g. AP); and resistance rooted in anti-capitalist ideologies (e.g. the Soviet TASS, Mao's Red China News Agency). This classification mapped on to our three Latin American news channels: CNNEsp as the hegemon, emanating from the center of corporate US power, privileging US news, supporting US foreign policy; NTN24 the subaltern, more focused than CNNEsp on news of Latin America but within a framework of US-style infotainment, and generally favoring US policies; TeleSur the counter-hegemon, ignoring or deprecating US interests. Whereas in the 19th century cartel subaltern agencies depended directly on the hegemons for international news content, in the case of the 24/7 channels, content merely aligned with relations of dependency between the nations that the channels represented. Dependency for actual content might have been determined had we been able to assess to what extent channels adopted directly from western video news agencies APTV or Reuters Television. The patterns we observed in CNNEsp, NTN24 and TeleSur, reflected the politics of their home governments and inter-governmental relations. US foreign policy tradition regards Latin America as its backyard,(Livingstone, 2009) a source of raw materials and profit for US corporations, an area in which intervenes politically and sometimes militarily whenever these interests are threatened by anti-capitalist and/or anti-US governments or movements favoring national and regional autonomy. …