Given the substantial impact of the Internet and social media on the contemporary process of news selection, this article studies the current role of news agencies as agenda-setters in global news reporting. With a focus on the foreign-reporting of Latin America within the prestigious national press in Germany, we analysed the articles’ authorship from four sources: two market-leading German dailies – ‘ Süddeutsche Zeitung’ and ‘ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’ – the weekly ‘ Der Spiegel’ and, the alternative newspaper ‘ tageszeitung’ (taz). The corpus comprises 3831 articles published between 2000 and 2014. In addition, eight (semi-structured) interviews with German correspondents in Latin America were conducted to comprehend their relationship with the editorial offices and the indirect use of wire services. We observe that not only is the agency-copy low (8.9%) when compared with other world regions, but direct agency use has also been declining. However, further indicators show that the thematic orientation remains powerful. Moreover, the interviewees confirm the agencies’ impact on their work.
This paper reassesses the image of the twenty Latin American countries in the German press – the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), the alternative newspaper taz and the political magazine Der Spiegel – almost forty years after the NWICO debates. The study comprises 3831 analysed articles published during 15 years (from 2000 to 2014), a period in which the continent has experienced substantially political transformations. We identified four main categories of foreign reporting related to the region; 1) Germany’s most important trading partners (Brazil, Argentina and Mexico); 2) the states against the Washington consensus (Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador); 3) the invisible Central American countries and 4) the other Mercosur and Pacific Alliance’s nations (Colombia, Peru, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay). The main postulations of the “Foreign News Study” – negativity, focus on politics and dominance of elite – should be relativised, especially in the case of the first category.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.