This paper contrasts the experiences of neoliberalism in Argentina and Chile, exploring why two countries that implemented apparently similar market reforms came to different stances on marketization: a post-neoliberal politics in Argentina, and a tempered neoliberalism in Chile that has only recently come under scrutiny. The paper traces the common antecedents that inspired these reforms and the different outcomes and reactions that they produced. In contrast to recent literature, which emphasizes one or another explanatory factor, this article offers a synthetic comparison of the historical, political, economic, and ideological factors in play, helping to understand how capitalists achieved a hegemonic class position in Chile and not in Argentina.

Media convergence and growing financial pressure on the journalistic field have triggered significant changes in newsmaking cultures across the world. This article examines the challenges of media convergence in the newsroom of Valor Econômico, the main economic newspaper in Brazil. In particular, it explores how the introduction in 2013 of Valor Pro, a real time news service oriented to the financial market, changed newsmaking practices at Valor Econômico. The introduction of Valor Pro meant that journalists from the whole newsroom had to report news simultaneously for three platforms: the real time service, the online website and the printed paper. This shift not only intensified journalists' workloads and altered the manufacture of news, but also increased financial pressure on the paper's agenda. I argue that this shift -from producing news for the public towards producing news for the market -cannot be explained solely with reference to traditional political economic factors such as ideological decisions at editorial level and the structural properties of the Brazilian media sphere. Instead, drawing on resources from cultural sociology and from science and technology studies, I provide a richer explanation that acknowledges the impact of technological innovation, the shifting nature of news values, and the agency of journalists themselves. This article elaborates on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork in Valor Econômico's newsroom in São Paulo between 2013 and 2015 and contributes to the literature on cultural sociology, media studies and science and technology studies.

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Based on a multi-site ethnography of two influential newspapers in Brazil, this article examines how Brazilian journalists mediate knowledge claims made by experts, policy makers and the lay public. It asks whether and how these journalists experience themselves as knowledge-makers. More specifically, it argues that Brazilian journalists index their production of knowledge in reference to four main characteristics: depth, authorship, influence, and expertise. Journalists tend to consider newsmaking a contribution to knowledge when: (1) they have the resources to do proper investigative reporting (depth); (2) they are able to help define the public agenda through their reporting and to express their opinion (authorship); (3) they have impact on the polity, the economy or other fields they cover (influence) and (4) their journalistic knowledge is recognized by readers and by specialists (expertise). In practice, however, there are multiple obstacles that make Brazilian journalists hesitant about their contribution to knowledge, including intensified working conditions, the lack of plurality within the mainstream presses, and their informal methods for dealing with knowledge claims from other fields. This research reveals that Brazilian journalists have different understandings of the nature of knowledge in journalism. These understandings cluster around two distinct poles: an expert notion of knowledge associated with disciplinary boundaries, and a distinct conception associated with journalists' capacity to mediate between jurisdictions. When journalists' production is assessed from the former point of view, the informality of their methods is seen as undermining their knowledge credentials. By contrast, when journalists' contribution is assessed from the latter point of view, their 'interactional expertise' comes to the fore.

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This article analyses the politicization of natural disasters in the media and the narratives of crisis that contribute to these dynamics. In particular, it studies media coverage of the 2017 mega-fires in Chile and the way in which this coverage was framed by pre-existing political disputes over the performance of Michelle Bachelet’s government (2014–2018). It examines the print press coverage of the mega-fires, and the framing contests used to interpret the fire crisis. It pays special attention to the controversies that erupted over the foreign planes that were sent to help fight the fires: the American Supertanker and the Russian Ilyushin. We argue that press coverage of the mega-fires transformed a natural-social phenomenon into an emotionally charged political drama in which the Supertanker airplane was signified as the hero, and the Chilean government the villain. The Supertanker played a condensation symbol role. It was cast in the media as an external hero promising to control the fires that had overwhelmed local capabilities, and to overcome a government that was portrayed as inefficient and late to respond. The media functioned as an echo chamber for the cultural battle between the government and opposition. This article contributes to a cultural sociology of disasters, paying special attention to the role played by the symbolic representation of nature and socio-technical artefacts in political disputes.