Framing international crises: a comparative content analysis of media texts on the collapse of Venezuela

Abstract

This research explores mainstream and diasporic media coverage and discourses surrounding the Venezuelan economic and political crisis from late March 2017 until early May 2018. A comparative content analysis was applied to a total of 256 news articles, editorials, and stories from the Toronto Star, one of Canada’s largest newspapers, and from La Portada Canadá, a Spanish-language Latin American newspaper in Toronto. The results demonstrated diasporic media’s appropriation of journalistic biases such as human impact, dramatization, and national interests and the reframing of dominant discourses from international news agencies about the Venezuelan crisis. Whereas there are significant similarities between both media’s content regarding the crisis, La Portada Canadá stressed the transnational component of the Venezuelan diaspora through discourses about political and civic engagement in Canada. The Toronto Star focused more on the economic and political components of the crisis, which are closely linked to the country’s national agenda. Keywords: diasporic media, mainstream media, media coverage, media discourses, international crises, humanitarian crisis, Venezuela, Toronto

A comparative analysis of the Canadian news media portrayals of refugees from Syria and Venezuela

“…While, for example, there are Spanishlanguage newspapers available in the Toronto region (such as La Portada, a Latin American newspaper in the GTA made by and for Spanish-speaking immigrants and people in the area) as well as an Arabic-language newspaper (Arab Toronto Newspaper), the Toronto-based, English-language papers were chosen in order to better represent the way that Canadians portray and perceive refugees. Olinto (2018) conducted a comparison of the Toronto Star and La Portada and found that a limitation to the study was that the papers were written in different languages and that "these language differences affect the way in which both newspapers have defined and illustrated" (p. 24) the crisis. Furthermore, the newspapers of study contained articles with discourses on both the local level as well as the national level.…”