Political clientelism and the media: southern Europe and Latin America in comparative perspective

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between political clientelism and the development of media systems in southern Europe and Latin America, considering the cases of Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil. Common characteristics of the media systems in these countries include low newspaper circulation, a tendency towards political instrumentalization of the media, limited development of journalism as a differentiated and autonomous profession, and regulatory agencies that are at the same time party-politicized and relatively weak. We argue that these media-system characteristics must be understood in relation to a broader history of political clientelism - though a number of forces, including commercialization of media industries and globalization, have tended in recent years to undermine clientelistic relationships.

Political communication in a high-choice media environment: a challenge for democracy?

“…This divide is, according to the literature, in large parts caused by developments in politics and changes in the media environment. 1 To some extent polarization may also be related to what is known as political parallelism, or the link between political actors and the media, that characterize many media systems in Southern and Eastern Europe and South America (Hallin & Mancini, 2004Hallin & Papathanassopoulos, 2002).…”

News, Nationalism, and the Imagined Community

“…Such struggles are endemic to much of southern Europe (Hallin and Papathanassopoulos, 2002) and Spain in particular (Gunther et al, 2000). While Spanish newspaper sales rose to 107 copies per 1000 inhabitants by the late 1990s (de Mateo, 2000), circulation has increased only slightly since (Salaverría, 2007).…”

“…Papatheodorou and Machin, 2003). Like much of the European press, Spain's newspapers tend to be partisan, tacitly if not openly so, and have a tradition of advocacy journalism (Hallin and Papathanassopoulos, 2002; see also Martín et al, 1997), in contrast to the American model of objectivity and detachment. In news and commentary, Spanish journalists often frame events through the lens of their bias, whether they favor the ruling Socialists, the conservative People's Party, or the regional separatist movements.…”

El impacto de la cobertura mediática de la corrupción en la opinión pública española

“…This paper analyses the media coverage of Spanish political scandals from 1996 to 2009. The aim is to see if the two most-read newspapers in Spain, El Mundo and El País, reported corruption scandals from different political orientations, as happened at the beginning of the 1990s, or if, on the contrary, they have evolved from a party-based ideology towards a more apolitical one, following the trend in other countries towards a breakdown of the historical links between the media and politics (Canel and Piqué, 1998;Hallin and Mancini, 2004). This paper also analyses to what extent media coverage of corruption scandals affects citizens' perception of corruption as a public problem.…”