The Populist/Anti-Populist Cleavage in Latin American Media Systems: The Model of Argentina and Ecuador

KITZBERGER, PHILIP; HALLIN, DANIEL; PALOS-PONS, MANEL

Buenos Aires

Congreso; 27th World Congress of the International Political Science Association; 2023

IPSA

Latin America, a region usually associated with populism, has seen in the 2000s a number of populist governments rise and fall amidst clashes with other institutions, including, notably, news media organizations. These conflicts led to a tendency in regional scholarship to frame populism, normally expressed in its left-wing version, as a threat to the free press. The cases of Cristina Kirchner’s presidency in Argentina and Rafael Correa’s tenure in Ecuador fueled a narrative in which the populists endangered press freedom and other institutions of liberal democracy, especially when populists in power supported deep status quo challenging media reforms. In this paper we develop an alternative interpretation of the relation of media with left-wing populisms, centering around politicization and the establishment of new patterns of political cleavage. During and after the Kirchner’s and Correa’s eras, a new sort of political parallelism or ‘media-driven partisanship’ emerged in these countries: a populist-antipopulist cleavage was established in the media system, shaping private press’s professional values and practices. More specifically, most of the established news media adopted an ‘antipopulist’ rhetoric, which interestingly mirrored the mediatized populist logic introduced by Correa and Kirchner in the media system, to attack leftwing populists during and after their presidencies.We focus in detail on the Argentine and Ecuadorian cases, which despite differences present many similarities in the way media-politics relations developed with the rise of populism. We then go on to consider the ways in which other Latin American cases fit or diverge from the Argentine-Ecuadorian model, considering Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, and Mexico. This pattern emerges amidst the decline of the liberal function of the press as a neutral watchdog consolidated during the 1990s. We argue for recentering of the discussion of populism and the media to deemphasize the deemphasizing focus on populism as a challenge to liberal institutions, and focusing instead on how populism promotes repoliticization, and further argue for the importance of understanding anti-populism as a political movement. Finally, we explore the implications for the conceptualization of media systems in Latin America .