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Latin America: Sport and Telenovelas Essay

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Introduction
The chapter I will be critiquing is titled “Latin America: media conglomerates” written by José-Carlos Lozano, from Artz, L & Kamalipour, Y, The media globe: trends in international mass media. In this chapter Lozano (2007) is trying to discover how the Latin American audiovisual space has changed over time to what it has become in present day. This is told by finding about dominance of US media on Latin American mass media systems and how it has changed from the 1970s to present day. The main argument suggests that in the 1970s and 1980s, the Latin American mass media system was very much dependant on the US as a whole adopting their media system entirely. As time moved on this lessened right until present day where Latin …show more content…

• Although Telenovelas are a major part of Latin American television, US fiction movies are widespread across the whole region. This contradicts the cultural proximity hypothesis due to the low cost of importation into Latin America for a difference of culture and language.

• With Latin American audiences being so close together, do they prefer each other’s content or content from outside the region? With an exception, Mexico, it was found that local programming was much preferred than regional. The exception being: male upper-class youngsters preferring US content.

• Could the concept of asymmetrical interdependence, “relationships in which countries find themselves unequal but possessing variable degrees of power and initiative in politics, economics and culture” (Straubhaar, 1991), be revisited when looking at Latin American TV systems? High production values seen in US fictional content (movies, series, sitcoms, and cartoons) is what makes this content so popular in Latin America as well as around the world due to the level of difficulty replicating on such a low budget.

Lozano (2007) uses lots of research from other theorists, including himself, in the field to compile many facts of where the Latin American media system is heading in present day. There are many assumptions throughout the chapter as seen from the very beginning that Lozano doesn’t believe theorists from the 1970s and 1980s due to the newly found term “cultural proximity”. This

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