Latin American Watchdogs Essay

Clay Shirky who wrote Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable (1993) argues that society doesn’t need newspapers society needs journalism to save society. Shirky supports this argument by giving a historical background to the problems newspapers face and how the problems have developed over time and the solutions society has came up with. The blogger concludes that in order for journalism to go farther new models must be created in place of past molds. Shirky directs this blog toward the current and future generations in attempt to motivate new models and methods of journalism.

Mexico’s drugs wars as well as bloody drug cartels are echoed in a controversial folk music genre commonly known as narco corridos or simply as drug ballads. They tell the stories allied to shootouts, drug lords, betrayals including daring criminal operations. Narco corridos are not a new style in Mexican music, in fact, they have been around for years, and they are popular among the old and the young. This genre has evolved to be modern fugitive music that fuses the emotional responses of antique ballads with the tense gravel of mobster rap. From global idols to rural artists documenting their neighborhood current events in the regions subjugated by guerilla war, narco corridos provides the songwriters in their homes with unique but

Propaganda is about power and persuasion, and is used for many reasons by the government. This essay will explore the overt means by which the government uses systematic propagation to control the citizens of the society and the subtle ways in which information, independent thought, and their freedoms are restricted through radio and television.

This will be as much a tale about the Venezuelan people as it is about a returning immigrant who knows his homeland largely from memories and media. Though my experiences have shaped my outlook, my intention is to enter the country as a neutral and impartial writer, cognizant of daily life, yet oblivious to the fiery political discourse which consumes too many discussions.

Coined “mudrakers” by President Theodore Roosevelt, journalists wrote investigative articles exposing social, economic and political scandals. The writers detailed the many horrors of poverty, urban slums, dangerous factory conditions, and even child labor. No one was safe from the “mudrakers”, their articles took aim at the food and insurance industries, prostitution and political bribery and corruption. All which satisfied the American public’s appetite for scandal. Not unlike the sensationalism used by media today to help influence public

Outside of the political spectrum, there is another group of organizations that have perhaps and even stronger grasp on the media than media regulators themselves. The incredibly complex and well organized drug cartels that base themselves mostly in northern Mexico and along the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico are in many ways the most influential organizations in the nation’s media. As mentioned earlier, Mexican citizens were granted freedom of the press in the 1857 Federal Constitution giving them expressional rights that closely resembled the United States’ on paper. However, as the cartels ran rampant throughout the country some indirect restrictions were put on these rights. The cartels employ ruthless violence and torture in order to punish those who oppose them, including journalists and reporters who attempt to portray them in a negative light. Over the past decade “there have been ‘172 attacks on press freedom, including nine journalists and two media workers killed’” (Hernandez-Garcia 2012). As a result, anyone reporting on the drug wars is essentially risking his or her own life; a risk the majority of reporters are not willing to take. The fear of being found and captured by the cartel is enough to cause a chilling effect among reporters and even stop some news outlets from reporting on the cartel’s actions at all. That’s not to say that news of the cartels’ actions doesn’t get released to the public. Lepe summarized the media portrayals of the cartel as such:

“Words of Fire,” by Anthony Collings, details the lives of different journalists in regards to free press and covering potentially dangerous stories. Anthony Collings is a former CNN reporter who shifted his focus from reporting to telling the story of journalists who have come under fire in a power struggle between government and free press. Collings puts free press into a spectrum, on one side there is the United States, where the press is largely free, and on the other side there are places like North Korea or China where press is largely restricted by the government. Collings does not focus on these extremes, but rather the places in the middle where there is an ongoing struggle between state power.

When the Europeans first arrived in Latin America, they didn’t realize the immensity of their actions. As history has proven, the Europeans have imposed many things on the Latin American territory have had a long, devastating effect on the indigenous people. In the centuries after 1492, Europeans would control much of South America and impose a foreign culture upon the already established civilizations that existed before their arrival. These imposed ideas left the continent weak and resulted in the loss of culture, the dependence on European countries, and a long standing ethnic tension between natives and settlers which is evident even to this day. The indigenous people of South America, which

In the propaganda model media’s function is to inform the public with values and beliefs that will integrate them but if the power is in the hands of state, which means if the state controls the media. It is clear that the media serves the state and their dominant elite. The propaganda and Duncan’s analysis both agree that the journalists that covered the Marikana massacre had critiques and inequality in their reporting. Both Chomsky and Duncan focused on this inequality of power and civil servants. Clearly money and power are able to filter out news that is fit to go to print. This means that government and dominant private interests are able to get their messages across to the

Until the 1980s, the control of the media was in the hands of the national government. From then, the control shifted to private outlets and by the 1990’s, there were more than fifty multinational companies who controlled it (“Mass Media”). Today, only about six major companies control the larger fraction of media in America (Williams, Par. 1). Norman Solomon wrote in the New Political Science Journal that most reporters and editors work for just a few huge companies. These journalists and editors are on the payroll for “mega-media institutions”, of which, only about six exist (Solomon 297). How much will the public learn if these companies generally control the output of information?

History of the region from the pre-Columbian period and including colonization by the Spanish and Portuguese beginning in the 15th century, the 19th-century wars of independence, and developments to the end of World War II.Latin America is generally understood to consist of the entire continent of South America in addition to Mexico, Central America, and the islands of the Caribbean whose inhabitants speak a Romance language. The peoples of this large area shared the experience of conquest and colonization by the Spaniards and Portuguese from the late 15th through the 18th centuries as well as movements of independence from Spain and Portugal in the early 19th century. Even since independence, many of the various

I was a stranger in a foreign country and I was surrounded by numerous people known to have killed in the past. This is how I spent many afternoons during the summer of 2014. That year, I traveled to a city called Cartagena in the South American country of Colombia. At this time, I had big plans of studying law and getting involved in politics. I was involved in a joint program between my undergraduate university and the University of Cartagena, which is where I was introduced to Professor Germán Ruiz. Professor Ruiz worked in the university’s global and public policy office and I was offered an internship with him. I assumed I would be learning about Colombia’s political system and policies but I was surprisingly mistaken. The first day of my internship was the day Professor Ruiz told me about Bonché.

I decided to write this research paper because we were assigned to find an issue or subject within Latin America to write about. One of the most widely known and influential revolutionary figure in the history of Latin America is Ché Guevara. Ché knew how to use his intelligence and judgment in all the circumstances he encountered taking advantage of each moment as if it was a highly intensive chess game he was sincerely

In a contemporary society, the role of journalism is a varied one that covers many different aspects of people’s lives. As more and more outlets spring up around the world, many more stories are able to be covered by different outlets, and this means that journalism takes on a more and more important role in a contemporary society. Much of our lives centre on political and social happenings, and journalistic outlets are the public’s way of finding all the information on these event. Journalism also provides us with a way of finding out which of these stories are important and deserve our attention, and which stories can be ignored. The important role of journalism can be well observed in the recent coverage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) in both New Zealand and around the world. This is a ground breaking economic deal, and holds a great deal of importance for the 800 million citizens of the countries involved, as well as the rest of the world. With worldwide coverage of this deal, it is inevitable that different types of reporting occurs, and that different outlets will provide different accounts. With so many different journalism outlets around the world and locally, many have to have a way of standing out from the crowd. This means that some extremely different coverage of very similar stories can occur. However it can also simply be down to different ownership, differing political views, and different socio-economic environments. Two outlets with

This work is not only a result of Martín Barbero’s erudition and his interdisciplinary approach, but it is also a product of his journey across Latin America and his meetings in several think tanks and universities in the continent in the mid-1980s. Martín Barbero was eager to know what communication scholars were doing in the field, “he interviewed them, asking what we were doing and how, and what were our models”, remembers