Populism’s Influence on News Content: Polarization, Political Parallelism, and Journalistic Professionalism in Rafael Correa’s Ecuador

Manel Palos Pons

SAGE Open, 2024, vol. 14, issue 3, 21582440241266973

Abstract: This article investigates how populism in power influenced news media in Ecuador during leftist president Rafael Correa’s presidency (2007–2017). Correa’s administration triggered a bold media reform in Ecuador challenging traditional media and promising media democratization, but his government received sharp denunciations from press freedom and media organizations which considered Ecuador as a “not free†country, especially after the passing of a Communication Law in 2013 that regulated media extensively. Through content analysis of news and opinion pieces published in 2005, 2006, 2015, 2016, and 2018 by Ecuador’s main legacy newspapers, El Comercio and El Universo, different legal and political contexts are examined. The main observations suggest an increase in polarization and improvements in journalistic professionalism, two results consistent and divergent to mainstream academic approaches and public discussions about populism. This contradictory situation may be explained by the emergence of a new political parallelism, absent before Correa came to power, which combines consistent stances based on the rejection of Correa’s leadership, with an improvement in professional practices, especially when Correa was in power. These results, and novel approach adopting a detailed content analysis to explore the relationship between populism and journalism in a Latin American media system, may contribute to a better understanding of the influence of populism on news media. This study calls for more comparative and longitudinal analyses in different media systems and populist experiences, focused on the connection of professional practices and political positioning, with or without populist actors in power.

Keywords: populism; journalism; mass communication; communication; social sciences; political communication; media and society; polarization; Latin America; political parallelism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440241266973 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:14:y:2024:i:3:p:21582440241266973

DOI: 10.1177/21582440241266973

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in SAGE Open
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().