Media-Politics Parallelism and Populism/Anti-populism Divides in Latin America: Evidence from Argentina

Abstract

Comparative political communication scholars repeatedly debated political parallelism as a tool to conceptualize the relation of media systems to political cleavages. Despite the fact that populism/anti-populism divides (re-)emerged as central political fault-lines, scholarship has paid little attention to the concept’s potential to look at how populist polarization restructures media-politics connections in Latin America and elsewhere. Through a combination of content analysis, in-depth interviews and other sources, this article traces shifts in news media alignments and journalistic practices during and following the recent experience of leftist-populist rule in Argentina. It argues that news media shifted to a distinct form of political parallelism organized around the populism/anti-populism divide in which most private mainstream news media assumed an active political role in the mobilization of anti-populism. The article provides a broader understanding of political parallelism that applies to settings of competitive-electoral populist politics and sheds light on not only news media alignments, but also media involvement in the political task of cleavage construction. Scholarly research on Latin America, given its focus on instrumental media-politics connections or its concerns over populist threats to media freedom, generally misses both the politicizing role of anti-populist media and the ways in which they mirror populist style.