Media anti-populism and political parallelism in Latin America

Abstract

This article examines seven Latin American cases in which anti-populist media played central roles in organizing political opposition to a populist regime, creating a political cleavage between populism and anti-populism which continued to structure both journalism and political competition following the end of populist rule. It contributes to the literature on media and populism by focusing on an actor usually neglected in this literature—the anti-populist media—and by shifting the focus from press freedom to political parallelism. Following the case studies we take up conceptual issues related to the logics of populism and anti-populism and to debates about the applicability of the concept of political parallelism and of mediatization to Latin America and other regions of the global South.