Research Article Open Access

Latin American 24/7 News Battle for Honduras

Abstract

International 24/7 television news channels have proliferated in the past two decades. Sometimes hailed as a democratization of international television news-space, the perspective of media imperialism theory counsels that this 24/7 trend is more usefully seen as a continuation of a global system of unequal relations in the business and politics of information exchange and diffusion going back at least as far as the establishment of the first international news agencies in the early nineteenth century. The authors assess this perspective in the context of a three-way comparative analysis of coverage by CNN en Español (based in Atlanta), NTN24 (based in Bogota, Colombia) and TeleSur (based in Caracas, Venezuela) during the first days of the aftermath of a coup in Honduras at the end of June 2009, which forcibly removed President Manuel Zelaya from office. The results, largely confirming those of the authors’ earlier analysis of how these channels covered 2009 riots in Iran and Peru, lends support for the application of the terms hegemon, subaltern and counter-hegemon to actors in the domain of 24/7 television news.

To read the full article Download Full Article | Visit Full Article