What a Special Issue on Latin America Teaches Us about Some Key Limitations in the Field of Digital Journalism

“Solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order.”

(Shapin and Shaffer 1985, 312)

This special issue showcases research on digital journalism in Latin America. As such, it serves an important mission of contextualization of knowledge in a nascent field of inquiry dominated by Global North papers, perspectives, scholars, and institutional arrangements. Yet, its very existence foregrounds the depth of the inequities between North and South that still mark the production of knowledge about digital journalism—and in journalism studies more generally. These inequities affect disproportionally the regions of the world most disadvantaged in terms of institutional resources, but by implication impoverish the field of inquiry as a whole: since all knowledge is contextual and comparative in essence, knowing less about the other implies also knowing less about the self. Thus, we take advantage of the opportunity to write this introduction to reflect on what the conditions of possibility of putting together this special issue say about dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in scholarship on digital journalism—and in communication and media studies more broadly. More concretely, we identify four problems that characterize these dynamics: lack of representativeness, lack of reflexivity, lack of decentering, and lack of cosmopolitanism. On the basis of this diagnosis about the current state of affairs, we also offer some steps towards a more scholarly robust and politically equitable domain of inquiry. We conclude this introduction by providing an overview of the papers that are featured in this special issue.

First is the problem of lack of representativeness. The countries that constitute the Global North amount in the aggregate to approximately 14% of the global population, but much more than 14% of the published scholarship, the reviewer pool, and the positions of power in the journalism studies field. In statistical terms, the Global North is pretty much an outlier. Yet, this status is never mentioned. On the contrary, the findings are typically assumed to be universal and are rarely contextualized with regards to the statistical norm. When was the last time that you read a paper on, say, the United States, Norway or Germany where the authors contextualized the findings with respect to comparable phenomena in, say, Thailand, Paraguay, and Ghana? If arguments obliterating the issue of lack of representativeness of the findings were made by an undergraduate student in a term paper for a class taught by any of the faculty readers of this journal, there would be points deducted and observations written in the margin; perhaps the reservations would be so high that the term paper would be marked with a failing grade. However, this basic, fundamental argumentative error very seldom constitutes ground for rejection of a manuscript submission. Thus, coupling the lack of representativeness with the editorial failure to keep it in check constitutes a remarkable sociopolitical achievement within a domain of inquiry built around dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that have less to do with epistemic excellence and more to do with the exercise of power that maintains the prevailing social order.

Second is the problem of lack of reflexivity. Not only there are evident majority-minority imbalances that result from these dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, but these imbalances and dynamics are further reinforced by the limited awareness about them. Yes, there are the occasional, well-intended statements noting that things should be more equitable, but they are largely decoupled from the processes that keep the machinery of knowledge production going. This is not just an ethical matter, but also—and primarily—an epistemic one. Take one of the latest topical obsessions of scholarship about digital journalism and other domains of inquiry in communication and media studies: fake news, misinformation, and disinformation. Interest in these topics spiked since 2016 and the vast majority of the scholarship shows a contemporary focus exhibiting a remarkable level of ethnocentrism and historical ignorance. The ethnocentrism is tied to the moral outrage of having domestic politics in countries of the Global North being interfered by foreign powers through various modes of information infiltration in news and social media. Yet, what this ethnocentric view conveniently ignores is a long history of similar attempts undertaken by nations in the North towards their counterparts in the South.

For instance, a particularly salient case in light of the regional focus of this special issue are the well-documented actions pursued by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency to unsuccessfully try to prevent Salvador Allende’s victory in the 1970 presidential elections in Chile. As Dorfman (2016) eloquently put it, Allende won “in spite of the United States’ spending millions of dollars on psychological warfare and misinformation to prevent its victory (we’d call it ‘fake news’ today).” This misinformation campaign—partly implemented through subsidies to the country’s leading daily, El Mercurio—continued after Allende took office until his government “was overthrown and replaced by a vicious dictatorship that lasted nearly 17 years. Years of torture and executions and disappearances and exile” (Dorfman 2016). Ignoring these historical antecedents prevents the field from asking the kind of comparative questions that would shed light on all forms of misinformation by contrasting, for example, those undertaken through print and digital media, and those sponsored by state bureaucracies versus operators not belonging to the state apparatus.

Third is the problem of lack of decentering. It is not only that most scholarship is produced in and about a small number of countries, and also treated as universal by default instead of as a statistical outlier that expresses a peculiar set of historical circumstances. There is also the issue that whatever happens in the Global North is considered to be the norm, and whatever happens everywhere else should aspire to achieve that status if it is to have a positive connotation. The world has a normative center and a deviant—or at least un-developed—periphery; a periphery that is to be redeemed by aspiring to shed its singularities and model itself in the virtuous image of the center. Take for instance the much-touted norm of impartiality, that for decades led journalism scholars, in particular those researching media in the United States, to look down on the occupational culture of practitioners in Latin America, usually more engaged with particular positions and more entangled with the larger institutional environment. Since the beginning of the presidency of Donald Trump, and even more so since the recent wave of protests against centuries-long racial violence, those very scholars have been advocating towards abandoning the pristine perch of impartiality in favor of various forms of advocacy. However, these conversations proceed as if these very practices have not been in existence for decades in Latin America and other parts of the world. This kind of navel-gazing prevents the field from asking comparative questions between past and present, and across different national contexts that could provide heuristically superior accounts of the processes and outcomes than those produced through the currently dominant center-periphery approach. Decentering journalism studies would lead to better scholarship, and by implication, to a more equitable and multi-centric intellectual field.

Fourth is the problem of lack of cosmopolitanism. This is the flip side of the previous problem: the expectation about research on the “other” 86% is that findings will be about the local, particular, and, ultimately, exotic. Those of us who publish studies on both the Global North and the Global South are familiar with typical parochialism of reviewers and editors: while the findings of the former are assumed to be universal, those of the latter are expected to reveal something that make them distinct. But in a world without a center, neither what happens in the North should be assumed to be universal nor what transpires in the South should be expected to be exotic. Similarities and differences need to be uncovered through research, rather than become an implicit a priori of the process of inquiry. For this, we long for the days in which in addition to a special issue on digital journalism in Latin America there will be comparable dossiers about Scandinavia, North America, Continental Europe, and so on, and the guest editors will encourage the manuscript authors to reflect on what is shared and unique about their findings in relation to comparable phenomena in other regions.

Taken together, these problems of lack of representativeness, reflexivity, decentering and cosmopolitanism give an enormous advantage to scholarship on the Global North and a comparatively steeper hill to climb to research on the Global South—as if the asymmetries in resources between the two did not create enough inequalities for knowledge production already. Yet, as we have argued, the issue transcends the domain of power and politics in the academic community, and it becomes eminently epistemic: the combination of these four problems amount to a significant impoverishment of the scholarship on digital journalism—and in the journalism studies field as whole. The ethnocentrism of the Global North not only reproduces and reinforces inequalities, but also results in inferior scholarship. There are no winners in this state of affairs in terms of what we know about the world and the quality of this knowledge; on the contrary, we are all losers. Thus, to help overcome the limitations that the current mindset has generated we propose the following four steps.

First, appoint scholars in the Global South as journal editors. The recent steps undertaken by publications such as Digital Journalism to make the boards more representative are positive. Second, require all authors to contextualize findings with respect to other relevant national and regional settings—not only those making submissions about the Global South. Third, in relation to the previous recommendation, encourage authors to elaborate on patterns of what is shared and what is unique about the findings, rather than assume that those from the Global North are universal while results from other settings tend to be locally contingent and therefore unique. Fourth, develop editorial practices that are sensitive to, and accepting of, different genre options as well as business models that can support multi-language editions. The English-language-social-science article—the Ford Model T of scholarly communication—is a well-suited textual option for a non-representative, non-reflexive, self-centered, and parochial regime of knowledge production, and an inequitable social order often tied to it. As the field becomes more representative, reflexive, decentered, and cosmopolitan, and aspires to contribute to a more equitable social order, it is imperative to be mindful that scholars in different parts of the world write in different languages and resort to different argumentative genres. Thus, it is time for the field to switch from universal deployment of the Model T of scholarly publishing into a more pluralistic set of communication options.

This special issue includes papers that showcases vibrancy in the study of digital journalism in Latin America. It includes an inquiry into journalists’ perceptions of media companies’ policies regarding social media use; a survey of investigative reporters in the region; an examination of the interaction between traditional broadcast journalists and online news teams in two television stations in Colombia; and research on modes of news consumption on Facebook and WhatsApp in Costa Rica and Chile and a study of the institutionalization of independent digital journalism in Brazil. The methods employed by the authors include surveys, in-depth interviews, recordings of ocular movement on the screen, and participant observation. Moreover, these papers underscore the importance of abandoning the ethnocentric perspective which tends to homogenize a supposedly exotic other by revealing differences across and within Latin American media and their audiences. The findings from these five studies exemplify how research from the 86% can both increase the representativeness of the scholarly endeavor while contribute to deeper understanding of the processes and practices of digital journalism in Latin America and beyond.

Summer Harlow (2020) examines the perceptions of 1,094 journalists from Latin America about their policies implemented by their employers regarding social media use, and the consequences of these guidelines—and lack thereof—for their reportorial work. Her research shows that most of the respondents worked in companies with no social media policies, although the proportion of news outlets without such policies varied from 33% in Cuba to 100% in Paraguay. Those companies which had policies in place were more focused on protecting their brand, their audiences and their sources than on either keeping journalists safe or providing them with innovative tools to do their work. Harlow does not propose that “a universal social media policy should be applied in newsrooms throughout the region” given that “tenets of journalism and understandings of professionalism vary by country,” but that some commonalities “could underlie social media policies across countries to make them more effective” (176–195).

The differences across countries are also evident in Cueva Chacón and Saldaña’s (2020) analysis of participation in collaborative projects among 251 investigative reporters. These scholars find that, although cooperation was high, with 59% of respondents reporting having worked on such a project with colleagues from their own country, and 45% with journalists from other countries, the percentages varied by country and region. Journalists from México were the least likely to embark on a joint investigative project, and the authors propose that this relative lack of engagement is due to the extremely high levels of violence against journalists in the region. Cueva Chacón and Saldaña finish their study by arguing for a “need to analyze Latin American countries separately instead of as a whole, advocated by previous research about journalism in the continent (…) to understand the nuances and specificities of each region” (196–214).

Diversity across journalistic cultures do not cease at the country level. García-Perdomo (2020) looks into the online operations of two major Colombian TV organizations through ethnographic work and in-depth interviews. His research shows that, although the interaction between traditional media and online and social media teams was fraught at both the national broadcasting company Caracol and the local-level Citytv, the orientation towards members of the public on social media differed widely at these two outlets. While Caracol uses social listening and surveillance to capture audiences and strengthen the brand, Citytv aims at maintaining a dialogic relationship with local communities, so that they can serve as sources for local issues. This difference between a national level network and a local television station is not unique to Colombian television stations and contributes to scholarly understanding of the relationship between television, online media and the audience, by unveiling “how multiple networked actors participate in the production and distribution of news, and how their practices become intertwined with platform and other artefacts” (136–154).

The interaction of audiences with news on digital platforms, and particularly on Facebook, is the focus of the research conducted by Vergara et al. (2020). These scholars conduct an eye-tracking study of how college students and recent graduates in Costa Rica consumed news incidentally on social media. Building on a growing corpus of academic literature on incidental news consumption, they focus on the specific procedures and operations that shape user interaction with news on Facebook, rather than on self-reported data. Their research shows that less than a tenth of the content encountered by participants was news, and that the consumption of news was not triggered by the subject matter of the posts, but rather conditioned by visual stimuli: images were the visual entry point to interact with news 79% of the times. Vergara and colleagues argue that “by shaping how news surfaces and who gets to receive it, algorithms thus play a key role in the incidental exposure to news” (215–234).

However, algorithms are not the only gatekeepers of exposure to news. Social filtering also plays a role, as Valenzuela, Bachmann, and Bargsted (2019) find in their panel survey on how users in Chile share content on WhatsApp during the 2017 presidential campaign. Although respondents reported using WhatsApp to share more personal information, sharing of public affairs information increased as the campaign progressed. Moreover, sharing personal or public affairs content on WhatsApp did not vary across age, gender, educational attainment, or income. Those who used WhatsApp to share public affairs content were more likely to be knowledgeable about politics and to participate in civic activities. Despite warnings about echo chambers of digital platforms, increased use of WhatsApp for political content was not associated with increased issue position extremity. Valenzuela and co-authors propose that “from a normative perspective, it is an important finding that WhatsApp use is not linked to mass ideological polarization” (155–175). This finding suggests that the link between use of platforms and polarization, which has been mostly studied in the Global North, might be contingent on particular national cultural features, rather than an inevitable consequence of engagement with social media. Sarah Ganter and Fernando Oliveira Paulino look into Independent Digital Journalism in Brazil. By combining analysis of documents, industry data, and interviews, they find that Independent Digital Journalism is embedded within wider networks. These networks provide organizations and reporters with the opportunity to build resilience against professional, physical, and psychological attacks, and are also involved in an ongoing process of institutionalization to enhance journalists' safety. The “positive dependence” of Independent Digital Journalism in Brazil, “a situation in which dependence on various collaborators and partners exists” (p. 12), complements European and North American conceptualizations about independent journalism.

From Chile to Mexico and from television to WhatsApp, these six papers show how high-quality scholarship conducted in Latin America may illuminate contemporary phenomena in digital journalism, and communication more generally, in other regions of the world. It is our sincere hope that this special issue on Digital Journalism in Latin America sparks a multitude of other regionally specific special issues fostering comparative understanding and positional sensibility in a world in which the Global North is no longer treated as a primus inter pares.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).