![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
This is a study of US-based print media coverage of the indigenous-led uprising in Ecuador which occurred in January 2000. As a result of having mobilized tens of thousands of Ecuadorans, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador managed to peacefully force the resignation of a President who had presided over one of the worst recessions in Ecuador's modern history. Nevertheless, most US news dailies covered the affair as if it was purely a military coup and a threat to democracy, in spite of the existence of hundreds of citizen-led, participatory governing councils (called the “People's Parliament,” by Ecuadorans). Previous scholarship on media performance in relation to US foreign policy has proven in a variety of cases to serve as a useful analytical tool and predictive device. This article evaluates the extent that the propaganda model by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, as well as the indexing model by W. Lance Bennett, are instructive in the case of the news media performance of US which covered the uprising in Ecuador.
Notes
1. W. Lance Bennett, “Gatekeeping and press-government relations: A multi-gated model of news construction,” in Lynda Lee Kaid, ed., Handbook of Political Communication Research (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004); Daniel Chomsky, “‘Wild’ or ‘Crazy’: The New York Times, and the Logic of War in Iraq,” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Chicago, 2004; Howard Friel & Richard A. Falk, The Paper of Record: How the New York Times Misreports US Foreign Policy (New York: Verso, 2004); Daniel Hallin, The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Deepa Kumar, Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization, and the UPS Strike (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); McChesney, The Problem of the Media: US Communication Politics in the 21 st Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004); Norman Solomon, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2005).
2. W. Lance Bennett, “Toward a Theory of Press-State Relations in the United States,” Journal of Communication 40 (1990): 103–25; Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 2002); Thomas L. Jacobson, Nien-Hsuan Fang, & William Raffel, “The Propaganda Model: A Test of Human Rights Reporting in the New York Times,” Journal of International Communication 8 (2002): 19–39; Andrew Kennis, “Worthy and Unworthy Victims: An Evaluation of the Predictions of the Propaganda Model, SysteMexico 4 (2003): 74–114; Jonathan Mermin, Debating War and Peace: Media Coverage of US Intervention in the Post-Vietnam Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6752.html.
3. Andrew Kennis, “The Movement in Vieques: Using the Indexing and Propaganda Models to Analyze New York Times Coverage,” paper presented at the National Communication Association conference in San Antonio, Texas, November 2006.
4. Herman and Chomsky, 2.
5. Herman and Chomsky.
6. Herman and Chomsky.
7. Herman and Chomsky, 34–5.
8. Herman and Chomsky, 37.
9. Bennett 1990, 106.
10. Mermin 1999, 5.
11. Indexing scholars who have found criticism to be limited and shaped by important domestic officials include: Mikhail A. Alexseev and W. Lance Bennett, “For Whom the Gates Open: News Reporting and Government Source Patterns in the United States, Great Britain, and Russia,” Political Communication 12 (1995): 395–412; Bennett 1990; W. Lance Bennett & Jarol Manheim, “Taking the Public by Storm: Information, Cueing, and the Democratic Process in the Gulf Conflict, Political Communication 10 (1993): 331–52; William Dorman & Steven Livingston, “News and Historical Content: The Establishing Phase of the Persian Gulf Policy Debate,” in Taken by Storm: The Media, Public Opinion, and US Foreign Policy in the Gulf War, ed. W. L. Bennett and D. L. Paletz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994): 63–81; Christiane Eilders & Albrecht Lüter, “Germany at War: Competing Framing Strategies in German Public Discourse,” European Journal of Communication 15 (2000): 415–28; Brigitte Lebens Nacos, The Press, Presidents, and Crises (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); John Zaller and Dennis Chiu, “Government's Little Helper: US Press Coverage of Foreign Policy Crises, 1945–1991,” Political Communication 13 (1996): 385–405. Similarly, indexing scholars who have found that criticism in US news media tends more toward a procedural variety than a substantive one include: Robert Entman & Benjamin Page, “The News before the Storm: Limits to Media Autonomy in Covering the Iraq War Debate,” in Taken by Storm: The Media, Public Opinion, and US Foreign Policy in the Gulf War, ed. L. Bennett & D. Paletz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994): 82–101; Daniel Hallin, We Keep America on Top of the World: Television, Journalism, and the Public Sphere (New York: Routledge, 1994); Hallin, 1986; J. K. Hertog, “Elite Press Coverage of the 1986 US–Libya Conflict: A Case Study of Tactical and Strategic Critique, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 77 (2000): 612–27; Mermin, “Conflict in the Sphere of Consensus? Critical Reporting on the Panama Invasion and the Gulf War,” Political Communication 13 (1996): 181–94.
12. Mermin 1999, 5–6. Mermin's main findings are detailed in a table from his comprehensive 1999 study (154–155); see .
13. Herman and Chomsky, 2002; and McChesney, 1999.
14. Mermin 1999, 150. Michael Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
15. W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, & Steven Livingston, When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007: 179.
16. Kennis 2006.
17. At the same time, the propaganda model's line of corporate criticism helped explain the complete oversight of a corporate related scandal to the Vieques struggle (see Kennis 2006). The scandal was only revealed through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by a non-profit watchdog group named Judicial Watch. The FOIA request was originally contested by the government, but successfully won by Judicial Watch and publicized through press releases it widely distributed. The scandal involved the Navy's illegal contracting of the Rendon Group and their involvement in the non-binding referendum of 2001. This scandal continues to be all but completely unknown to journalists and scholars alike, as it completely escaped the radar screen of news coverage. The fourth filter of the propaganda model, however, explains that revealing scandals involving public relations firms will simply not be a matter of great interest to the news media when they conflict with the interests of the White House.
18. Kumar.
19. W. Lance Bennett, Victor Pickard, David P. Iozzi, Carl L. Schroeder, Taso Lagos, & C. Evans Caswell. “Managing the Public Sphere: Journalistic Construction of the Great Globalization Debate, Journal of Communication 54 (2004): 437–55.
20. In his book, Mermin unfortunately focuses much of his criticism and solutions on journalists (as do most indexing theorists), as opposed to offering an institutional critique of the corporate and conglomerate base of the US news media itself. This is duly shown by the following passage, which appeared in Mermin's concluding chapter (1999, 149–150):
There is also the concern that corporate owners shade news stories to serve their economic and ideological interests. Corporate interests in US foreign policy are substantial. But … American journalists do have some real editorial freedom within the corporation … If journalists endeavored to put into practice the changes suggested here, and corporate ownership vetoed the changes, we would have evidence that structural reform of the American media system is required before the problem of indexing can be addressed. But until there is evidence that journalists have in fact tried to get beyond the indexing rule in their foreign-policy reporting, the concern that change might not be possible within the existing media system remains a theoretical one.
There are a number of problems with this analysis. First, it assumes that journalists have not “tried to get beyond the indexing rule.” However, there is a lot of evidence pointing to a myriad of instances in which journalists have tried and succeeded in getting beyond the indexing rule, only to see their articles buried in the back pages or their careers ended (McChesney 2004). I have personally experienced this phenomenon when I was working full-time as an investigative, freelance journalist. The second problem with Mermin's prescription is that it overlooks the fact that while there are certainly institutional incentives that would result in exceptions to the indexing rule, there are none for such exceptions to stop being exceptions altogether and become the kind of journalistic norm that Mermin desires. How this is possible, is not elaborated on by Mermin. Lastly, Mermin's prescription that intellectuals wait until journalists push the envelope as far as possible before advocating fundamental institutional change to the media puts the very livelihoods of already exploited workers and individuals on the line for the mere sake of giving the benefit of the doubt to some of the most powerful and wealthy institutions in the world.
21. Herman and Chomsky, xi.
22. In terms of even the US State Department's own accounting, a recent report describes in detail the main geo-political factors of importance between the two countries, which included: “combating narcotrafficking; building trade, investment, and financial ties; cooperating in fostering Ecuador's economic development; and participating in inter-American organizations … More than 100 US companies are doing business in Ecuador,” see US Department of State, “Ecuador 03/06,” US Department of State Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/35761.htm (accessed 16 May 2006).
23. Herman and Chomsky included an updated and revised introduction to the most recent printing of Manufacturing Consent. Therein, the co-authors tracked continued coverage of the case studies originally contained within the first edition of their book, and argued that the propaganda model's expectations still hold up in the post-Cold War era. One table showed continued dichotomous coverage of worthy and unworthy victims, as indicated by sharply differing results in the usage of the term “genocide” (see , 393).
24. Jacobson, Fang, and Raffel.
25. Kennis 2003.
26. Mark Major, “Contesting Media Models: Propaganda vs. Cascading Activation,” Paper presented at the Midwestern Political Science Association Conference in Chicago, 2006.
27. Kevin Young, “Colombia and Venezuela: Testing the Propaganda Model” NACLA Report on the Americas 41 (November/December 2008): 50–52. Full version accessible at: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20159 (accessed 15 January 2009).
28. Bennett et al. 2004; Mermin 1999.
29. Andrew Kennis, “Indexing State-Corporate Propaganda? An Evaluation of the Propaganda and Indexing Models from Coverage of Fallujah Broadcasted on CNN and CNN en Español,” in Twenty Years of Propaganda, ed. Paul Boin, (forthcoming, New York: Routledge, 2010); Andrew Kennis. “Double Standards? An Evaluation of the Propaganda and Indexing Models on Immigration Coverage,” paper presented at joint pre-conference of the American Political Science Association and the International Communication Association in Boston, August 2008; Kennis 2006, “Combining the Indexing and the Propaganda Models: An Evaluation of the Media Performance of the New York Times on Vieques.”
30. US State Department 2006.
31. Jennifer Collins, 2000b “Report from Ecuador,” Z-Net, http://www.zmag.org/Crises CurEvts/Ecuador/collins1.htm (accessed 15 May 2006).
32. “Reports from Ecuador,” 2000b. Agencia Informativa Pulsar, 20 January 2000.
33. Nicole Veash, 2000b. “Ecuador Moves to Halt Fall of Currency,” Boston Globe, 10 January 2000.
34. Collins 2000b.
35. Collins 2000b.
36. Ecuadoran police fight protesters in 3 cities, Washington Post, 7 January 2000.
37. Reuters, “Strike Adds to Strife of Ecuador Leader,” San Diego Union-Tribune, 8 January 2000.
38. Bloomberg News Report, “International Business: Ecuador's Currency Falls as the Government Examines its Options, New York Times, 5 January 2000: C3.
39. Veash 2000b.
40. Collins 2000b.
41. Collins 2000b; “Ecuadoran Leader Unpopular,” The Gazette, 10 January 2000; “Ecuadoran police fight protesters in 3 cities,” 2000; Nicole Veash 2000c, “Indians Show Clout in Ecuador,” Boston Globe, 14 January 2000: A2.
42. Carlos Hamann, “Indians Flex Political Muscles,” The Gazette, 3 February 2000.
43. Collins 2000b.
44. “Reports from Ecuador,” 2000a. Agencia Informativa Pulsar, 19 January 2000.
45. Jennifer Collins, 2000a. “Military-Indigenous Coup Aborted by Military High Command,” Z-Net, http://www.zmag.org/CrisesCurEvts/Ecuador/collins3.htm (accessed 26 February 2006); Collins, 2000c. “Urgent Update on Situation in Ecuador,” Z-Net, http://www.zmag.org/CrisesCurEvts/Ecuador/collins2.htm (accessed 3 May 2006); Tim Johnson, “Vice President Put at Ecuador Helm as Junta Backs Off,” San Diego Union-Tribune, 23 January 2000; Larry Rohter, 2000b. “Ecuador Coup Shifts Control to No. 2 Man,”New York Times, 23 January 2000; Sebatian Rotella, “Ecuador's Military Says “Junta” Is in Charge; Latin America: Defense Chief Announces New Government. President Flees to Air Force Base after Vowing to Stay in Office. Crisis Is Sparked by Uprising Earlier in Day by Indigenous People,” The Los Angeles Times, 22 January 2000.
46. Monte Hayes, “Junta in Power; Ecuador Leader Flees; Indian Protest Wins Military Backing; President in Hiding,” San Diego Union-Tribune, 22 January 2000.
47. Associated Press, “Day of Rebellion Ends with Ouster of Ecuador Leader,” New York Times, 22 January 2000: A1.
48. Stephen Buckley, “Ecuadoran President Told to Step Down; Army Backs Indian Protesters, Washington Post, 22 January 2000: A13; Larry Rohter, 2000a. “Ecuador's Coup Alerts Region to a Resurgent Military,” New York Times, 29 January 2000.
49. George A. Donohue, Phillip J. Tichenor, & Clarice N. Olien, “A Guard Dog Perspective on the Role of the Media,” Journal of Communications 45 (1995): 115–32; Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980); Douglas M. McLeod & James K. Hertog, “Social Control, Social Change, and the Mass Media's Role in the Regulation of Protest Groups,” in Mass Media, Social Control, and Social Change: A Macrosocial Perspective, ed. D. Demers & K. Viswanath (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1999): 305–30; David Schultz, “The Cultural Contradictions of the American Media,” in It's Show Time! Media, Politics, and Popular Culture, ed. D. Schultz (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2000): 29–49.
50. Buckley.
51. Here is a collection of quotes from news coverage that cited important government officials during their most outspoken moments:
22 January: “The State Department in Washington condemned the move against Mahuad and referred to the Indian protesters and their army backers as those who are ‘seeking to establish an unconstitutional regime’” (see Buckley).
23 January: “The US State Department joined Gaviria and other Latin American leaders who warned the Ecuadorean military and insurgent protesters that any attempt to topple the president would be condemned and provoke economic sanctions and other forms of retaliation” (see Steven Dudley & Stephen Buckley, “Civilian Rule is Restored in Ecuador; Vice President Takes Power after Foreign Pressure,” Washington Post, 23 January 2000.).
23 January: “The US State Department, in a statement issued by the American Embassy in Quito, said it was “watching closely” as events unfold in Ecuador” (see Johnson).
23 January: “‘While we regret the circumstances that led President Mahuad to call for public support for a Noboa presidency, his statement is a magnanimous gesture to pave the way to restore the country to constitutional order,’ the State Department said” (see Johnson).
23 January: “Peter Romero, the State Department's top official for Latin America, warned the coup leaders on Quito radio on Friday that they faced “political and economic isolation” akin to Cuba's if they persisted. Today, Mr. Romero, a former ambassador to Ecuador, described the situation as ‘chaos’” (see Rohter 2000b).
52. Rohter 2000b.
53. Freelance journalist Nicole Veash's on-the-scene articles, which gave the most attention and careful treatment on Ecuador's mostly indigenous social movement, were largely picked up by the Scotsman, a foreign source based in Edinburgh. The lone exception was one short (edited down over a ¼ from its original length, originally published in the Scotsman), non-cover-page article picked up by the Boston Globe on 14 January, entitled, “Indians Show Clout in Ecuador.”
54. For the lone exception, see Jane Bussey, 2000a. “Ecuador's Many Poor Denounce Dollarization; Government Blamed for Mismanagement,” San Diego Tribune, 23 January 2000: A14.
55. Prominent examples included John Lancaster, “US Sees Democracy Wane in Latin America,” Washington Post, 30 January 2000 and Rohter 2000a.
56. “Ecuador's endangered democracy,” New York Times, 25 January 2000.
57. Associated Press.
58. Dudley and Buckley.
59. Buckley.
60. Sebastian Rotella.
61. See editorial, “Ecuador's endangered democracy,” New York Times.
62. Weekly News Update on the Americas, Issue #542, 18 June 2000.
63. Nicole Veash, “Death Is Better Than Tyranny, Ecuador's Indians Say,” The Scotsman, 13 January 2000.
64. Carlos Hamann.
65. Weekly News Update on the Americas.
66. Kintto Lucas, “‘Power is Not Indigenous Goal,’ says leader,” Inter-Press Service, 2 February 2000.
67. “The Ecuadoran indigenous movement,” Nueva Mayoria, 28 September 2000.
68. Jane Bussey, 2000b. “Ecuador's ‘People's Parliament’ Plans Economic Counterplan,” Miami Herald, 14 January 2004.
69. Collins 2000b.
70. Kennis 2010; Kennis 2008; Kennis 2006.
71. Fortunately, media reform activism has been buttressed for the better part of the last decade, thanks to the organizing undertaken by the media reform movement and the legislative achievements accomplished largely by a nationwide grassroots organization, called Free Press <http://www.freepress.org>; for a historical treatment of some of the more significant victories garnered by Free Press, see McChesney 2004: 252–97.