Media Wars: Mediatization, populism and media reform in Rafael Correa’s Ecuador

Engaging multimodal ethnographic work and content analysis methods, my dissertation examines how populism emerges and endures in a particular media and institutional environment, how journalism and populism’s relationship presents a conflictive and symbiotic logic, and how the experience of media policy under these circumstances demands a re-evaluation of how we think the role of the state and the law in producing the institutions and practices necessary for independent and democratic journalism to thrive. More specifically, my study focuses on the intersection of the mediatization of politics and populism in Ecuador around Rafael Correa’s presidency (2007-2017), a critical case to understand processes of media and politics transformation from a Global South perspective. Correa’s era was marked by one of the boldest media reforms in Latin America and the severe clash between mainstream media and the populist government. My analysis shows how a persistent institutional instability between the fields of politics and journalism shapes the struggle to settle a diverse, democratic, and plural public sphere. My findings highlight, first, that the Ecuadorean case clearly challenges the analytical distinction between media and political logics, since in Ecuador we observe how a populist actor (Correa and his allies) is not only able to adopt media logic’s core features, but also to use them to support a political and legislative agenda with outcomes affecting the media logic itself. These ambiguous delimitations contribute critically to feed a conflictive (although productive) relationship between media and populism. In this context, secondly, and after Correa implemented a deep media reform, journalistic professionalism increased; this is confirmed by in-depth interviews with journalists, and by the content analysis of the most read national newspapers. Once Correa left the presidency, private and public media alike aligned with the government, and levels of critical journalism, pluralism and diversity decreased. Finally, these findings critically modify how we think the role of the state in enabling the institutions and practices necessary for independent and democratic news media to progress. Usually, main narratives about the emergence of the independent press focus on the rise of a professionalized media market, circumventing the position of the state; the Ecuadorean case requires a re-evaluation of the role of the state over the birth of an autonomous journalistic field able to protect and spread democratic, inclusive, and pluralist values