USA

In recent years, Latin America has experienced different integration initiatives aimed to cultivate a more unified and sovereign position in the world. However, the neodevelopmentalist and extractivist policies that characterize some of those initiatives have been rejected by social movements. In awareness of the vital importance of communication, alternative media projects are promoting grassroots integration through new agendas, narratives, and aesthetics in Latin America. This article shows the important role these projects have in the articulation of regional social struggles in order to promote coordinated actions concerning common issues and alternatives to the rationale of dominant media.

USA

This article analyzes social movements’ appropriations of social media for challenging mainstream media systems. The study includes two recent Latin American student movements: the Mexican movement #YoSoy132 and the Chilean student movement. A quantitative-qualitative methodology was used to compare their appropriations of social media, which included a statistical analysis of the Facebook profiles of both movements during a selected period of time and Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis of the contents posted and interviews with participants. The findings indicate that there are some relevant specific trends in the appropriation of social media for this specific purpose, mediated by dimensions such as the demands, goals, political communication context, online or offline nature of the mobilization, and organizational characteristics of the movement.

USA

This article examines how the expropriation of oil company YPF by the Argentine government in April 2012 was framed by Spanish digital newspapers, and whether the treatment of this issue was transferred from the media to the audience. Using the theoretical approach of framing, we analyzed the news coverage of this event to find out whether the event was reported from a strategic game frame or an issue frame. Additionally, the comments posted by the news readers were analyzed to ascertain whether there was a relationship between the frames used by the media and the latent opinion frames in the discourse of these news readers. The results show a higher presence of the issue frame in the coverage of the expropriation of YPF, whereas no significant relationship was found between the media frames and the latent frames in the readers’ opinions. Conversely, a significant relationship between these two types of frames (strategic game and issue frames) was found both inside the news content and in the readers’ comments.