Relaciones

Is there a specific role played by media in Latin American Politics?
To start with this essay it is important to mention that nowadays media plays a really important role regarding to politics in Latin America. Each day the media continues growing, and so does the use people gives to it. Media can influence or change people minds about any topic like: politics, whether something is good or not,what to think about a politician, who is the best candidate to vote for, and it can also make public some information that before was secret.

Even if some forms of media like books or manuscripts have been around for centuries, mass media as we know it , first started developing during the 1920’s with radio networks, newspapers and magazines. Nowadays the amount of information people can foundin media is bigger than ever. With the use of internet, the television, the radio, among others, people can receive information about an event seconds after it occurred.

From now on, in this essay, the term political marketing is going to be mention, for that reason it is important to understand its meaning.

“Harrop (1990) perceives political marketing as being not just about politicaladvertising, party political broadcasts and electoral speeches but covering the whole area of party positioning in the electoral market. Kavanagh (1995, 1996) sees political marketing as electioneering, i.e. as a set of strategies and tools to
trace and study public opinion before and during an election campaign, to develop campaign communications and to assess their impact. A similar view isexpressed by Scammell (1995)”(Referenced from: Political marketing and political communication: the relationship revisited by Ioannis Kolovos and Phil Harris).
In order to have a successful media-politic, a candidate has to be designed like a product, offering an amount of benefits, the candidate is seen like a product, while the elector is seen as a consumer, the candidate aims to manipulate the politicstrategy in order to win the elections, with media a candidate can project the image he wants, doesn’t matter if that projection is real or not, what is important is that the citizens believe in it and can feel identified with the candidate. Whit this, electors have been losing identity as political subjects. Media is the new place to make politics.

From the mid 1970’s, the most part of LatinAmerica had anti-democratic governments, the neoliberal politics applied during that time, especially in the economics were highly supported by the media.

In Latin America Political Marketing appeared broadly between 1960 and 1976, where politicians started using spots and it was during the 1980’s when the television became the principal way of political publicity, during this time negativepublicity also appeared in political campaigns. Every politician now needs an expert in the management of media, publicists and consulters in order to succeed.

The case of political marketing in Latin America first appeared in Venezuela in 1968, when the parties “AD” and “COPEI” hired for the first time the services of consulters for their candidates campaigns.

In Brasil during the electoralprocess of 1989, the candidate Fernando Collor introduced the negative publicity, claiming that if Luis inácio Lula reach the presidency he would confiscate the saving accounts.

It is not casualty that the breakthrough of the political marketing and the campaigns centered on media appeared majorly during the last two or three decades of the last century; its appearance coincides with thedevelopment of the process of democratization of Latin American countries.

In Latin America, making democracy, and political update, means producing a feeling of nation, propose an horizon of hope where every citizen of the country can feel related to, promote the feeling that even if the situation in the country has not got better it looks like it is actually getting better. In order to achieve...