All the News That's Fit to Print? A Comparison of News Narratives of the 2009 Horduran Coup

Date of Award

2011

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Hernandez, Sarah

Keywords

News, Narratives, Latin America

Area of Concentration

Sociology

Abstract

This thesis seeks to analyze the differences in the narratives about the coup d'etat of President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras in 2009 from three news sources: Mexico's La Jornada, TeleSUR, a transnational Latin American news network, and The New York Times. La Jornada and TeleSUR both represent outlets with left-leaning, counter-hegemonic tendencies, but whereas TeleSUR represents the vision of ALBA, an organization of countries seeking alternate paths of development for the region, La Jornada is a wholly independent news source. By comparing these two sources with The New York Times, an emblem of mainstream Western news, this thesis seeks to observe how outlets from such diverse backgrounds go about reconstructing one of the most controversial recent political crises to hit Latin America. News articles from all three sources were randomly selected from before and after the coup occurred, and their various narrative features were compared through content analysis. The results showed that though TeleSUR and The New York Times both have more international audiences than La Jornada, which has a limited national audience, the latter source provided a broader range of perspectives on the coup. Overall, the differences amongst these sources give the picture of global media as potentially becoming increasingly multi-polar, given the increasing amounts of venues for different voices representing different interpretations of the news.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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