ABSTRACT

Comparative political communication scholars repeatedly debated political parallelism as a tool to conceptualize the relation of media systems to political cleavages. Despite the fact that populism/anti-populism divides (re-)emerged as central political fault-lines, scholarship has paid little attention to the concept’s potential to look at how populist polarization restructures media-politics connections in Latin America and elsewhere. Through a combination of content analysis, in-depth interviews and other sources, this article traces shifts in news media alignments and journalistic practices during and following the recent experience of leftist-populist rule in Argentina. It argues that news media shifted to a distinct form of political parallelism organized around the populism/anti-populism divide in which most private mainstream news media assumed an active political role in the mobilization of anti-populism. The article provides a broader understanding of political parallelism that applies to settings of competitive-electoral populist politics and sheds light on not only news media alignments, but also media involvement in the political task of cleavage construction. Scholarly research on Latin America, given its focus on instrumental media-politics connections or its concerns over populist threats to media freedom, generally misses both the politicizing role of anti-populist media and the ways in which they mirror populist style.

摘要

比较政治传播学者反复争论政治平行论作为概念化媒体系统与政治分裂之间关系的工具。尽管民粹主义/反民粹主义的分歧（重新）成为中央政治断层线，但学术界很少关注这一概念的潜力，即研究民粹主义两极分化如何重构拉丁美洲和其他地方的媒体与政治联系。通过结合内容分析、深度访谈和其他来源，本文追溯了阿根廷最近的左翼民粹主义统治期间和之后新闻媒体结盟和新闻实践的变化。它认为，新闻媒体转向了围绕民粹主义/反民粹主义鸿沟组织的一种独特的政治平行主义形式，其中大多数私营主流新闻媒体在反民粹主义动员中发挥了积极的政治作用。这篇文章提供了对适用于竞争性选举民粹主义政治环境的政治平行性的更广泛理解，不仅阐明了新闻媒体的结盟，还阐明了媒体参与分裂建构的政治任务。鉴于拉丁美洲的学术研究侧重于工具性的媒体政治联系或对民粹主义对媒体自由的威胁的担忧，因此通常忽视了反民粹主义媒体的政治化作用以及它们反映民粹主义风格的方式。