Four facets of Latin America: A study of the German press coverage from 2000 to 2014

Abstract

This paper reassesses the image of the twenty Latin American countries in the German press – the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), the alternative newspaper taz and the political magazine Der Spiegel – almost forty years after the NWICO debates. The study comprises 3831 analysed articles published during 15 years (from 2000 to 2014), a period in which the continent has experienced substantially political transformations. We identified four main categories of foreign reporting related to the region; 1) Germany’s most important trading partners (Brazil, Argentina and Mexico); 2) the states against the Washington consensus (Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador); 3) the invisible Central American countries and 4) the other Mercosur and Pacific Alliance’s nations (Colombia, Peru, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay). The main postulations of the “Foreign News Study” – negativity, focus on politics and dominance of elite – should be relativised, especially in the case of the first category.

Keywords

• foreign reporting
• global news coverage
• press coverage
• news values
• nwico
• international communication