Televisa and Univision, 50 years of media post-nationalism

Transformations in the Seriality of Television Fiction Ibero-American in Times of Streaming

Comunicacion Y Sociedad, 2015

All media is local. This is probably one of the central conclusions of this important book. The local political and corporate actors, the professional culture, and the type of state, are determinist forces in shaping the media. A select group of Latin American scholars describe national media systems and discourage one from overemphasizing global trends. Those are the "limitations of the media 'globalization'" that Silvio Waisbord describes in the first chapter. This collective work explains that Latin American countries have hybrid media systems that are captured, or held hostage to a large degree, to political and economic interests. The principal thesis of the book is that this capturing of the media affects the goals of the public policies on media, and also the watchdog role of journalism. The editors propose a common framework that is useful to understanding the media in the different Latin American countries. The book includes research portraying in detail the media systems in ten countries. A common set of issues emerge from these portrayals defining a model of how media works in the region. Public policies depend on the quality of state enforcement. And in this region, almost all countries have a wide gap between the law and state action. That gap is a democratic brick with a lot of consequences to democracy and, obviously, to the media system. The framework needs some additional analysis to try to detect when the media system improves the quality of democracy. If it is very static, the framework will put all the countries in the same place. There are similarities, but also a lot of differences. The Latin American media systems have experienced a historical voyage of confluence and divergence between American and European media models. The American-style big media commercialism has coexisted with European state intervention, especially in the area of news and political information. The states have promoted particularism rather than a universal view of journalism. State-run media and the state-sponsored private media created something akin to propaganda machines.

Historically, there has been a scarcity of studies about the kind of national and foreign supply and its reception of media messages by different audiences in the northwest of Mexico, more specifically in Tijuana city bordering with San Diego, California. However, the audiovisual flows of Mexican and transnational media messages have been studied by a number of scholars in the largest cities of Mexico (Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey). While media scholars have long debated the effects of foreign media on particular local and national communities, research has long shown that audiences tend to prefer media products produced more locally and that reflect their linguistic and cultural experiences. In this article I consider these findings and how they play out when considering border population living in a shared U.S.-Mexican audiovisual space where notions of national identity language are in seemingly in constant flow and in direct exchange. 2

International Journal of Communication, 2016

The presence of Latino TV in the United States has been increasing during the first decades of the millennium. Many alliances and new players are emerging in this market. This article contributes to the discussion of the Latino media by addressing the dynamics and complexity of this changing U.S. media subsystem; in fact, I propose a characterization of the Latino media as a subsystem of the U.S. communication system. The research (a) analyzes the main ownership links and networks between the major U.S. media players with their Latino TV counterparts; (b) draws a map of the Latino TV subsystem with a concentric analysis and establishes the production and consumption particularities of the subsystem; (c) identifies the interaction of Latino TV companies with their partners in Latin America; and (d) establishes that the core of Latino national broadcasting networks can be divided into two levels according to their audiovisual industrial strategies and financial support.

The Oxford Handbook of Latino Studies, 2018

The chapter investigates the intersections of television with Latinx communities, and the ways in which the evolving televisual context is mediating diasporic translatinidades. It focuses on five areas: (1) the role of Latinas in television set manufacturing, (2) the representation of Latinos in mainstream television, (3) the rise of Spanish-language television, (4) the importance of telenovelas in global television, and (5) the emergence of TV streaming as new venues for translatinidades. Taken together, these five topics construct an ample canvas in which we can investigate television and how it reflects social, political, economic, and cultural lived experiences. Ultimately, the goal of this chapter is to investigate how television and its relationship with Latinx communities cannot be uniformly characterized as one static practice but must in fact be recognized as a multilayered and evolving formation that is culturally embedded as well as closely interconnected to market power.

Media Pluralism & Diversity: Concepts, Risks and Global Trends, Palgrave., 2015

Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 2006

During the early 1990s, Chilean television was transformed radically by processes of deregulation, privatization, transnational investment, technological change, and ideological liberalization. Chilean media were integrated into global structures of ownership, infrastructure expanded dramatically, and Chileans gained access to a broad range of international programming. However, a substantial national televisual space persisted and thrived. National programming expanded and commanded the highest ratings among Chilean audiences despite the growing availability of imported fare. The Chilean case illustrates how national media culture is neither obliterated by globalization nor sim- ply resistant to it. Instead, national media spaces are reorganized by transnational structures and processes.

Hampton Press, 2014

Writing this book has required a constant questioning of my own discursive procedures and a risky venturing in an unknown territory. It also has been exhilarating, as I moved through it in the company of Kevin Williams, who brought to this beloved task the richest insights and observations. Neither this book nor the years of academic work that preceded it could have been accomplished without the presence of Algis Mickunas as professor, mentor, and friend. To him, to a teaching that never ceases to create, to a life that brings inspiration to those who long for the impossible, I dedicate this work. Finally, I wish to thank my sister Ana Maria, a true soul mate as lovely as she is brilliant; my mother Diana, who taught me the art of looking inward; and Hernán, the first human to suggest I may have a thing for words.

From Telenovelas to Netflix: Transnational, Transverse Television in Latin America,, 2021

This chapter explores two theoretical implications that seem promising to explain some of the television preferences of upper-middle-class and elite audiences in Latin America. We discuss how both cultural distinction (Bourdieu, 1984) and cosmopolitanism (Beck, 2004; Szerszynski & Urry, 2006; Hannerz & Ulf Hannerz, 1996) are useful for thinking about streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Disney spread through the world, in our particular interest here, through Latin America. Bourdieu’s theories of capital help us explain how economic and social advantages can provide access and sufficient cultural knowledge to con- sume and understand foreign cultural products, specifically television and film. He also discusses in his original work Distinction (1984) how those in upper-middle or upper classes also use their greater store of cultural capital to draw social distinctions between them and those in lesser classes with lower cultural capital. Recently, sociologists have been drawing on Bourdieu to examine the ways cosmopolitanism is related to stratification at a global scale (Igarashi & Saito, 2014). We find both distinctions through cultural capital and its relation to global stratification to be highly useful in understanding why upper-middle and upper classes in Latin America seem to be pursuing high status forms of television and film from the U.S. and Europe, while most Latin Americans, as noted in Chap. 3, are still relatively content with nationally produced television.