ABSTRACT
The end of the 1990s witnessed the rise of left-wing governments in Latin America.
Hugo Cha´vez in Venezuela, Luiz Ina´cio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Ne´stor Kirchner in Argentina,
Evo Morales in Bolivia, were prominent among those who swept into power, in most cases
in landslides victories at the polls, only to encounter almost immediately a forceful
opposition, not least from the mainstream and privately owned commercial news media.
Evidence of this can be seen in the active role played by these news media outlets in the
rapid overthrow of President Hugo Chavez in April 2002 (Lugo and Romero, 2003) and the
subsequent antagonistic relations between the news media and the government in places
such as Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Nicaragua. We argue that at the centre of this
struggle is the appropriation of history by journalists and news editors to contextualise
and frame political news stories in ways which provide specific meaning to current
accounts and narratives, demonstrating that editors can effect change by means of
language (Schlesinger, 1978, p. 272). This is of paramount importance since the narratives
of continuity and discontinuity within the news media can tend to obscure reality when
historical context is used to frame politics in a selective manner, making it difficult for
citizens to make informed decisions in order to express their political preferences and
articulate their own political identities.
