Losing focus: goal displacement at an alternative newspaper in El Salvador

Abstract

This study examines whether a Salvadoran alternative newspaper maintained its critical, independent, and alternative position after the country’s first leftist president was elected and the newspaper no longer was in opposition to the government. Via a content analysis and in-depth interviews that drove the content analysis, this study improves our understanding of ‘alternativeness’ in a non-US context. Using a theoretical lens founded on alternative media scholarship and sociology’s displacement theory to examine the newspaper’s radical purpose, the study found that once the left came into power after decades of rightist and authoritarian rule, the newspaper’s alternative mission and goals were displaced, becoming less radical and more propagandistic. Pro-government coverage increased and coverage of social movements, civil society, and other traditionally ‘alternative’ topics decreased. Journalists at the newspaper acknowledged the shift in goals and lessening of radical purpose, but clung to the newspaper’s ‘alternativeness’.

Keywords

alternative media content analysis El Salvador interviews Latin America social movements

The small Central American nation of El Salvador boasts a rich history of alternative media, such as the revolutionary radio station Radio Venceremos (We Will Overcome Radio) that broadcasted during the country’s civil war, from 1980 to 1992. In El Salvador, like in much of Latin America, alternative media serve as what Simpson Grinberg (1986) called a form of ‘social resistance’ (p. 169), constituting ‘an alternative to the dominant discourse of power at all levels’, and in Latin America, that power traditionally has been a conservative, rightist, elitist power. El Salvador, for example, throughout history has been ruled by a series of authoritarian and military governments, and even after the onset of democracy in the 1980s, the rightist party Nationalist Republican Alliance (Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA)) controlled the presidency uninterrupted for 20 years, from 1989 to 2009. What happens, though, to the role of alternative media – its ‘alternativeness’ – once a country undergoes a seismic shift in political power, and the left takes control of the national government? This article attempts to answer that question, examining the radical purpose of alternative media by studying whether a long-time alternative newspaper in El Salvador managed to maintain its alternative, independent, critical stance after the left – for the first time in that country’s history¹ – took power in 2009 with the election of Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN)) presidential candidate Mauricio Funes. Within a theoretical framework of alternative media and sociology’s goal displacement theory, this study explores whether the Salvadoran alternative newspaper Diario CoLatino’s alternative mission and goals became less radical and more propagandistic once the newspaper no longer found itself in opposition to the ruling government.

This study exploring the radical purpose of alternative media is important as it contributes to what little research empirically examines how ‘alternative’ alternative media truly are. One notable exception is Benson’s (2003) work on alternative weeklies in California, in which he used factors such as political versus cultural emphasis, citizen mobilization, capitalist critique, independent ownership, professional identity, type of advertising, and audience composition and motivation to measure alternativeness. Thus, considering that ‘the study of alternative media is still developing’ (Atton and Wickenden, 2005: 348), and that scholars have yet to agree on a fixed definition of ‘alternative’ (Downing, 2001; Rodriguez, 2001), this study contributes to our growing understanding of what alternative media are by using a multi-methodological approach of a content analysis and in-depth interviews to analyze the ‘alternativeness’ of Diario CoLatino, a more-than-100-year-old alternative newspaper in El Salvador confronted with ideological pressures stemming from a change in political power that gave the left control of the presidency for the first time in history. What is more, by focusing on an under-studied region in communication research (Porto and Hallin, 2009), this article adds to our understanding of alternativeness in a non-US context.

While some studies have examined how alternative the sourcing is in the alternative press (Atton and Wickenden, 2005; Groshek and Han, 2011) and/or what happens to an alternative media outlet’s alternativeness when faced with economic pressures (Gibbs, 2003), little research empirically examines whether alternative media maintain their alternativeness when there is a change of political power in the government and the alternative media ‘get’ what they have been fighting for. Founded on theoretical perspectives stemming from alternative media and social movement scholarship, this study helps begin to fill that gap by showing whether Diario CoLatino, a 120-year-old ideologically leftist, alternative newspaper in El Salvador, managed to maintain its alternative, critical stance once a leftist party took power, or whether the newspaper lost focus and underwent a goal displacement, becoming a mouthpiece for the government and operating no differently than the mainstream press when the right held power. Ultimately, this article sharpens a somewhat ambiguous definition of ‘alternative’ from an international perspective by exploring the radical purpose of alternative media through an examination of CoLatino’s sourcing practices (who is quoted?), coverage of activist versus government issues, the extent of the newspaper’s oppositional stance pre and post the election of a leftist president, and an inquiry into CoLatino journalists’ conceptions of what it means to be ‘alternative’ when they are no longer in opposition to the ruling party.

Background

El Salvador, about the size of Massachusetts, is the smallest yet most densely populated country in Central America, with roughly 6 million people. An estimated 35% of the population lives in poverty, and nearly 16% of those aged 15 and older are illiterate (World Bank, n.d.). According to the United Nations Development Program’s most recent Human Development Index (HDI) report for El Salvador, life expectancy, average years of schooling, and gross national income (GNI) per capita all increased steadily between 1980 and 2012. Despite increases in overall human development, inequalities persist: the richest 10% captured 37% of the income (the top 20% took 53% of the income) while the share of income of the bottom 10% was a mere 1% and that of the poorest 20% just 3.7% (World Bank, n.d.).

Freedom House (2014) considers El Salvador to be a ‘free’ country, giving it a 2 for political rights and a 3 for civil rights, where 1 is most free and 7 least free. Central American neighbors Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua all are classified as ‘partly free’. Although an electoral democracy with a ‘free’ ranking, most Salvadorans in a nationwide survey (62.9%) said they were dissatisfied with democracy, and on a scale of 1–10, 1 being not democratic and 10 totally democratic, they gave El Salvador’s democracy an average rating of 6.3 (Latinobarómetro, 2011). The top three qualities surveyed respondents said hurt El Salvador’s democracy were corruption (29%), lack of citizen participation (28%), and lack of social justice (27%).

Concern over lack of social justice in part stems from El Salvador’s ongoing suffering from the legacy of a brutal civil war, which lasted from 1980 to 1992. Fueled by economic and political tensions that brewed for years, the war between El Salvador’s military-led, US-backed government and a coalition of leftist guerrilla groups known as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) left an estimated 75,000 people dead. Thousands more were disappeared or forced to flee as refugees (Almeida, 2008). During the war, the Salvadoran government – which for years repressed leftist political groups, presumed Communists, and anyone advocating for social reforms or economic equality – carried out a ‘strategy of mass murder’ (Stanley, 1996: 225) with military death squads targeting not just guerrillas, but any civilians – sometimes entire villages – thought to support the guerrillas. ‘The objective of death squad terror seemed not only the elimination of opponents or suspected opponents but also, through torture and the gruesome disfiguration of bodies, the terrorization of the population’ (Arnson, 2002: 86).

After the signing of peace accords in 1992, the FMLN demobilized and converted into a political party that in 2009 gained the presidency with the election of former journalist Mauricio Funes, the country’s first leftist president. In a heated and contested run-off election in March 2014, former FMLN guerrilla Salvador Sánchez Cerén beat right-wing candidate and former San Salvador mayor Norman Quijano by roughly 6500 votes to win the presidency. While some Salvadorans, such as many of those at Diario CoLatino, view Sánchez Cerén’s win as a step toward achieving the equality that the FMLN fought for during the war, the conservative mainstream media portray the continued leftist rule as damaging for political stability and the economy, and warn that El Salvador could become another Venezuela, erupting into violent protests (Center for Latin American and Latino Studies (CLALS), 2014).

El Salvador’s media

Within this context of social inequality, violence, and unrest, the Salvadoran press evolved into a conservative, elitist media system common to most of Latin America. The Reporters without Borders (2014) World Press Freedom Index ranks El Salvador as 38th of 180 countries, deeming its press freedom situation as ‘satisfactory’. In contrast, neighbors Guatemala and Honduras are in ‘difficult situations’ and Nicaragua has ‘noticeable problems’. The press situation in nearby Costa Rica is characterized as ‘good’. Freedom House, which also rates countries’ press freedom levels, listed El Salvador as ‘partly free’ in 2014, in part because of media concentration and a lack of official recognition of community radio. Of the Central American nations, Costa Rica was the only country Freedom House rated as having a ‘free’ press; Honduras was ‘not free’, and the rest were ‘partly free’.

Historically, the region’s media show a mix of state- or market-centered systems, although most Latin American media from the beginning were private enterprises catering to the elites (even authoritarian and military regimes), with a purpose less journalistic than commercial- and market-oriented (Cañizález and Lugo-Ocando, 2008; Rockwell and Janus, 2003; Waisbord, 2000). Any attempts at media regulation tended to reflect elites’ desire to maintain political control (Fox and Waisbord, 2002; Lugo-Ocando, 2008). Government interference became widespread, whether through outright censorship, the imposition of licenses and fees, or, more recently, the allocation – or denial – of state advertising, and restricting access to government sources. Today, while official government censorship in the region is rare, ‘Latin American media are hardly free from threats and pressures from political actors of all stripes, including government officials. Indeed, the last decade has witnessed a serious erosion of press freedom throughout the region’ (Hughes and Lawson, 2005: 10).

After beginning the transition to democracy in the 1980s, most Latin American countries in the 1990s were characterized, in terms of media, by the rise of multimedia mega-corporations (media concentration with both international and local ownership), the decline of family-owned media (although more so in broadcast than print media outlets), increased local television production, and increased regional trade, all of which were made possible by neoliberal reforms, growth of the free market, and a decrease in the role of the state (Fox and Waisbord, 2002; Vialey et al., 2008). Still, liberalization and privatization have not yet democratized the media, as politicians and media owners maintain the ‘quid pro quo dynamics of personal favors and clientelism’ (Fox and Waisbord, 2002: 10), protecting corporate and (mostly conservative) political interests rather than the interests of society (Aldana-Amabile, 2008; Torrico Villanueva, 2008). Rockwell and Janus (2002) argued that the media in Central America further the interests of the elite, helping maintain elite control rather than opening up a space for alternative voices. Neo-conservative media oligopolies of Central America commodified the public sphere and ensured that ‘homogeneity rules over diversity in content and cultural forms’ (Sandoval-García, 2008: 100). In other words, the consolidated, conservative media outlets share the same interests and thus cover the same types of stories, resulting in a lack of media pluralism, both in terms of ownership and content. As Hughes and Lawson (2005) noted, such symbiotic relations created a media system in which

Private media companies rarely rock the boat politically. Internally, these family-run enterprises rarely allow a separation between ownership and editorial control … It remains common practice for media owners to sack journalists who offend them, their political supporters, key advertisers, or friendly business interests. (p. 14)

Such media concentration and elite control is evidenced in El Salvador where one family owns the three most-viewed television stations, as well as powerful advertising agencies; and of the country’s five newspapers, four belong to just two families (Valencia, 2005). As one El Salvadoran journalist put it, ‘Our media have been aligned with official power, with political cronies, with economic interests, and with ideologies, in an almost feudal style of journalism’ (Rockwell and Janus, 2003: 8).

El Salvador’s fifth newspaper, Diario CoLatino, is an alternative newspaper controlled by a cooperative run by 20 of the newspaper’s employees. CoLatino’s website touts that its vision is to provide ‘alternative, independent journalism’, with the stated goal to criticize those in power and open a space for community organizations, insurgent forces, and protesters (Diario CoLatino, 2011). A content analysis of mainstream newspapers in El Salvador referred to CoLatino as ‘the only news daily that is markedly autonomous from government and elite control’ (Kowalchuk, 2009). In a March 2009 column, CoLatino published shortly before the leftist FMLN party took power, the author noted how CoLatino, an alternative newspaper, had valiantly opened its pages to those voices otherwise censored during the civil war, and how after a century in print, CoLatino continues to provide what no other printed media offer: a critical space (Alvarenga, 2009). Similarly, a 2012 CoLatino news article succinctly stated the newspaper’s goals and purpose: to counter the hegemonic commercial media through an alternative form of journalism that is committed to marginalized peoples and to the formation of critical citizens, and to offer a space for the ‘people’ to express themselves, and to ‘contribute to the deepening of democracy and the construction of a just, inclusive, equitable and sustainable development model’ (Vilches, 2012). In sum, the newspaper defines itself as alternative, critical, and independent, even going so far as to state that one of its objectives is to prove to readers that it is not tied to any political party.

Defining ‘alternative’

Alternative media like CoLatino are seen as a way to counterbalance the hegemonic power of media conglomerates (Agosta, 2007; Reyes Matta, 1986; Rodriguez, 2001). Since appearing on the academic research radar in the 1980s, scholarship on alternative media has proclaimed it to be pluralistic and democratic, fulfilling a void left by mainstream media that further hegemony and cater to elite interests, excluding ordinary citizen voices (Atton, 2002; Downing, 2001; Rodriguez, 2001). Abundant research documents how mainstream media ‘privilege dominant, mainstream positions’ (Gurevitch and Blumler, 1990: 33).

In contrast, alternative media ‘question the regime of objectivity’ (Atton, 2009: 272) that rules mainstream media in order to offer multiple versions of reality. Alternative media are associated with notions of inclusive public spheres (Fraser, 1990) that promote citizen debate, citizen participation, and, ultimately, democracy, offering a space for those marginalized voices systematically ignored by the mainstream media (Downing, 2001; Rodriguez, 2001). Alternative media’s participatory nature coupled with alternative narratives and alternative facts and perspectives are believed to help empower citizens and communities (Rodriguez, 2001). Independence, oppositional stances, and a strong allegiance to freedom of expression also are fundamental tenets of alternative media (Benson, 2003).

While a precise, agreed-upon definition of what is ‘alternative’ seems to remain beyond researchers’ grasp, attempts at defining alternative media have moved beyond the simplistic ‘not the mainstream’ (Comedia, 1984: 95) to consider content, modes of production, distribution, and ideology (Atton, 2002; Couldry and Curran, 2003; Downing, 2001). In general, alternative media are seen to advocate for leftist, politically progressive ideals, although some scholars acknowledge that alternative media can refer to rightist or extremist publications as well (Atton, 2002). Traditionally, alternative media are associated with social movements, dissidents, counterculture, anarchists, ethnic media, community media, and the underground press (Armstrong, 1981; Downing, 2001; Kessler, 1984; Rodriguez, 2001). Historically excluded from the mainstream press, these groups turned to alternative media, or created their own media, in order to control their message (Kessler, 1984).

Downing (2001) explicated the interdependent relationship between alternative media and social movements, pointing out that the growth – or demise – of the two seem to go hand in hand. Noting that ‘alternative’ is an ambiguous term since ‘everything, at some point, is alternative to something else’ (Downing, 2001: ix), Downing added the modifier ‘radical’ to the concept of alternative media to indicate that for him, alternative media are politicized, counter-hegemonic, oppositional, and aimed at widespread and long-term political and social change. Similarly, Sandoval and Fuchs (2010) view alternative media as critical media. Criticizing much of the scholarship for positing an automatic link between emancipation and participatory media processes, they argued that defining alternative media as ‘participatory’ is problematic because participation can still be used to repress or to accumulate profit, and the notion of ‘participatory’ excludes ‘many oppositional media that provide critical content, but make use of professional organization structures’ (Sandoval and Fuchs, 2010). As such, they pushed for an ‘ideal-typical alternative media’ (p. 145), in which the form is noncommercial, the content is critical, and producers become consumers and vice versa.

For the purposes of this article, ‘alternative media’ will integrate the preceding definitions to conceptualize alternative media as a democratic, independent space for radical, critical content produced in an anti-capitalist process and aimed at progressive political and social change. Under this definition, and according to the newspaper itself, CoLatino certainly would be deemed ‘alternative’ prior to Funes’ election. The question is whether that nomenclature and radical purpose still applies once a leftist president took office.

Measuring ‘alternativeness’

While ‘alternative’ lacks a fixed definition, scholars have pointed to a number of measures of alternativeness, although most of the research is based on a US context. For example, Benson’s (2003) study of alternative California weeklies found that independent ownership, publisher commitment to criticality, and audience involvement are crucial to remaining critical and alternative. Other studies suggest that alternative media emphasize activist issues and more favorably cover protests and social movements than the mainstream media (Downing, 2001; McLeod and Hertog, 1999). Alternative media also tend to quote more ordinary community members who can ‘offer a perspective from below’ (Harcup, 2003: 371) than do mainstream media, which quote more official and governmental sources. Social movement participants and protesters also are more likely to be quoted in alternative media than mainstream media (Atton and Wickenden, 2005).

Of course, as recent studies have demonstrated, some alternative media tend to privilege and over-access certain social movement or protest organizations, offering a one-sided picture no different than the mainstream media that over-rely on official sources (Groshek and Han, 2011). Atton and Wickenden’s (2005) case study of an alternative newspaper in the United Kingdom found that the newspaper created a ‘counter-elite’ (p. 358) hierarchy of sources that relied on activist organizations and protest leaders, rather than ordinary community members, so that the alternative newspaper was just as reliant on ‘shared interests, ideologies, and notions of expert knowledge’ as the mainstream media. As such, the newspaper’s political ideology, rather than a commitment to the practice of radical media, influenced who was quoted. Similarly, Krovel’s (2011) examination of alternative media in Central America during the wars of the 1980s and 1990s found much of the alternative journalism of the time was no more critical than mainstream media, despite including so-called alternative sources and narratives.

Considering the preceding research on alternative media and sourcing practices, then, this study first hypothesizes that

H1. Diario CoLatino’s sourcing practices will change once the left comes into power, so that significantly more official government sources and significantly fewer ordinary, nonofficial sources will be quoted in 2012 than in 2006.

Alternative media also are so deemed for their connection with ‘politics of resistance’ (Atkinson, 2010) and their opposition, such as to mainstream media, governments, or capitalism. The aim of this study is to empirically analyze alternative media’s radical purpose: what happens when an alternative media outlet no longer finds itself in an opposing role? Some previous scholarship has considered related questions. For example, Gibbs’ (2003) political economic analysis of an alternative newspaper in Hawaii found that economic pressures from shareholders had undermined the newspaper’s critical stance, converting what once was an alternative newspaper into a profit-oriented business so that the ‘alternative label at best only thinly disguises its deep roots in capitalist modes of production’ (p. 603). In a study of alternative radio in Taiwan, Ke (2000) noted the way in which community radio stations became more commercial and less political after the government implemented a deregulation policy and changed the broadcasting law to legalize underground stations – two main goals of community radio. As Ke noted, with the stations no longer having to fight government control, they lost their purpose and focus. Similarly, the alternative or left-wing press in South Africa, born out of the fight against apartheid, drastically declined and lost international funding once apartheid was outlawed and the alternative press’ reason for being disappeared (Louw and Tomaselli, 1991).

In light of the preceding, then, this study also makes the following two hypotheses:

H2. Diario CoLatino’s focus on activist issues will significantly decrease and focus on the government will significantly increase once the left is in power.

H3. Diario CoLatino will demonstrate less of an oppositional stance once the left is in power.

Goal displacement

Outside of alternative media scholarship, research from sociology about social movements and alternative institutions also offers insight into various conditions that could undermine an organization’s commitment to alternative principles. Building on the work of Robert Michels (1876–1936) who claimed that all organizations eventually develop oligarchic and conservative tendencies, Jenkins (1977) referred to the ‘iron law of oligarchy’, in which over time alternative organizations will succumb to various economic and political pressures and abandon their democratic principles as they professionalize, developing oligarchic leadership and conservative goals and tactics aimed more at maintaining the organization’s survival than meeting the needs of its members. The development of these oligarchies results in goal displacement, as a social movement organization’s original goals become accommodated or co-opted, replaced with less radical ends that ultimately do away with the reason the movement was created in the first place (Gusfield, 1955; Selznick, 1949). As Piven and Cloward’s (1992) study of poor people’s movements found, social movements lost their disruptive aims and were diverted from their political and social goals when they formalized into organizations. Other studies have shown that goal displacement occurs when an organization sees survival as related to blending in with and mimicking more powerful organizations, and thus transforms its goals because of political pressure (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Selznick, 1949).

Critiques of this iron law challenge the notion that oligarchic structures and conservative tendencies will inherently develop over time, arguing instead that this occurs only under particular conditions (Rothschild-Whitt, 1976; Zald and Ash, 1966). For example, Osterman (2006) considered the ways in which agency and culture can help an organization to maintain, rather than displace, its original goals, and Voss and Sherman (2000) looked at how bureaucratized organizations could break free of – rather than just resist or avoid – the iron law, and return to their radical roots.

While the concepts of the iron law and conservatism typically have been applied to social movements and alternative institutions, the core argument about goal displacement can be extended as a useful framework for thinking about transformations in alternative media when they are no longer positioned in opposition to the ruling government. If a change in government is no longer the goal, does conservatism and goal displacement set in as an alternative media outlet’s initial aims become accommodated to or co-opted by the government? And if goal displacement does occur, what does that mean for the media’s level of alternativeness?

As such, this study poses the following research question:

RQ1. Do CoLatino journalists believe the newspaper’s goals changed with the government’s shift to the left, and if so, how?

Methods

In order to examine whether Diario CoLatino managed to maintain its alternativeness and critical position once the left came into power, this study relied on in-depth interviews with CoLatino reporters and editors and a content analysis driven by the comments journalists made during the interviews. The content analysis compared news stories between 2006 – when the conservative party ARENA was still enjoying its 20-year rule and before Mauricio Funes had been green lit as the FMLN’s 2009 presidential candidate – and 2012, the half-way point of Funes’ leftist administration. The analysis included two constructed weeks of content (Riffe et al., 1993): one constructed week from days randomly chosen from 2006 and one from 2012. All national and municipal news stories in CoLatino’s online archive from the selected dates were included in the analysis, resulting in a total of 158 articles (85 from 2006 and 73 from 2012). Two coders, one a native Spanish speaker and the other fluent in Spanish, coded the articles for variables such as number of official and nonofficial sources; mentions of the FMLN, ARENA, protesters, elections, human rights, and social movements; and tone of the portrayal of the FMLN, ARENA, and protesters. After coder training and codebook revisions to achieve inter-coder reliability (ICR), ICR was achieved with 2 variables at ‘substantial agreement’, where Cohen’s Kappa is between .61 and .80, and 16 variables at ‘almost perfect agreement’, where Kappa is at or above .81 (Viera and Garrett, 2005). Cohen’s Kappa for the individual variables ranged from 0.71 (tone of how the FMLN/Funes/first lady were portrayed) to 1 (i.e. whether the FMLN, Funes, or the first lady were mentioned, or whether protesters were mentioned), with a mean Kappa of .92 for all variables, which exceeds the acceptable minimum standard (Poindexter and McCombs, 2000).

To test H1, which hypothesized that Diario CoLatino’s sourcing practices would change with the change in power, so that significantly more official government sources and significantly fewer ordinary, nonofficial sources would be quoted in 2012 than 2006, independent sample T-tests were run using the ordinal variables that coded for number of official, authoritative, expert, or governmental sources cited and number of ordinary citizen, nonofficial or nongovernmental sources cited.

For H2, which predicted that Diario CoLatino’s focus on activist issues would significantly decrease and focus on the government would significantly increase once the left was in power, analysis relied on variables that assigned topics to stories (topics included business/economy, health, protests/social movements, police/crime/conflict/war, politics/government, education, environment, feature/human interest, and others), coded for mentions of social movements or activist causes/campaigns, and coded for mentions of various activist-issue ‘rights’ (i.e. human rights, environmental rights, indigenous rights, women’s rights, and union’s rights).

H3, which hypothesized that Diario CoLatino would demonstrate less of an oppositional stance once the left was in power, was tested using variables that examined mentions of Funes, the first lady, the FMLN, ARENA, protesters, and elections/election campaigns, as well as variables that coded for whether the mentions of Funes/the first lady/FMLN, ARENA, and protesters was negative, positive, or neutral/mixed.

Finally, RQ1, which questioned whether reporters and editors believed Diario CoLatino had changed with the election of Funes, involved the use of textual analysis of in-depth interviews conducted in Spanish with 17 CoLatino journalists from August to November 2012, in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. Journalists were questioned about their definitions of alternative, and the role of government propaganda in alternative media.

Findings and discussion

Sourcing

Interestingly, H1, which hypothesized that sourcing practices would change once the left took power, was not supported, as Diario CoLatino did not quote significantly more official sources nor significantly fewer unofficial sources after the left came into power (see Table 1). Analysis showed that indeed, from 2006 to 2012, the mean number of ordinary, nonofficial sources quoted in the newspaper declined, from 0.56 per article to 0.4, but the difference only approached significance (F = 3.569, t = 1.268, p = .061). When it came to the number of official, government sources quoted, the mean actually declined from 1.27 in 2006 to 1.23 in 2012, rather than increase as predicted, although again, the difference was not significant (F = 1.523, t = 0.249, p = .219). Thus, regardless of whether the left or the right was in power, Diario CoLatino still quoted more official sources than nonofficial sources.

Table 1.

Comparison of means of sources quoted per story before and after the left took power.

	2006	2012
Ordinary citizens quoted per story^a	0.56 (mean)	0.4 (mean)
Official, government sources quoted per story^b	1.27 (mean)	1.23 (mean)

F = 3.569, t = 1.268, p = .061.

F = 1.523, t = 0.249, p = .219.

The fact that CoLatino quoted more official, government sources, regardless of whether the left was in power, lends further support to Atton and Wickenden’s (2005) research that indicates alternative journalists, like mainstream journalists, tend to follow sourcing patterns that privilege easy access. Because CoLatino is an afternoon newspaper with an 11 a.m. deadline, its journalists are under pressure to get the story as fast as possible, which often means turning to the most easily accessible sources, that is, politicians and other authority figures. Furthermore, as several interviewees said, El Salvador’s context of authoritarian rule, a brutal civil war, and its history of outspoken dissidents being disappeared and killed mean that journalists often have trouble convincing ordinary citizens to talk to the press. As a result, rather than spending time trying to find ordinary voices to quote, they turn to appointed spokespeople, who more often than not are officials or authority figures in some capacity. By taking the easy way out and constantly quoting government officials – several stories cited only FMLN officials – CoLatino is displacing its goal to provide a voice for the voiceless, thus running the risk of serving as a mouthpiece for the government, rather than a platform for the people.

Coverage

H2, which predicted that Diario CoLatino’s focus on activist issues would significantly decrease and that the focus on government would significantly increase once the left came into power, was supported (see Table 2). Indeed, just as government officials dominated the sources used in stories, so, too, did the government dominate in terms of topics of stories once the left took power. The percentage of stories whose topics emphasized protests, social movements, or activist causes significantly decreased from about 12% of articles analyzed in 2006 to just 5.5% of articles in 2012. Meanwhile, the number of stories whose topics focused on the government or politics significantly increased once the FMLN took the presidency, jumping from 31% in 2006 to nearly half of news stories, 48%, in 2012.

Table 2.

Comparison of story focus on activist issues versus the government before and after the left took power.

	2006	2012
Story topics emphasizing emphasized protests, social movements, or activist causes^a	12%	5.5%
Story topics emphasizing politics or the government^b	31%	48%
Mentions of human rights/activist issues^c	52%	30%

x² = 15.630, df = 8, p < .05.

x² = 7.552, df = 1, p < .01.

What is more, prior to Funes’ election, more than half of news stories mentioned activist issues like human rights, environmental rights, women’s rights, or unions’ rights, but by 2012, once the left was in power, those mentions had significantly decreased to less than a third of articles, dropping from 52% in 2006 to 30% in 2012. Clearly, political stories took precedent over civil society stories, despite the newspaper’s stated goal to cover marginalized groups.

Oppositional stance

H3, which hypothesized that Diario CoLatino would demonstrate less of an oppositional stance once the left was in power, was mostly supported (see Table 3), as positive coverage of the president and the FMLN increased significantly after Funes’ election. However, on a positive note, this increase in positive coverage of the government, and thus decrease in oppositional stance, was not accompanied by a significant decrease in positive coverage of protesters, as expected.

Table 3.

Comparing portrayals of political parties and protesters before and after the left took power.

	2006	2012
Mentions of Funes/FMLN/first lady^a	22%	51%
Mentions of ARENA^b	19%	25%
Mentions of protesters^c	12%	5.5%
Positive portrayal of Funes/FMLN^d	53%	65%
Negative portrayal of ARENA^e	59%	67%
Positive portrayal of protesters^e	72%	75%

FMLN: Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional; ARENA: Alianza Republicana Nacionalista.

x² = 13.777, df = 1, p < .001.

x² = 0.791, df = 1, p = .374.

x² = 3.020, df = 2, p = .221.

F = 10.696, t = −1.461, p < .01.

Difference not significant.

Mentions of Funes, the first lady, and the FMLN increased significantly from 2006 to 2012 (x² = 13.777, df = 1, p < .001), rising from less than a quarter of stories in 2006 (22%) to just more than half in 2012 (51%). Likewise, more stories portrayed Funes/FMLN positively and ARENA negatively in 2012 than in 2006, although only the increase in positive Funes/FMLN stories was significant. On a scale of 1 to 3, 1 being negative and 3 positive, the positive portrayal of the leftist party significantly increased (F = 10.696, t = −1.461, p < .01) from a mean of 2.37 in 2006 to 2.65 in 2012. Of articles that mentioned the FMLN, 53% in 2006 portrayed the party positively, compared with 65% in 2012. This makes sense considering the new goal to prioritize the FMLN and support the leftist government, and in light of the fact that CoLatino always had been critical of the right. Once Funes was elected, the critical light CoLatino previously had shone on the government – a rightist government – was obscured. Although criticism of the right continued as always in 2012, the FMLN, once in power, was left un-examined critically; indeed, it was portrayed positively most of the time. As such, Diario CoLatino, a newspaper that differentiated itself from the mainstream press and prided itself on its alternativeness, essentially behaved no differently than the mainstream media that CoLatino journalists faulted for blindly supporting the right and automatically criticizing the left. The newspaper’s goal to create critically thinking citizens by offering independent, alternative, and critical journalism appears to have become displaced by the new obligation to support the leftist government.

While the content analysis showed from 2006 to 2012 a slight decrease – albeit not a significant one – in the number of stories that mentioned protesters, the treatment of those protesters in the newspaper did not change significantly once Funes was elected. Regardless of whether the left was in power, protesters were portrayed positively. In other words, the decrease in oppositional stance did not alter the newspaper’s depiction of protesters. This lends further support to previous alternative media research (e.g. Downing, 2001; Kessler, 1984; Rodriguez, 2001) that contends social movements and activists rely on alternative media to counter the negative image of protesters (often referred to as the ‘protest paradigm’) portrayed in the mainstream media (McLeod and Hertog, 1999). The slight decrease in the number of stories mentioning protesters perhaps could be explained by a decrease in actual protests. As several interviewed journalists said, social movement leaders had joined the ranks of the new leftist government, thereby making any protests against the government problematic.

Changed priorities and displaced goals

Answering RQ1, which questioned whether CoLatino journalists believed the newspaper had changed with the government’s shift to the left, qualitative analysis of the in-depth interviews showed all of the interviewees indeed believed Funes’ election impacted news coverage, as the priority shifted from coverage of social movements, protests, and the like, to coverage of the leftist government. But for a few exceptions, most of the interviewees saw this impact as a negative one, dulling CoLatino’s critical edge and detracting from its commitment to covering marginalized sectors of the population. Still, in general, they all said that despite this, Diario CoLatino was an alternative newspaper, even if somewhat less alternative than before, and they all took pride in this label of alternativeness, repeatedly pointing out that, unlike the mainstream media, they offered a voice for the voiceless and a perspective that differed from the conservative, unquestioning editorial line the mainstream had been espousing for decades. For them, supporting the left, and not just criticizing the government (whether rightist or leftist), was ‘alternative’. For example, a female reporter who had been with the newspaper for more than 12 years noted that

Before (Funes was elected) we gave more priority to social topics, covering, for example, demonstrations, protests, the taking of streets, and we gave these people a lot of space, which other media didn’t do … But now there is little space for these people. Now the priority is the topic of government. Before the front page would be for social organizations … but now they have been relegated to page 4 or page 7 and they don’t receive the same space or the same coverage as before … Is CoLatino an alternative medium? I would say we are. Or we were.

Another female reporter said CoLatino’s journalists are well aware of the newspaper’s editorial line in support of the FMLN. ‘We know that if there’s a Funes story to cover, and a story about a community to cover, obviously the priority is going to be to cover Funes’, she said. But considering the mainstream does nothing but cover the right and attack the left, she said, it was CoLatino’s responsibility to add a little balance (meaning support the left), even if that meant sacrificing some coverage of civil society to increase coverage of the president.

A female journalist who works in a managerial capacity said that despite always having been a leftist newspaper striving to counter-act the misinformation of the rightist, commercial press that defends the interests of the powerful classes, the left being in power means CoLatino now shies away from its critical duties. ‘We still denounce things, but not with the same 100 percent as before. Maybe now it’s just 50 percent, because our editorial policy is that we support the leftist government’. Other reporters noted how they must ‘disguise’ or ‘put makeup on’ any anti-government protests or sentiment. As one reporter said, she self-censors, choosing to ‘use less-strong words if it’s against the party (FMLN)’, but adding she can be as direct and clear as she wants in her word choice if she’s writing a story with complaints about ARENA or the right.

A couple of journalists contended that despite the directive to cover Funes and the FMLN, this does not mean CoLatino has lost its objectivity. Being leftist does not mean distorting information, as the rightist, mainstream press does, one male journalist said. ‘If something bad happens with the FMLN, it will probably still come out and be published’, he said. ‘Perhaps it won’t get a full page of coverage like the rightist newspapers would do, but an article still would be published’. Another journalist said she understands the newspaper’s position to support the leftist government since ‘there are already enough media criticizing Funes. But we should be criticizing constructively’.

The newspaper’s editor freely admitted that with the election of Funes, CoLatino’s goal became to provide coverage for all FMLN activities, as to him, alternative journalism and propaganda go hand in hand. Calling the newspaper a ‘political project of the left’, he said the newspaper’s mission is to ‘support social movements that accompany the leftist political project and the development of the country’, as well as to ‘accompany the leftist government while it is in power’. This does not mean losing alternativeness or ceasing criticism, he said, but rather to change the nature of the criticism and to be more accommodating in discourse, as otherwise the criticism will be used to strengthen the power of the right. ‘We’re not going to say what the other newspapers say about the FMLN. We’re not going to run a campaign against the FMLN. Any criticism against the government or the left will be very measured’. He added that if coverage of social movements has decreased, it is because those movements in fact have a hidden political agenda to discredit the left, so ‘we have to control or measure the participation of certain sectors in the newspaper’. Furthermore, he noted, many of the leftist social movement’s leaders now are part of the government, so protests and demonstrations have decreased – he contended it would be like movements protesting against themselves – meaning less social movement activity in general for the newspaper to cover, and not necessarily a failure on the part of the newspaper.

While the journalists clung to the newspaper’s identity as ‘alternative’, they mostly saw the change in priorities as negative. In general, however, the journalists did not see the newspaper’s support of the left as a bad thing: their role as journalists at an alternative newspaper was to counter the right’s criticism of the left, they said. In this sense, then, the change in focus to the government away from civil society, combined with a lessening of an oppositional stance, can be seen as a shift away from the newspaper’s alternative goals – a goal displacement toward the less radical, less independent goal of serving and supporting the leftist government.

Conclusion

This study used a content analysis born from in-depth interviews to explore whether a leftist, alternative newspaper in El Salvador maintained its critical stance and ‘alternativeness’ once the country’s first leftist president came into power. Analysis of newspaper content pre and post Mauricio Funes’ election, as well as in-depth interviews with the newspaper’s journalists, showed that once the leftist FMLN political party took power, Diario CoLatino’s mission to cover social movements and civil society and to offer a voice for those marginalized by the mainstream media was replaced with the goal to prioritize coverage of the leftist government, thus reducing the newspaper’s alternativeness and displacing its radical purpose.

Just as research has shown that social movement organizations and other alternative institutions over time eventually suffer from goal displacement once they professionalize, or once they succumb to political and economic pressures to fit in (Gusfield, 1955; Selznik, 1984), this study showed that Diario CoLatino, too, became more accommodating and less alternative after the election of El Salvador’s first leftist president. With the left in power, the newspaper’s goal to be a critical, alternative voice became co-opted, replaced with the less radical mission to support the leftist government, even if that meant dedicating less coverage to typically ‘alternative’ stories, such as those related to social movements and human rights. Previous studies indicate that once their reason to exist disappears, alternative media go mainstream or disappear altogether, such as was the case with the end of apartheid in South Africa (Louw and Tomaselli, 1991). The concern, thus, is that without a rightist government to oppose, Diario CoLatino could be in danger of losing not only its alternativeness, but also its reason to exist. This study builds on the work of Louw and Tomaselli (1991) and other studies that examined what makes the media ‘alternative’, and suggests that, at least in the case of El Salvador, maintaining a critical, alternative position became problematic, if not impossible, after the politically seismic shift of the left taking power. After decades of pushing for leftist causes in a right-ruled country, CoLatino suddenly found itself in a position where the government was, in theory, no longer the target. Rather than continuing to maintain a critical, alternative stance that would hold the government accountable and prioritize the news of social movements and other marginalized groups normally excluded from the mainstream press, CoLatino underwent goal displacement, deciding to instead prioritize support for the government, thus replacing its alternative goals with less radical ones. The result, then, is that El Salvador is left without a radical alternative press. Readers are faced with choosing between the mainstream, conservative, and sensationalist media conglomerates, or an unofficially ‘official’ newspaper of the FMLN.

As this study is limited in that it relies on just two constructed weeks of content – one before Funes’ election and one after – future studies should examine content over a longer period of time, such as from the founding of CoLatino as a cooperative, to 2014, when Funes left office. In light of the fact that a second leftist president in a row was elected in 2014, future studies also could examine whether the radical goal displacement continues with the left remaining in power, or whether CoLatino reverts to its alternative, critical position. Additionally, with an unprecedented number of leftist governments currently ruling in Latin America (i.e. El Salvador, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, etc.), the opportunity is ripe for a regional analysis of how alternative the alternative press truly is in these countries.

As even the definition of alternative remains under scholarly debate, this study is important for contributing to our understanding of alternativeness, alternative goals, and how those goals transform when the alternative media are no longer positioned in opposition to the ruling government. This study furthers our understanding of alternativeness in a non-US context, where after more than 100 years in opposition to the government, a sudden shift in the ruling party meant CoLatino, excited to finally be on the same side as the government, began to lose its focus on social movements and protesters. Once a change in government was no longer the goal, the alternative newspaper’s alternative goals were replaced with the less radical mission to support the government. Of course, by some definitions of ‘alternative media’ (i.e. Atton, 2002; Couldry and Curran, 2003), the lack of critical edge or radical purpose does not mean CoLatino is no longer alternative, as it still is in opposition to the mainstream press, and as a cooperative, it still is run in an alternative way. However, by any definition of alternative that includes its radicalness (i.e. Downing, 2001) or criticalness (i.e. Fuchs, 2010) – and even by the definition put forward by the newspaper itself – Diario CoLatino falls short of the ‘alternative’ ideal, offering more governmental propaganda than independent, critical, alternative journalism that gives a voice to the voiceless.

Footnotes

Funding

This work was supported by an Inter-American Foundation Grassroots Development Fellowship.

Notes

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