Perspectives of Corruption and Economic Action in the Ecuadorian Digital Press during Authoritarian Neoliberalism (2017-2019)

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Abstract

Abstract: This research characterises the role of the frames of political scandals of corruption and economic action, present in the news of the newspapers El Comercio and El Telégrafo during the first two years of Lenin Moreno's government (2017-2019) in Ecuador. Three theoretical currents are addressed: political scandal as a product of media visibility transformations (Thompson, 2001) and as a contest between the powerful (Narváez, 2004); framing as a message framing phenomenon (Entman, 1993); and authoritarian neoliberalism as the use of state apparatus to promote neoliberal reforms through authoritarian mechanisms (Bruff & Tensel, 2019). In the quantitative methodology, we opted for content analysis, which involves the analysis of a corpus of 1449 units of analysis (687 news items on corruption and 762 on economic measures). The main finding is that the media frames allowed for the justification of a strong intervention and mobilisation of the state apparatus on a legal and judicial basis, bursting into spaces of citizen participation and political opposition to the neoliberalisation of the state.

Author Biographies

Jhonatan Andrés Lara-Aguiar, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Sede Ecuador

Egresado de la Maestría de Investigación en Comunicación y Opinión Pública, FLACSO Sede Ecuador. Licenciado en Comunicación Social, Universidad Central del Ecuador.

Juan Arturo Mila-Maldonado, Universidade de Alicante

Estudiante del Doctorado en Humanidades y Estudios Sociales de América Latina, Universidad de Alicante. Doctor en Comunicación e Información Contemporánea, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela. 

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Published

2025-05-29

Issue

No. 40 (2025): Estudos em Comunicação

Section

Artigos

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 Unported License.

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