Social Organizations’ Journalistic Narrative on Media During Demonstrations in 2017 and 2021

Abstract

One of the key sources of information for a wide audience is digital news outlets. However, these often foreground institutional discourses focused on immediacy, privileging government information and marginalizing the voices and actions of social actors, peasant organizations, and Indigenous peoples. This research work is based on the assumption that newspapers respond to hegemonic media structuring their discourse in line with exclusive editorial stances that respond to commercial or political interests prevailing in national and regional newspapers. In this article, we aim to analyze contents published by newspapers La Opinión (a regional newspaper) and El Espectador (of countrywide circulation) in their internet editions dealing with narratives on social, peasant, and Indigenous organizations during popular demonstrations in 2017 and 2021 in the Northern Santander department. A qualitative approach was followed to analyze the contents of 118 news stories taken from La Opinión and El Espectador. This corpus shows that both news outlets informed about daily events adopting digital narrative elements, such as interactivity, multimediality, and hypertextuality. Findings include identifying categories of analysis dealing with violence, denunciation, grassroots collectives joining together, seeking guarantees, environmental calls for action, blockades, State neglect, seeking social consensus, and nonviolent protests. Also, we highlight La Opinión’s narrative about the pacific nature of 2021 demonstrations, contrasting with the complex violence dynamics that have been common throughout the history of this department on the border area with Venezuela.