Paola Prado

Empowering rural citizen journalism via web 2.0 technologies

Once acquainted with the modern information and communication tools made available with the advent of the Internet, five Brazilian rural communities participating in a pilot project to develop a self-sustaining telecenter model, engaged in citizen journalism using inexpensive digital video cameras. Community members used Web 2.0 collaborative tools to post short videos on the telecenter portal. The 95 video blogs published between September 2006 and May 2008 recorded various aspects of community life, including religious celebrations, oral history arts and crafts traditions, folklore, and environmental concerns. This study evaluates the impact of video blogging in these communities.

Overcoming Poverty through Digital Inclusion

A growing body of research is showing how digital inclusion can help communities overcome poverty and injustice. The main challenge lies in how best to achieve this goal. The authors argue that digital inclusion must occur in two distinct stages. The first stage is digital literacy, accomplished with the Symbiotic Computer (SC)-smartphones and tablets. The second stage will be professional capacity-building, accomplished with the more traditional Personal Computer (PC).

News, Conflict and Environment as Social Constructions

Using an innovative approach that encompasses perspectives from media studies, political ecology and political ecology, Pinto, Prado and Tirado examine the body of literature that views the connections between environment and society. With a particular focus on Latin America, the chapter provides a much-needed overview of environment, news and protest as social constructions. Mediated discourse surrounding environmental debate provides an opportunity to explore how local protest is scaled up to national and global levels, or marginalized and prevented from entering public sphere debate. As well as looking at the literature informing the book’s conceptual approach, the chapter also explains the methodology employed here, which encompasses both qualitative and quantitative content analysis, as well as dozens of interviews with the journalists who reported the news.

Ecuador and the Chevron Case: Spinning Risk, Hazard and Reward

This chapter focuses on Ecuadorian press coverage of the Chevron legal case in Ecuador, which arose out of allegations that indigenous populations suffered health hazards from decades of living in lands contaminated by petroleum extractive activities. A case study of the nexus of news values and environmental and health risk and hazard, it offers an opportunity to better comparatively understand the mediated social construction of claims-making during one of the biggest environmental legal battles in the world. Legal arenas provide ground for study of disproportionate risks in terms of actors, responsibility and credibility, as claims are picked up by media and repeated over time. These iterations have significance for public engagement, agency and debate over issues associated with risks to environmental and human health.

Brazil and the Belo Monte Dam: “The Amazon Is Ours”

The fourth-largest hydroelectric plant in the world, the Belo Monte dam, on the Xingu River, a tributary of the Amazon in northern Brazil, requires the flooding of rainforest and agricultural areas, as well as the resettlement of thousands of residents, and has been the source of substantial controversy. In press reports, the authors find a reliance on official sources and a focus on the conflict between the local residents and the government and consortium. This case study reveals the ways in which local politics are interpreted and transformed into the national by regional and national media, and how indigenous communities’ perspectives and views are regarded in economically booming Brazil, even as they are linked to international environmental networks and have popular support at home. It also reveals how media strategies from non-state actors shape coverage.

Chile’s Pascua Lama: Where Water Is Worth More than Gold

In recent years, the expansion of mega-mining projects in remote regions of South America has politicized and internationalized conflicts over water, and given rise to regional coalitions of local farmers and indigenous communities who protest the socio-environmental threat posed by the use of water in mining projects such as the one at Pascua Lama. Further, the polluting nature of the chemical processes at Pascua Lama pose contamination hazards to watersheds, rivers and other water sources. Most of the news coverage took one of two predominant approaches: reports either presented the threat that the gold mine represented to the watershed as “business as usual,” or the narrative took on melodramatic tones with a focus on the social or political conflict that ensued. Journalistic norms and routines inherent in this dynamic have been found to contribute to an overexposure of official and elite sources.

Mediated Neo-extractivism and National Development

By examining three case studies of environmental contestation in Latin America, we bring new understanding to how local politics are channeled and defined through mediated mechanisms into national and international arenas. The analysis of mediated content regarding political battles over the control and management of natural resources allows a glimpse into the media’s role in the social construction of environmental news in Latin America, a region that is underexplored in terms of environmental communication

Introduction: Extraction, National Development and Environmental News in Twenty-first-century South America

A region where many local and national economies are based on natural resource extractive activities to meet global demand, South America provides an important laboratory for understanding the social construction of news regarding contestations over the promotion of extractivism as a national development strategy. Often residents living in extraction zones must deal with not only environmental degradation but also health impacts and loss of culture and heritage. Focusing on historical interfaces of news, environment, ideas of modernity and development, and media–state relations, Pinto, Prado and Tirado offer an introduction to the social construction of news that is provided to mass audiences in South America, and discuss the pressures that impact journalism in the region.

Mapping citizen journalism and the promise of digital inclusion: A perspective from the Global South

This study maps the factors that impact and inform the practice of citizen journalism in the Global South, and asks how individuals in poor and marginalized communities produce contextually relevant news reports. Results obtained from 25 field interviews in the Dominican Republic contribute to the growing literature about practices that complement or contest journalism produced by mainstream news media. The findings suggest that we mind the gap of structural and institutional realities that pose practical challenges to individual agency for citizen journalists who operate in the Global South.

Mediating claims of environmental degradation, source credibility and risk to human health: Ecuadorian news coverage of the Chevron case

How are claims of environmental degradation and health risk and hazard socially constructed in mediated arenas? This article examines frames, sources and claims in articles from Ecuadorian news regarding the lawsuit against Chevron brought by thousands of indigenous peoples living in the Amazonian region, who claimed their health was at risk and ancestral lands destroyed by petroleum contamination. Findings indicated that the risk discussion at the heart of events and conflicts was subsumed by coverage that focused largely on the legal conflict as well as was indexed to the claims denying the hazard. The case has significance for understanding mediated claims of risk and responsibility through a lens of news production.