Understanding how the Colombian media intervened in the 2012-2016 peace negotiation process: a mediatization approach

This research investigates how the Colombian news media intervened in the peace process (2012-2016) between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC, Spanish acronym). Through applying and testing the utility of the theoretical framework on mediatization (Couldry and Hepp, 2013), particularly the mediatization of politics (Strömbäck and Esser, 2014b), this study examines the media discourses around the peace dialogues, the journalistic practices that generated them, and the media-related practices from political actors who participated in the negotiations. To do so, the study follows a mixed-method approach. Quantitatively, it performs a computational text analysis by applying Structural Topic Modelling - STM - to a corpus of 17.688 online news articles. Qualitatively, it conducts a thematic analysis on some of the key topics identified by the STM as well as semi-structured interviews (n=26) with political actors (the government delegation, the FARC delegation, and the opposition party) and journalists who reported on the negotiations.

The findings illustrate that alongside an ‘elite driven’ approach (Robinson et al., 2010), the news media often incorporated the ‘commercial aspects’ of the ‘news media logic’ (Esser, 2013) to report about the peace process. Pertinently, other journalistic attitudes more focused on professional norms (e.g., serving the public interest) were also prevalent. For instance, ‘protecting the peace process’ became a key (journalistic) criterion for some journalists when reporting on the negotiations. Moreover, this study shows that news media considerations influenced the political actors’ routines and strategies as they all perceived the media as a key influential actor. However, the varied political actors were influenced differently and to different extents by the news media, suggesting the importance of understanding the mediatization of politics as a matter of degree. Finally, the empirical data reveals that the adoption of news media logic by political actors did not necessarily mean a power shift from the latter towards the news media, as politicians often adopted media considerations instrumentally or through what is known as ‘self-mediatization’.

Overall, this research provides a rigorous and multiperspectival examination of the relationships between media actors and political actors in the context of a peace process in Colombia, an area of study that has been under-researched.