The role of journalism in presidential debates in Argentina and Brazil
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Abstract
Presidential debates are crucial in current election campaigns. How they are staged is the outcome of tense negotiations between media and politicians. This study aims to compare presidential debates’ format between Brazil and Argentina, with a special focus on the role journalists are allowed to take.
To this end, it has reviewed archive and secondary sources and reconstructed the trajectories of presidential debates in both countries. While Brazil and Argentina are similar with respect to their political and media systems, they presidential debate’s histories differ markedly. This investigation’s result show
that journalists in Brazil, while having been marginalized from the overtly critical role they played on the first debates in the country, still play a role on them in current campaigns. In contrast, argentinian journalists are not allowed to participate on the debates, aside from a quiet moderating stance. This difference, we argue, is likely due to the different timing on which presidential debates in one and the other country have taken place. While in Brazil debates started being organized early on (with the first direct and democratic elections), at a time where the mass media were undoubtedly dominant, in Argentina these have only recently taken place, just when the media systems (there and elsewhere) are increasingly fragmented and the objectivity and neutrality of journalist is being questioned.
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