The News Media in Puerto Rico

Journalism in Colonial Settings and in Times of Crises

Federico Subervi-Vélez, Sandra Rodríguez-Cotto, Jairo Lugo-Ocando

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367429034
• eBook ISBN: 9781000208719
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Digital Media

The News Media in Puerto Rico offers a synopsis as well as a critical analysis of the Island's news media system, with emphasis on the political and economic factors that most influence how the media operate.

The authors also document the impact of Hurricane Maria on the media structures and the changing media landscape given the political, economic and colonial strictures. Building on interviews with news media professionals, the book further presents detailed insights about journalism and journalism education in these times of crises. The final chapters include theoretical frameworks and methodological guidelines for the analysis of other colonial, post-colonial and neo-colonial media systems, with research recommendations valuable for future studies of the Island's media as well as for cross-national comparisons.

This book will be an essential read for students and scholars interested in learning not only about the Puerto Rican and Latin American mass media, but also the media systems of other colonial/neo-colonial countries.

Part I

1 Introduction

In the aftermath of Hurricane María on September 20, 2017, all but a few of the 3.4 million residents of Puerto Rico were driven into a desperate humanitarian crisis. The hurricane unleashed all its force, destroying houses, whole towns, and the livelihoods of entire segments of society who were already struggling to make ends meet (Hackett, 2019; Virella, 2019a). Hurricane María left behind a saga of destruction and desolation never seen in the past century in the Island. The Islanders, who had already endured years of economic decline and fiscal austerity, looked to Washington, DC for federal help (Henning, 2019). The response was slow, clumsy, and, as one could say in more mundane terms, “too little and too late.”

The US response degenerated then into a long and bitter feud between then President Donald Trump, who denied the death toll of 3,000 and accused the locals of mismanaging aid, and the Island leaders who in turn accused the president and Washington authorities of downplaying the Island’s suffering. In an infamous Tweet, Trump would go on to say,

When I left the island, after the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000

(Edelman, 2018).

To add insult to injury, the president would go on to call the recovery operation a “success” when clearly the Island was still in the dark and recovery was still underway. Then Governor Ricardo Rosselló seized on the president’s use of the word “successful” and said in a statement at the time: “No relationship between a colony and the federal government can ever be called ‘successful’ because Puerto Ricans lack certain inalienable rights enjoyed by our fellow Americans in the states” (Lucey, 2018).

Indeed, Hurricane María also unearthed the long-buried evident fact that for all sense and purposes, Puerto Rico has been a colony of the United States since 1898. For generations of Islanders, the legal and political limbo in which Puerto Rico lives has become a sort of permanent “purgatory.” Even friendly foreign countries in disaster situations have received more attention than Puerto Rico in its times of crises. The neglect of Puerto Rico in the past few years has left little doubt of the Island’s position as a de-facto colony. As Yarimar Bonilla, a professor of Puerto Rican studies and anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York pointed out in an interview with The New Yorker Magazine,

A lot of the young people that I talk to feel that the imposition of the oversight board, the denial of the ability for Puerto Rico to declare bankruptcy, and Trump’s reaction to María have made the colonial status of Puerto Rico so clear. It’s been completely unveiled. Today, July 25th, is Constitution Day, when the commonwealth was established, in 1952, and, when that happened, we were promised that we were not a colony, that we had some kind of free association with the United States and a certain level of sovereignty. And so, in 2016, with everything that happened around the debt, which was under Obama, it became clear to everyone here that we were a colony.

(Chotiner, 2019)

That neglect is evident in times of crises such as the devastating hurricanes of 2017 (Allsop, 2019) and even after the early 2020 earthquakes (Allsop, 2020; Gladstone, 2019; González Ramírez, 2020). All these years have been characterized by turmoil and political unrest, including the resignation of governor Rosselló himself in July 2019. Nevertheless, in time, “normality” came slowly crawling back into the Island. Before the 2020 earthquakes,¹ things seemed to be progressing—at least superficially—toward how they were before Hurricane María. All along, Puerto Ricans continue to struggle with their own sense of nationhood and national belonging.

Indeed, Puerto Rico has been described as “a nation on the move” (Duany, 2002) as Diasporic communities are tightly linked to the Island’s life by a steady circular migration, one that creates a real but also imaginary nation. The Puerto Rican media, however, are far from becoming the cornerstone for a more robust, organic, and articulated national project. They are too embedded to the notions of “objectivity, impartiality and neutrality,” hence incapable of challenging the colonial enterprise that has dominated the life and sense of belonging of the Puerto Rican people. They have thus failed to mobilize or build the “collective imaginary” proposed by Benedict Anderson (2006 [1983]) and which gave birth to nearby nations such as the United States itself and Haiti. Our thesis here is that this is partly because the news media on the Island have broadly been an apparatus of hegemonic reinforcement, which under the guise of objectivity has helped to underpin the status quo. A key question of this book is how did the news media in Puerto Rico become such a mirror of the one in the US and what does this state of affairs mean for the Island’s history and society as a whole?

To be sure, the news has long been heralded as “only the first draft of history” (Barth, 1943) and its version of events, places, and people then becomes enshrined in the public imagination of future generations, which would look at the old pages of newspapers to try to understand what happened and what we did. However, if this is the case, how can we be sure that these accidental historians themselves have provided us with a definitive version of history? How do we know about what these individuals and organizations themselves did in order to create the accounts and versions of history? More importantly, as the Roman poet Juvenal in his Satires once pointed out, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will guard the guards themselves?).

The answer to these questions might be to study and understand better the drafters of the organizations that produce the news in the first place. That is, to write as researchers the books and essays that can offer insights into the news media themselves. This book is built on the premise that analyzing the factors that shape a country’s news media system, describing the media outlets, and gaining insights from the journalists who work in those media is indispensable for better grasping those first drafts of a country’s history.

The history of Puerto Rico in modern times is one of colonialism, period. Any undertones to that under the guise of being an “Estado Libre Asociado” (or Free Associated State) fell flat on their face after President Obama signed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act, or PROMESA, in June 2016. The control board imposed harsh austerity measures, including big cuts in social services, public institutions, and pension funds, but mostly it was to remind everyone that despite the rhetoric of “freedom,” the Island is a colony. Senator Bob Menéndez—a Democrat from Obama’s own party—slammed the legislation as a form of “blatant colonialism” that puts “hedge funds ahead of the people” (Norton, 2016).

Why is this history of colonialism so important in understanding the media themselves? Because critically assessing the characteristics of those media is a window for the understanding not only of the history of Puerto Rico, but also the Island’s current socio-political juncture in the twenty-first century. More than a quarter of a century ago, Subervi-Vélez, Hernández-López, and Frambes-Buxeda (1990) stated that “the most fundamental factor shaping the mass media system in Puerto Rico is the Island’s status with the United States.”² That assertion still holds true and is also a central tenet of this book because the Island increasingly continues to be subject to colonial political and economic relations with the US and the parameters that shape the media system remain unaltered. With respect to the media, what has changed most since 1990 is the number and owners of some of the media outlets, the growth of Internet-based media, and the audience characteristics of those media.

A first goal of this book is to offer an analysis of the factors that shape Puerto Rico’s media system in general, and the news media in particular. Within that context, the second goal is to provide a synopsis of the histories and current status of the selected major news media outlets while also pointing to some of their known political ties or orientations. A third goal is to share the insights—opinions, concerns, critiques—that journalists themselves have about their news media, their working conditions, and future. Altogether, these analyses tell the story of the Island’s news media operating in colonial settings. The public’s media consumption patterns are also described with the goal of bringing together a broad picture of this aspect of the appeal and relationships between the news media and the Island’s population.

Hurricane María’s passage and destruction of the Island in September 2017 drew attention to how the analyses of the media, the journalists, and the audiences were written and assembled. In Part I of the book, the news media are presented as they existed prior to the hurricane, thus providing historical markers of how things were back then. The chapters in Part II present analyses of the changes during the two years that followed.

In addition to providing post-hurricane analyses of Puerto Rico’s news media and their audiences, a corollary objective of the second part of the book is to share an “insider’s view” of challenges facing the Island’s journalists in colonial settings and in these times of crises. These analyses, based on data gathered in 2018, also delve into the journalists’ considerations about the future of the news media and about media education. Two additional goals guided this book, and are the reason for Part III and the last two chapters. One is to present theoretical frameworks for helping understand how and why the media and Puerto Rico operate in their particular colonial settings. Those frameworks are relevant for analyses and understanding of the news media systems in other colonial nation-states or territories. The other objective embodied in the final chapter, is to put forward a series of recommendations for the much-needed research about the history and workings of Puerto Rico’s news media, of the media’s audiences, and about the real or potential effects of the traditional as well as expanding and ever-present social media. Throughout the chapters, including the final one, the analyses will allude to the reality of Puerto Rico’s news media operating in colonial settings and in times of crises. If this book contributes to additional research in this arena, there might well be more clarity on the workings of the news media and how these, in turn, help shape the political, economic, social and cultural dynamics of the Island and thus the emerging history of Puerto Rico, too.

Why Puerto Rico?

To date, there remain major voids in the systematic historical and social science-based research about the media in Puerto Rico. A variety of theses, books, and essays about the Island’s media offer insights about particular historical moments of some outlets and address content patterns and characteristics of news and entertainment (Dávila, 1998; Pérez Lugo, 2001; Tian and Robinson, 2014), provide critiques of media-government interconnections or influences in selected narrow time periods, and address ideological implications of media operations at a historical moment (Asociación de Periodistas de Puerto Rico, 2018; Plá Rodríguez, 1996; Rivero, 2005; Subervi-Velez et al., 1990). However, still not enough has been written about the beginnings and transformations of the major or alternative media over the years, their changing structures, management, organization, connections and interdependency with political parties, individuals, or with economic interests or corporations be these national (from Puerto Rico) or from the US or other countries. Those shortcomings, in turn, limit broad and in-depth analyses and understanding not only of how the news media operate, but also about how they may influence the development of Puerto Rican society at large. Daily news is printed, broadcast, and shared via the Internet and social media, and some news-related events are observable. But not sufficiently known is what communication dynamics contribute to the selection and dissemination of particular news stories but not others (Alonso, 2011).

The current literature about the news media in Puerto Rico (cited thr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• Epilogue
• References
• Index