Journalistic Roles of the Media in Ecuador during the State of Emergency due to COVID-19
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Abstract
This article has as its main objective performing an analysis of the journalistic roles performed by the media in Ecuador during the State of Emergency due to COVID-19 between March and September 2020. The methodology employed consists of a content analysis with an analytical and descriptive approach of the news broadcasted in the main media tv, radio, printed and digital platforms in Ecuador; in which the presence of six journalistic roles was measured: interventionist, vigilant, loyal-facilitator, info-entertaining and civic and service roles. Trough the method of the built week, a sample was designed in systematic-stratified manner, this method is framed within the Journalistic Role Performance (JRP) project. 1932 informative pieces were analyzed: 574 news in printed media, 488 news in TV media, 248 in radio stations, and 622 in online media. Coding was performed through a code book and application of analysis tokens created as part of the JRP project. The results displayed that the journalistic roles highlighted during Ecuador’s confinement were the interventionist, vigilante info-entertaining and civic ones. In the conclusions, a relevant fact is that despite of not having a predominant role, the presence of the info-entertainment over the civic and service role is relevant; i.e., the news about the pandemic were more emotional and sensationalist, mostly on TV. Likewise, more space was given to the journalist for its interpretation, which contributed more information from his/her subjectivity.
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