Latin America has a vibrant culture of journalism. It’s a curious fact, however, that surprisingly little overlap exists between news outlets there and the media landscapes north of the Mexican border or across the Atlantic. In the United States, Canada, and Europe this world of reporting and writing remains largely undiscovered country. We at Latin American News Digest intend to change this sorry
state of affairs. We strive to provide North Americans and Europeans (and Africans, Asians, and Australians for that matter) with wide spectrum coverage of news and commentary, produced by Latin Americans, for Latin Americans. The value we add comes not just from presenting the highlights, but from recognizing patterns across countries, noting differences, following themes, aggregating and synthesizing. Roughly 585 million people live in the Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries of Latin America and lots of interesting things are happening there. Is Latin America simply too big for such a quest? Well if broad coverage of the region is an impossible dream, then so is most journalism. The same argument could be made against attempting to cover individual countries with one hundred, two hundred, or over three hundred million inhabitants, such as Mexico, Brazil, and the United States. What is enough news? What does it mean to be “well-informed”? Just how many papers do most “well-informed” people read; a local paper, a national paper, and perhaps a couple of news magazines? We digest over one hundred newspapers and magazines, and the number is growing. While world news services make half-hearted efforts to cover the region, the labors of their shrinking corps of foreign correspondents only hint at the journalistic riches available. And with the default emphasis such outlets place on the U.S. and Europe (with a tendency to see other parts of the globe from that perspective), they often give relatively short shrift to "emerging" regions. But it’s not just a matter of quantity of coverage, which is, to be sure, pretty low on average in major papers outside of Latin America. It’s also a matter of what is covered. What mainstream journalism often generates is a streamlined and overly simplified version of events, with a fairly narrow scope of what is “fit to print”, with an even more narrow view of acceptable interpretations. Instead of providing diversified news and commentary about Latin America, it often acts as a filtering mechanism, constricting the flow of information and range of opinion. Our aim is to even the odds, and provide a better way to follow events as they unfold across Latin America, by observing how they are covered there. We also do our utmost to increase the number of voices heard, and expand the diversity of explanations provided. To this end, we bring out points of view (on both the right and the left) that are seldom, or mostly likely, never heard in the “developed” world’s media. Latin America does not speak with one voice, and many of these voices say things that discomfort groups that hold social, economic, and political power in the region (or over it). Critiques of the status quo as defined in Washington D.C., London, Paris, or Berlin might as well not exist, as far as the mainstream media “in the north” is concerned. It has no patience with ideas that are deemed “immature”, “unserious”, or simply don’t tag along obediently with the accepted narratives.
