Abstract
This chapter provides an update of Ecuadorian news coverage of environmental issues. Worsening media–state relations, a harsh legal environment for media criticism of political actors, and a national economy based in large part on neoextractivist activities present serious challenges for in-depth investigative reporting and have reduced journalists’ ability to investigate powerful domestic actors. At the same time, increasing national political attention to the impacts of climate change has opened the door for new opportunities to train and report on environmental issues. We find new openings for climate change reporting in certain contexts and provide discussion of new interfaces of media and state agendas.
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Notes
- 1.
Alexa is an Amazon.com company: ‘its Traffic Ranks are based on the traffic data provided by users in Alexa’s global data panel over a rolling 3 month period. Traffic Ranks are updated daily. A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of Unique Visitors and Pageviews. Unique Visitors are determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day.’ Retrieved from: https://support.alexa.com/hc/en-us/articles/200449744-How-are-Alexa-s-traffic-rankings-determined-.
- 2.
The role of the DesInventar database is the systematic collection, documentation, and analysis of data about losses caused by disasters associated with natural hazards in several countries. In Ecuador, daily updates of this database are now the responsibility of the National Secretariat for Risk Management (NSRM). The main sources of information in this inventory from 1970 to 2007 were the newspapers El Comercio , based in Quito, and El Universo in Guayaquil. Since that time, the collection has also included reports from the country’s basic organizations such as fire brigades, the Red Cross, and the police. https://online.desinventar.org/desinventar/#ECU-DISASTER, 1970 – 2018-02-18.
- 3.
Ecuador offered to stop oil extraction in a part of the Yasuni National Park called Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) in return for payments of $3.6 billion from the international community. ‘But while Correa’s proposal generated interest, there were few takers, in part because he insisted that Ecuador alone would decide how the donations would be spent.’ As a result, Ecuador’s President abandoned the plan in August 2013 (AP, The Guardian 2013).
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Vigón, M., Pinto, J., Martínez-Bustos, L. (2018). Environmental News Coverage in Ecuador: New Resources, Old Media–State Tensions and Practices. In: Takahashi, B., Pinto, J., Chavez, M., Vigón, M. (eds) News Media Coverage of Environmental Challenges in Latin America and the Caribbean. Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70509-5_5
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