The present volume is concerned with the battles between governments and corporate or established media in South America in the context of the resurgence of the Left. As the posthumous foreword by Ernesto Laclau makes clear, most of the book's attention is devoted to answering questions about the polarised confrontations with media institutions in the populist variant of the Latin American turn to the left. The title and the introduction announce that these conflicts should be interpreted as ‘closely related to questions of international political economy and the global politics of unequal development’. Part III of the book explicitly addresses the governmental media strategies and policy reforms in the wider context of the different patterns and alternatives related to global capitalist insertion that emerged in the post-neoliberal moment. In the first two parts, however, there are only lateral references to the international political economy dimension of the media-government conflicts.

Part I contains three chapters. The first one, by Robert McChesney, a leading US scholar in the field of political economy of communications, revises the theories on journalism and democracy and reconstructs the radical democratic media tradition in order to provide some references against which the outcomes of the current struggles in Latin America can be measured. The other way round, the second chapter, looks at the media reform efforts in South America with the aim of extracting political and policy lessons for Europe and the United Kingdom in particular. A third chapter, by Arne Hintz, centres on the significant and unprecedented changes in community media policy in the region, paying special attention to the role of grassroots and policy activism in the legal reforms that took place. The chapter describes the innovative and standard setting character of the new community media legislation in Uruguay, Argentina and some of the Andean countries. It also offers important insights regarding the factors that brought about these reforms, such as political opportunities, the formation of transnational advocacy networks, policy transfer and policy diffusion processes.

Part II of the volume contains four case studies and an essay on populism and the mainstream media. The chapter on Ecuador by Mauro Cerbino et al. presents a contextualised, nuanced and theoretically informed presentation of the confrontation between Rafael Correa and the private media. The authors explain the conflict as a ‘populist rupture’ (in Laclau's sense) occurring in the context of an audio-visual democracy. In addition, the contribution offers a detailed examination of the different strategies and courses of action followed by both sides in the battle for public opinion, concluding that the government uses the same communicative weapons as the corporate media to wage war. This polarised and mirror-like configuration, the authors follow, has had mixed results in terms the quality of public debate and the democratic distribution of public voice. The two following chapters, one on Argentina and the other one on Venezuela, use a more celebratory tone to describe the governmental policy initiatives and struggles against the dominant corporate media. This tone diminishes their analytical and critical value, leaving unanswered questions about constraints and challenges to media reformism. The article on Venezuela, for instance, enumerates several state policies aimed at the promotion of participatory democracy in the area of communication. While it is interesting to state the significant number of participatory-oriented measures, the study lacks an evaluative effort as to how these initiatives translated into effective autonomous practices. Despite the dominant focus on the populist experiences, the volume lacks a chapter on the Bolivian case where the Evo Morales government also engaged in a bitter media war. Instead, the book offers a contribution on Brazil by Carolina Matos that looks at the impact of the Internet for public debate, pluralism and political participation. By examining the uses of the digital media in recent electoral campaigns and during the massive street protests of June 2013 throughout the country, the author finds that, despite the difficulties to reverse the offline inequalities, the new media have some potential to constitute counter-publics and alternatives to one-sided discourses in contexts of partisan and concentrated mainstream media. Closing the second part, Roberto Follari's essay on populism and the mainstream media suggests looking at the confrontations as a game of ‘mutual transgression of fields’ that ends in a sort of stalemate: while populist governments invade the media field, they fail to strip the private corporate media from their hegemony based on the legitimacy of journalistic discourse; on the other hand, private media are condemned to failure when trying to operate directly in the political arena.

Part III contains a contribution and concluding remarks that are directly concerned with the international political economy of communication. The article by Katherine Reilly provides an insightful analysis of the relationship between the management of capitalist insertion and the patterns of media reform in South America. In this perspective, media reforms cannot be thought independently from general development strategies. The level of plurality of voices is not independent from the redistribution of resources, while media reform patterns are closely related to given balances between state and market as driving forces of development. The author shows how Brazil's international integration pattern implies a pro-business attitude that favoured market principles and competition in telecommunication policies rather than regulation. On the other hand, countries such as Venezuela, which seek a more autonomous path in the international order and where the state is the prime mover, risk polarised and clientelist media confrontations given the top-down and resource-dependent mobilisation of society. This provocative article closes with a suggestion to shift the focus of media reform research in the region towards these wider processes and environments.

To sum up, while the volume has its weaknesses and inconsistencies, scholars interested in the field of media and politics in Latin America will find valuable insights on the on-going media wars in Latin America.