Throughout the past decade, several countries in Latin America have approved new media laws which seek to reform the industry and to allow broader access to community and independent media in order to address the disparities in coverage.

When thousands of Hondurans protested in the streets of Tegucigalpa in May demanding the resignation of President Juan Orlando Hernandez after reports surfaced that his presidential campaign fraudulently used funds from the country’s social security program, they were surprised their passionate demonstrations didn’t make it to the headlines of the country's main newspapers.

At the same time in Ecuador, a smaller group of protesters launched a series of demonstrations, both for and against the government led by President Rafael Correa.

While the Ecuadorean opposition protesters began their demonstrations rallying against two tax laws, after President Rafael Correa temporarily suspended the bills and called for a debate, protesters shifted their demands to ousting the democratically-elected president.

Despite being only a fraction of the number of protesters in both Honduras, the Ecuadorean opposition made it to the front cover of the country's newspapers, and the protests were covered widely both in the national and international the media, as was witnessed when opposition lawmaker Andes Paez was interviewed on CNN Spanish.

So what makes Ecuador's protests more important than those in Honduras? To be frank, nothing.

If anything, two presidents almost directly linked to corruption scandals would be a far juicier story for any journalist.

However, commercial media in Latin America continues to hold a particularly privileged position of power in every society, and it is rarely up to an individual journalist to freely choose what to cover and how to report it.

Structural restraints imposed by media companies play a large part in the final outcome of what gets covered and what doesn’t.

Though censorship is rarely direct, media companies have the power to make a series of decisions, which build a structure that fits their ideological perspective.

This means that some voices will not be heard, while others will be featured regularly. Whether or not a story is worth publishing follows a similar logic.

After numerous studies, scholars have agreed that pluralism in the media improves democratic deliberation, thus making any democracy richer and more knowledgeable.

This, however, is far from a reality in today's world, where patterns show increasing monopolization of media markets around the world.

Amid this global trend, Latin American governments have promoted new media laws to reform and expand their media markets.

Media reform pioneer, Venezuela, approved its Social Responsibility for Radio and Television (RESORTE) law in 2005.

Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina and Uruguay would soon follow. But not all of these laws apply the same approach towards media reform.

Some emphasize media property while others incorporate content-related issues to the legislation.

Given the current polarization between commercial media and progressive governments, many newspapers and television stations have adopted an openly adverse stance to any kind of media regulation.

Many NGOs and media outlets have criticized the strained relationship between these actors and the new governments in power, leading many to believe the new regulations are political tools to silence opposition.

But the reality is often more nuanced than NGO narratives of good versus bad. Some of these new frameworks have ended decades of government benefits awarded to monopolized media corporations.

As expert Martin Becerra highlights in an article published last year, “In various countries there were never (legal) dispositions regarding license expiration for the audiovisual sector, which has been an obstacle to launch (new license) contests (in Brazil and Uruguay for example), or, when they did exist, they were not enforced.”

Other researchers have found that, through different legal maneuvers, for decades, governments had awarded subsidies and other economic benefits to the biggest media corporations in the region.

Two World Views Collide

Despite the fact that conservative and liberal factions alike recognize the importance of pluralism in the media for democracy in the West, the neoliberal trend has pushed countries to deregulate the media industry further. This has led to an increasing concentrated media market in the hands of a few.

This new trend is based on the belief that freedom of expression is rooted in the individual freedom of speech, which was based on the ability of any citizen to speak his/her political views.

However, as Yale professor Owen Fiss contends, the reality has changed dramatically and in today's world it is not enough to speak up to be heard.

Access to the media becomes a central feature in the construction of the public debate, and thus the state must have the ability to regulate the media to guarantee that the broadest possible diversity of voices in society have a say in what concerns the general public.

Opposition to this view is based on the liberal belief that the government should not regulate the media, and that self-regulation will ensure that all voices will be heard.

However, after decades of experience with this model – contrary to most Western nations – in Latin America commercial media developed without public media contesting its hegemony – the rise of progressive governments have disrupted the traditional status-quo.

If the 90s saw the biggest growth, both in income and in benefits, for the large media conglomerates in the region, the beginning of the 21st century has seen the mainstream media torpedoed by criticism and questioning from the people.

Dozens of media monitors – most of them founded in the late 90s – have been set up throughout the region and social movements have been vital in pushing for media regulations in countries such as Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil.

Even though the notion of freedom of speech has been largely debated in academia and amongst the citizenship, private corporations have reacted in a similar way, regardless of the country, condemning every effort to diminish their share of power.

Benefits – such as tax cuts, subsidies and others – which these corporations had taken for granted, due to their continuous political links with elites, have now vanished.

Progressive governments have also introduced public media outlets and government-led campaigns to question the mainstream media's dominating discourse.

The result has been a clear division between two worldviews; while corporations fights for a free-market system and small government, state-owned media promotes the political views of the parties in power.

This has led to a battle for the dominant narrative over events. While private media go through lengths to portray dim scenarios and inevitable catastrophes, public media defends official policies and programs.

Recently, the private media have had a strong, if not negative impact throughout the region in times of recent political crises. For example, the private media in Venezuela decisively backed the ousting of President Hugo Chavez in 2002.

In a similar fashion, the mainstream media in Honduras justified the coup d'etat against President Manuel Zelaya in 2009, and Ecuadorean commercial media became a megaphone for critics of Rafael Correa's government, denying that his violent abduction in a police hospital in 2010 was not a coup attempt.

Public media, on the other hand, was vital to informing thousands of Paraguayans about the irregular and illegal process carried by Congress to remove President Fernando Lugo from power.

However, despite the polarized political outlook presented by both types of media, Latin Americans remain skeptical. According to a 2012 study by the Vanderbilt University, in countries such as Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela and Bolivia, only around 50 percent of the people trust mass media.

Meanwhile, in countries such as Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala, a bare 60 percent of the people polled said they trusted mass media in general.

These numbers – which do not differ between public and private media – seem to suggest that regional media is not taken at face value, and that Latin American audiences scrutinize their sources.

Democratizing the Media and Challenges to Come

The different media regulations in the region cannot be homogenized. As the table below shows, the regulations vary from nation to nation.

This introduces a challenge for different countries to address. For example, the media laws in Ecuador and Venezuela contain dispositions which legislate on content published by the media, while Argentina and Uruguay's laws mainly deal with ownership limitations.

Brazil and Chile have both incorporated community media into their existing legislation and social movements together with journalist unions are pushing for the approval of new media laws which delimit and better regulate the media landscape.

Many critics have pointed out the importance of not only focusing on public and private media, but also of pushing forward the creation of educational and community media outlets.

Given the economic difficulties faced by such media, the Ecuadorean media law and the Argentine legislation seek to guarantee – with state support – the creation of community-led initiatives.

As various media activists have pointed out, the recognition of community-led media outlets and the reservation of a third of frequencies for this sector – a measure included in the Ecuadorean, Uruguayan, Argentine and Bolivian media laws – are a historic step forward.

The introduction of media ownership and monopoly as a problem that affects society as a whole has also increased the debate about access to information as a key feature of more transparent democracy.