Global Discourse and Local Readings of Development

Abstract

/ This article builds upon the definition of development as an ideological field to explore journalism as a site where global discourses of development meet locally grounded meanings to shape social understandings of modernization and progress in developing nations. The Puerto Rican experience during the promotion of Operation Bootstrap (1947—63) was selected as a case study to examine how the local press framed the process of industrialization as a news event of national and international relevance and thus mediated the definition of development as a public affair and redefined boundaries in the public and private spheres. Drawing on the notion of `mediated publicness', and its implications for the transformation of visibility and the organization of hegemony in modern societies, this research also discusses the ideological effects of such reporting in the particular context of colonialism and dependent development in Puerto Rico.