El debate constitucional en los medios de comunicación locales cubanos: factores que influyen en la construcción de la agenda temática

Abstract

Cuba is currently engaged in a process of constitutional reform that aims at important economic, political and social changes. The popular consultation, as an act of widespread participation in the country, is embedded into a context of deep transformations of the Cuban media system, which suggests a more critical look at issues of public interest. Taking this into account, this article analyzes the internal and external factors that influence the construction of media agendas on the process of popular consultation of the draft Constitution of the Republic in the provincial press in Santiago de Cuba. And it takes as a reference point studies that have characterized media agendas in Cuba or have studied their behavior in the face of eventual or specific issues. A mixed design of concurrent triangulation was applied, and the Analysis-Synthesis and the Inductive-Deductive analysis were used as general methods. More specifically, a content analysis was applied to the Sierra Maestra newspaper and the CMKC radio station and semi-structured interviews were conducted with the journalists of the above referred media. During the 14 weeks of the measurement, the media agendas prioritized topics such as history, public health, education and institutional activities; what matches previous results on the subject. The presence of nine attributes related to the most discussed articles was determined and the analysis revealed that the news coverage was variable in the case of the newspaper and had greater stability in that of the radio-station.