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Political communication researchers often take for granted that a free press is one of the most important pillars of a solid democracy. Based on the western Fourth Estate model, they suppose that a free press naturally acts as an accountability agent, by protecting the interests of common citizens against government corruption and political abuses. Like many other nonwestern regions of the world, studies about the relationship between media and politics in Latin America usually adopt a ‘transition to democracy’ approach, by evaluating them more or less positively in reference to their degree of conformity to western examples. Typically, these studies describe advances of Latin American media toward a more democratic model or point to the obstacles preventing this from happening. However, these studies rarely explore a third possibility: What about cases in which the free press seemingly conspire against the democratic order? The 2016 parliamentary coup that overthrew President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil pro...

American journalism has been taken as an almost universal standard for comparative journalism studies. Most of those focus on the adoption of American-born rhetoric and practices by other countries’ news media and journalists. This article maintains that this approach is misleading, because first, it minimizes the fact that American journalism is a cultural artifact too; and second, it offers a very simplistic model of the influence of American journalism on other countries. By analyzing the Brazilian news media, and the specific way it appropriates the American ‘Fourth Branch’ rhetoric, I maintain that the relationship that other countries’ journalisms establish with the American type of journalism must be understood as a creative adaptation, rather than a simple adoption.