Arts, Faculty of
Journalism, School of
DSpace
UBCV
Merchan, Juan
Master of Journalism - MJ
University of British Columbia
This thesis examines the news coverage of El Tiempo, Colombia’s largest and most influential newspaper, on the massacres committed by the FARC guerilla and the AUC paramilitary during the 1999 - 2002 peace process between the Colombian government and the FARC. The study confirmed some observations from previous research concerning the Colombian news ecosystem and the news coverage of the Colombian armed conflict by conducting a framing analysis of El Tiempo's news stories, front-page headlines, and standfirsts that were published within five days after the massacres occurred. It also identified problematic patterns in the news reporting of the massacres, such as the presence of victim-blaming accusations made by official sources and armed groups and the poor journalistic fact verification of the events. This thesis contributes to the communications and journalism studies in three ways. Firstly, it examines the news coverage of Colombia’s most important newspaper during a significant time period in Colombia’s history: the 1999-2002 peace process. Secondly, the study expands the comprehension of how news production in Colombia operates in times of crisis. Finally, it demonstrates the research capabilities of KH-Coder, a text analysis software, and promotes its use in communications and journalism studies.
FRAMING VIOLENCE IN TIMES OF PEACE TALKS: EL TIEMPO’S NEWSCOVERAGE OF MASSACRES COMMITTED DURING THE 1999–2002 COLOMBIANGOVERNMENT - FARC PEACE PROCESSbyJuan MerchanA THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OFTHE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OFMASTER OF JOURNALISMinTHE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIESTHE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA(Vancouver)April 2023© Juan Merchan, 2023The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduateand Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled:Framing Violence in Times of Peace Talks: El Tiempo’s News Coverage of MassacresCommitted during the 1999–2002 Colombian Government - FARC Peace Processsubmitted by Juan Merchan in partial fulfilment of the requirements forthe degree of Master of Journalismin JournalismExamining Committee:Dr. Saranaz Barforoush, Assistant Professor, School of Journalism, Writing, and Media, UBCSupervisorDr. Pilar Riaño, Professor, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, UBCCo-supervisoriiAbstractThis thesis examines the news coverage of El Tiempo, Colombia’s largest and most influentialnewspaper, on the massacres committed by the FARC guerilla and the AUC paramilitary duringthe 1999 - 2002 peace process between the Colombian government and the FARC. The studyconfirmed some observations from previous research concerning the Colombian news ecosystemand the news coverage of the Colombian armed conflict by conducting a framing analysis of ElTiempo's news stories, front-page headlines, and standfirsts that were published within five daysafter the massacres occurred. It also identified problematic patterns in the news reporting of themassacres, such as the presence of victim-blaming accusations made by official sources andarmed groups and the poor journalistic fact verification of the events. This thesis contributes tothe communications and journalism studies in three ways. Firstly, it examines the news coverageof Colombia’s most important newspaper during a significant time period in Colombia’s history:the 1999-2002 peace process. Secondly, the study expands the comprehension of how newsproduction in Colombia operates in times of crisis. Finally, it demonstrates the researchcapabilities of KH-Coder, a text analysis software, and promotes its use in communications andjournalism studies.iiiLay SummaryThis thesis looks at how Colombia's largest and most influential newspaper, El Tiempo, reportedon the massacres committed by the FARC guerilla and the AUC paramilitary during the1999-2002 peace process between the Colombian government and the FARC. By analyzing ElTiempo's news stories, headlines, and standfirsts published within five days after the massacresoccurred, the study found some problems in the news reporting of these events, includingvictim-blaming accusations and poor journalistic fact verification. The paper makes threecontributions to communications and journalism studies: firstly, it examines the news coverageof Colombia's most influential newspaper during a significant time period in the country'shistory; secondly, it expands understanding of how news production operates during times ofcrisis in Colombia; and finally, it demonstrates the research capabilities of KH-Coder, a textanalysis software, which could be helpful in future studies.ivPrefaceThis thesis is an original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Juan Merchan.vTable of ContentsAbstract......................................................................................................................................... iiiLay Summary................................................................................................................................ivPreface.............................................................................................................................................vTable of Contents.......................................................................................................................... viList of Tables............................................................................................................................... viiiList of Figures................................................................................................................................ivList of Abbreviations.................................................................................................................... xiAcknowledgements...................................................................................................................... xiiDedication....................................................................................................................................xiii1 Introduction................................................................................................................................11.1 Socio-political context....................................................................................................... 21.1.1 Colombia's strategic geopolitical position................................................................ 21.1.2 The emergence of the guerillas and the paramilitary groups................................... 31.1.3 The 1999- 2002 Colombian Government - FARC guerrilla peace process..............71.1.4 Uribe’s tenure and contemporary Colombian political panorama............................81.2 The Colombian armed conflict during the Caguan peace process...................................101.2.1 Dynamics of the FARC's acts of violence during 1999-2002................................ 111.2.2 Dynamics of the AUC's acts of violence during 1999-2002.................................. 121.3 The Colombian news media ecosystem...........................................................................131.3.1 El Tiempo newspaper..............................................................................................141.3.2 Colombian news media coverage of the armed conflict........................................ 151.4 Study purpose and motivation......................................................................................... 162 Literature Review.................................................................................................................... 192.1 A review of the literature on agenda-setting and framing analysis................................. 192.1.1 Defining framing.................................................................................................... 202.1.2 The roles of frames in news media messages........................................................ 212.1.3 Framing armed conflicts.........................................................................................222.1.4 Frames and news influence.................................................................................... 232.2 Journalistic sources..........................................................................................................242.3 Journalistic verification................................................................................................... 253 Methods....................................................................................................................................263.1 Framing analysis.............................................................................................................. 273.1.2 Inductive approach to framing analysis..................................................................283.2 Search rationale and data selection..................................................................................29vi3.2.1 Data collection process...........................................................................................303.2.2 Units of analysis..................................................................................................... 323.3 Content analysis software................................................................................................343.4 Classification of analysis................................................................................................. 344 Findings.....................................................................................................................................404.1 News texts analysis...........................................................................................................404.1.1 Excessive reliance on official sources....................................................................404.1.2 FARC in active voice sentences............................................................................. 424.1.3 AUC in passive voice sentences.............................................................................444.1.4 Victims at fault....................................................................................................... 464.1.5 FARC – AUC clash................................................................................................ 474.1.6 The peace process...................................................................................................494.1.7 The armed group.................................................................................................... 514.2 Front-page headlines and standfirsts analysis...................................................................534.2.1 Use of stirring language and disparity in the coverage.......................................... 544.2.2 FARC: omnipresent across the headlines and standfirsts.......................................594.2.3 No direct reference to the AUC..............................................................................625 Discussion................................................................................................................................. 645.1 Use of official sources..................................................................................................... 645.2 El Tiempo’s fact verification........................................................................................... 685.3 Grammatical representation of the FARC and the AUC................................................. 725.4 Victim blaming.................................................................................................................765.5. The armed group and the use of generic names...............................................................795.6 Unreported massacres...................................................................................................... 826 Conclusion................................................................................................................................ 85References.....................................................................................................................................91Appendices..................................................................................................................................102Appendix A: List of codes..................................................................................................... 102Appendix B: Databases search...............................................................................................107Appendix C: El Tiempo’s online portal search......................................................................109viiList of TablesTable 3.1 Top 20 keywords associated with the word FARC in news texts andheadlines/leads covering FARC massacres (n=5)......................................................................... 38viiiList of FiguresFigure 3.1 Top 10 most frequent words in news texts and headlines/leads covering FARCmassacres…………………………..………………………………………………………….… 35Figure 3.2 Co-occurrence of words in the news texts and headlines/leads covering FARCmassacres (n=5)............................................................................................................................. 36Figure 3.3 Nominalization of the FARC guerilla in headlines/leads covering FARC massacres(n=5).............................................................................................................................................. 37Figure 4.1 Use of the Fuentes Oficiales code in all news texts ............................................. 41Figure 4.2 Number of occurrences of active verb forms of asesinar (to murder) in news textscovering FARC massacres............................................................................................................ 43Figure 4.3 Number of occurrences of active verb forms of matar (to kill) in news textscovering FARC massacres............................................................................................................ 44Figure 4.4 The Proceso code in news texts covering FARC massacres, distributed byyear................................................................................................................................................ 49Figure 4.5 The Proceso code in news texts covering AUC massacres, distributed byyear…………………………………………………………..…….............................................. 50Figure 4.6 Co-occurrence network of most frequent words in news texts covering FARCmassacres.…………………………………………………………………………..…………… 51ixFigure 4.7 Co-occurrence network of most frequent words in news texts covering AUCmassacres………..………………………………………………………….…………………… 52Figure 4.8 Top 10 most frequent words in front-page headlines and standfirsts coveringFARC massacres………………………………………………………………….…...…………60Figure 4.9 Co-occurrence network of most frequent words in front-page headlines andstandfirsts covering AUC massacres…………………………………..….………………..…… 61Figure 4.10 Top 10 most frequent words in front-page headlines and standfirsts covering AUCmassacres……………………………………………………………………….………….……. 62Figure 5.1 Moreno’s flow of information in the journalistic exercise……………..….……. 67Figure 5.2 The Comunidad code in the news texts covering FARC and AUC massacres…. 69xList of AbbreviationsEnglish TranslationACCU Autodefensas Campesinas deCórdoba y UrabáField Workers Self-Defendersof Córdoba and UrabáAUC Autodefensas Unidas deColombiaUnited Self-Defence Forcesof ColombiaCNMH Centro Nacional de MemoriaHistóricaNational Centre for HistoricalMemoryFFMM Fuerzas Militares deColombiaMilitary Forces of ColombiaELN Ejército de LiberaciónNacionalNational Liberation ArmyEPL Ejército Popular deLiberación NacionalPopular Liberation ArmyFARC Fuerzas ArmadasRevolucionarias de ColombiaRevolutionary Armed Forcesof ColombiaM-19 Movimiento 19 de Abril 19th of April MovementMAS Muerte a Secuestradores Death to KidnappersUP Unión Patriótica Patriotic UnionxiAcknowledgementsI offer my enduring gratitude to the faculty and staff from the UBC School of Journalism,Writing and Media, who have motivated me to continue my work in this field.I owe particular gratitude to Dr. Saranaz Barforoush, whose classes in the first term of theprogram ignited my quest to do this thesis. Her supervision during the thesis-making process wasalso absolutely beneficial.I thank Dr. Pilar Riaño for enlarging my research vision to ensure the historical, social andpolitical context of this thesis was well-defined and accurate. My thesis gained a great deal fromher contributions.Immense gratitude is owed to my parents, who have always inspired me to take my studies tolevels theirs could not reach due to various circumstances. Living thousands of kilometres away,I always felt their endless emotional support really close to me. Their perseverance to wake upevery day and live their lives in spite of difficulties is perplexing, and it inspires me to keepgoing during moments of hardship.xiiDedicationTo all the victims of the Colombian armed conflict, whose dreams of living in a country at peacehave been horribly crushed by deadly ambitions.Justice and truth will germinate.xiii1 Introduction¨Voy a contarles una triste historiaAy, que a nosotros nos sucedióDonde muchas personas murieronY eso es lo que me da dolor”(I will tell you a sad storyOh, that happened to usWhere many people diedAnd that’s what’s causing me pain)First stanza of a song composed by Nacer Hernández,one of the survivors of the Trojas de Cataca massacre.On February 10, 2000, 50 Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, (United Self-Defence Forces)members arrived in Trojas de Cataca, a fishing village in the Cienaga Grande region, a largemarsh area on the north coast of Colombia. The paramilitaries ordered the women and childrenin town to lock up inside their homes. Then, they put all the men in the village's chapel and chosefour fishermen from the group to ask them questions privately. Later that night, the paramilitariesmurdered the fishermen and left the village. This massacre triggered a mass displacement of thevillagers, who sought refuge in nearby towns. Nacer Hernández was one of those who fled thefishing village. Besides contextualizing the quote at the beginning of this chapter, this eventexemplifies some of the characteristics surrounding the massacres that occurred in Colombia inthe early 2000s. The arrival of an armed group to a human settlement, the selective killing ofsome of the inhabitants, and the subsequent displacement of the survivors are some of thedynamics characterizing these acts of violence occurring in Colombia between 1999 and 2002.This thesis examines the news coverage that the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo made ofmassacres during the 1999-2002 Colombian government - FARC guerrilla peace talks.1Specifically, it aims to identify the frames that El Tiempo journalists and editors used in the newscoverage of the massacres committed by the FARC guerilla and the AUC paramilitary groupsduring that period. The main research questions are: how did El Tiempo newspaper frame themassacres that the FARC guerrilla and the AUC paramilitary committed? And, were themassacres committed by the AUC paramilitary and the FARC guerillas framed differently?This introductory chapter provides a historical overview of Colombia's sociopolitical dynamicsover the past 50 years. It outlines the significant events and collateral situations that served as thesocio-cultural scenario for the journalistic work of El Tiempo journalists and editors. Then, acontextual overview of El Tiempo newspaper and the Colombian news media ecosystem isprovided to show the relevance of this news media outlet and the characteristics of thejournalistic work in Colombia during the time frame determined for this analysis. The chapterwill end with an exploration of the purpose and motivation for this study, describing the drivingforce leading to the realization of this thesis.1.1 Socio-political context1.1.1 Colombia's strategic geopolitical positionLocated in the northwest part of South America and with coasts on the Pacific Ocean and theCaribbean Sea, Colombia has historically been a strategic nation in geopolitics. In 1903, U.S.President Theodore Roosevelt directly influenced the secession of Panama from Colombia afterthe Colombian Senate rejected a Roosevelt-proposed treaty to allow the U.S. to build and operatea canal across the isthmus (Dougas, 2009). In 1928, the Colombian military violently repressed astrike of United Fruit Company's workers near Santa Marta on the Colombian Caribbean coast,resulting in a still-unknown number of dead workers. Historians agree that the Colombian2government hastily suppressed the strike to work for the interests of the U.S. company, whoserepresentatives and some U.S. officials considered the workers subversive and communist (EliasCaro & Vidal Ortega, 2012; Posada-Carbó, 1998).When the popular leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, leader of the Liberal Party, was assassinated in1948 in Bogota, the 7th Pan-American Convention was held in the city. The New York Timescovered this assassination and the subsequent angry mobs destroying the city in great detail, asGeneral George C. Marshall and the U.S. delegation attended the conference. The U.S.newspaper described how "Colombia battles leftist mobs burning and looting the capital."(Times, 1948, p. 1). Gaitan's assassination aggravated a period in Colombian socio-politicalhistory known as La Violencia (The Violence), which had started in 1946, and lasted until 1958(Comisión Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación (Colombia), 2013). The period wascharacterized by widespread violence, gruesome acts of cruelty and torture, forced dispossessionof lands and political instability (G. Livingstone, 2004). As a result, between 1948 and 1953,over 300.000 Colombians lost their lives (Thoumi, 1995).1.1.2 The emergence of the guerillas and the paramilitary groupsThe extent of the violent confrontation in the country decreased at the end of the 1950s but didnot end completely. While the military government of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla offered an amnestyto the liberal guerillas that had been fighting against the army and the police during La Violencia,it also launched a military offensive against liberal and communist self-defence groups in regionslike Sumapaz and departments1 like Tolima. Especially in southern areas of the Tolimadepartment, some of these liberal and communist groups decided to continue the armed fight in1 Colombia is divided into 32 provinces or departments. In this thesis, I will refer to them as departments.3smaller groups (Comisión Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación (Colombia), 2013; Molano,2016).Starting in 1960, a group of large landowners and sectors of the dominant classes organized apolitical alliance called Frente Nacional (National Front), where the Liberal and Conservativeparty leaders agreed to intercalate incumbent time in the presidency as a way to “pacify thecountry” (Hylton, 2006; S. Livingstone, 1994; Stokes, 2005). The alliance lasted until 1974.The first National Front government sought to negotiate the demobilization of the remnant armedgroups that had been active since the 1950s. The government initially promised to offer socialassistance through subsidies, farming tools, better roads, health assistance and educationprograms to these armed groups and the population in the areas where they were active in anattempt to comply with their demands. However, after some time, most of these promises wereleft unaccomplished (Molano, 2016, p. 44; Richani, 2013), and the armed intimidation of theColombian army against these remnant groups intensified. In 1962, the United States ambassadorin Colombia designed and backed a counterinsurgency plan called Plan Lazo, which aimed toeliminate the remnant groups and quasi-guerilla forces through social plans and militarycooperation. Plan Lazo was also the first organized and government-backed effort to organizecivilian self-defence units, which relieved the Colombian military units of local patrolling andgarrison duties (Briscoe, 2006; Molano, 2016).In the first years of the 1960s, some areas of Colombia were the epicentre where remnant armedgroups of displaced farmers and ex-combatants of the 1950s settled down and organized. Theseareas were to be known as Repúblicas Independientes (Independent Republics) (ComisiónNacional de Reparación y Reconciliación (Colombia), 2013). On May 18, 1964, the Colombian4government launched “Operation Marquetalia,” a military intervention seeking to eradicate oneof those independent republics located in the Marquetalia region, located in the south of theTolima department and bring the area back under the control of the state. Although it waspublicly celebrated as a significant success by the government, this military campaign did noteradicate this independent republic. Instead, it radicalized some of its members who escaped thisarmed intervention and later reorganized into more powerful groups (Molano, 2016, p. 53). InMay 1966, Pedro Antonio Marín (better known by his noms de guerre Manuel Marulanda Velezand Tirofijo) and other survivors of Operation Marquetalia founded the Fuerzas ArmadasRevolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), FARC (Molano,2016; Richani, 2013).Following up on the dynamics of the Cold War, the successive Colombian governments opted fora military solution to combat the leftist guerillas while seeding the anti-communist narrative insociety at the same time (Hristov, 2014). During the late 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s, theFARC guerilla organized a more complex military structure and created armed fronts in differentregions of the country (Kerr, 1988; Medina Gallego & Beltrán Beltrán, 2011). Other leftistguerillas were born during these years, such as ELN, M19 and EPL,2 which differed in ideologyand strategies to advance the armed revolution (Comisión Nacional de Reparación yReconciliación (Colombia), 2013).In the early 1980s, some Colombian drug cartels made military and logistic alliances withwealthy landowners, local politicians and members of the Colombian military trained in cold warcounterinsurgency. They aimed to fight the leftist insurgency by organizing illegal self-defencearmed groups specialized in selective killings. One of these armed groups, called Muerte a2 See List of abbreviations.5Secuestradores (Death to Kidnappers), or MAS, specialized in violently responding tokidnappings by identifying, capturing and killing kidnappers belonging to the leftist guerillas.This group eventually became a paramilitary organization (G. Livingstone, 2004; Stokes, 2005).In the 1980s, besides being the focal point of the US-led war on drugs, Colombia was also theground of a furious anti-subversive offensive led by these emerging paramilitary groups whodeclared an open war against FARC, ELN, M19, and other guerilla groups (Chernick, 1998). Aspart of the 1984 Colombian government - FARC guerilla peace negotiations, the FARC formed apolitical party called Union Patriotica (Patriotic Union), or UP, in 1985, in an attempt to allowits militants to make a transition into the democratic landscape (Stokes, 2005). From itsinception, but especially after that peace agreement failed, most of UP’s members werethreatened, tortured, and murdered. Between 1985 and 2002, 4153 people were killed, kidnappedor went missing in this systematic extermination (CNMH, 2018, p. 108).The 1991 Colombian constitution was received with hope by most of the population. The newdocument introduced a progressive and inclusive agenda that promoted democraticrepresentation and participation for historically marginalized communities. However, the armedconflict continued. The associations between the paramilitary groups and the drug cartels thathad started in the 1980s permitted a commonality of labour divisions concerning drugtrafficking. The paramilitary groups were able to enter the drug trade more easily thanks to thiscommonality, and they benefited from the profits of drug trafficking to escalate politicalviolence. During the first years of the 1990s, the guerilla groups were not involved in the drugtrade business. However, once they confirmed the potential benefit they could obtain for theirpolitical struggle, they started profiting from it by taxing local drug traffickers and cocaine plantgrowers (Echandía Castilla, 2001; Medina Gallego & Beltrán Beltrán, 2011; M. Romero, 2003).61.1.3 The 1999- 2002 Colombian Government - FARC guerrilla peace processIn 1997, the then-scattered cells of paramilitary groups joined forces. They formed theAutodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defence Forces), AUC, a unified organizationthat sought to compete with the nationwide presence of the FARC guerillas so that they couldoust the leftist group of most of the territories (Ballvé, 2020; M. Romero, 2003). In 1998,conservative candidate Andrés Pastrana won the presidential election of Colombia mainly thanksto his flagship campaign promise: starting a peace process with the FARC guerrillas (G.Livingstone, 2004). The Colombian population perceived the success of Pastrana's campaignpromise with immense expectation and hope.The peace process started on January 20, 1999, with Pastrana agreeing to grant FARC 42.000 kmof the country’s southeast so the talks could occur. The area was then vacated by military andpolice forces so that FARC militants could not be pursued or arrested during the negotiations.This demilitarized zone was widely known as Zona de Despeje and had the town of San Vicentedel Caguan3 as the epicentre of the talks. After some good initial signs, the peace talks began tocrack due to a series of violent events affecting the public trust in the peace process. In February1999, the guerilla group murdered three indigenous American activists (Democracy Now, 1999).In May 2000, a female farmer was killed after a bomb device around her neck exploded. Thenews media and the government initially blamed FARC for this crime (Los Angeles Times,2000), but it was later determined that a group of extortionists had committed the crime(Saavedra, 2022). In September 2000, a FARC member hijacked a commuter aircraft, forcing itto land in the demilitarized zone. In December, the FARC murdered Colombian congressrepresentative Diego Turbay Cotes, his mother, and three others on a rural road in the Caqueta3 This peace process is often referred to as the Caguan talks.7province. In September 2001, former minister and culture promoter Consuelo Araujo Noguerawas kidnapped and later murdered by one of the FARC’s fronts in the country's north (TheGuardian, 2001). These events, together with an increase in the number of kidnappingsperpetrated by FARC, shocked public opinion and marked fractures in the peace process.The peace process ended on February 20, 2002, when Pastrana made a televised speech showingproof of alleged illegal routes and runways for the drug trade in the demilitarized zone andinforming that the FARC had used the zone to commit multiple crimes. He then ordered theColombian Military Forces to regain control of the demilitarized zone (Pastrana Arango, 2002).During the Colombian government - FARC peace process, the AUC paramilitary expanded itsmilitary presence nationwide and continued committing crimes against civilians. Drug tradelords, local politicians, and some members of the Colombian military made strong alliances withthe AUC. They instigated this armed group to perpetrate killings of civilians in numerousmassacres (M. Romero, 2003).1.1.4 Uribe’s tenure and contemporary Colombian political panoramaBuilding on the social discontent of Colombian public opinion as the peace process collapsed,Alvaro Uribe Velez, a former governor of the Antioquia department, grew exponentially in thepolls for the presidential election of 2002 (G. Livingstone, 2004). Promising a hard andmilitaristic stance against the guerillas and narrowing the Colombian state to reduce corruption,Uribe jumped from a trivial 2% in the polls in early 2000 to the 53% he finally obtained on May26, 2002, the voting day. He got elected in the first round (Forero, 2002).8Before 2005, the Colombian constitution did not allow the re-election of presidents. However,Uribe's favouritism in the polls and his political power in Congress made it possible to alter thespecific article mentioning that restriction. He was re-elected in 2006 for a second term ending in2010 (Forero, 2006). From 2004 until 2006, Uribe's government made a demobilizing agreementwith the AUC paramilitaries, which had approximately 15.000 active members (Nussio, 2011).During the negotiations of the demobilizing agreement, the paramilitary group changed itsmodality of violence: they de-escalated the killing of several people in one violent event — amassacre — but other crimes like selective assassinations, torture, and enforced disappearanceincreased (Holmes et al., 2021; Restrepo & Muggah, 2009).Uribe’s Minister of Defence, Juan Manuel Santos, won the presidential run in 2010 (S. Romero,2010). Nurturing votes from the platform of the militaristic solution against the FARC (Uribe'sstrategy), Santos turned away from his former boss and, in 2012, initiated a peace process withthis guerilla group. After a 4-year negotiation and Santos' re-election in 2014, the Colombiangovernment and the FARC signed a peace agreement on November 24, 2016, ending a 52-yearconflict (Partlow, 2016).Ivan Duque, elected in 2018, won the presidential election running as a candidate of Uribe'sparty, Centro Democratico, a party that has openly opposed and boycotted the implementation ofthe FARC - Government peace accord (Casey & Abad, 2018). Duque promised to respect theagreements and roll out the points that were agreed on; however, during his tenure, manyorganizations exposed his government's negligence in the matter (Arredondo, 2019; JiménezSandoval, 2021).9After an intense campaign, former M19 combatant Gustavo Petro Urrego was elected presidentin June 2022. Petro’s political platform was endorsed by workers' and peasants' unions, theColombian feminist movement, some of the FARC ex-combatants and other social and artisticmovements (Turkewitz, 2022). In his campaign, Petro expressed his intentions to implement allthe agreements that the government signed with the FARC in 2016 and improve the conditions ofits ex-combatants.According to a UN Verification Mission report of December 2022, since the signing of the peaceagreement, 355 FARC ex-combatants have been murdered (Misión de Verificación de NacionesUnidas en Colombia, 2022).1.2 The Colombian armed conflict during the Caguan peace processThe acts of violence committed by the FARC guerillas and the AUC paramilitaries during thetime frame determined for this analysis demonstrate that the Colombian armed conflict was notat its ripe moment. Zartman (2001) defines a ripe moment as the stage of maturity of a conflictwhere the parties involved find themselves in a locked scenario from which neither of them canescalate to victory. Therefore, they seek any way out, potentially in a peaceful manner.Conversely, between 1999 and 2002, the AUC and the FARC groups used violence as a strategicresource to gain control of territories and intimidate local populations to support them (EchandíaCastilla, 2001). Their advancement over many regions of the country through violence wassteadfast, and they were convinced they could escalate to victory through it (M. Romero, 2003).All the actors involved in the Colombian armed conflict used violence against civilians as a warstrategy, including the Colombian Military Forces (military and police), the ELN, and otherarmed groups (CNMH, 2013). However, the dynamics of their attacks on civilians differed10depending on where they operated, the time frame of the conflict, and their war strategy itself(Rodríguez, 2011). The following two sections explain how the FARC and the AUC operatedand show the characteristics of their acts of violence during the time frame selected for thisanalysis.1.2.1 Dynamics of the FARC's acts of violence during 1999-2002During the time frame determined for this analysis, FARC had between 16.000 and 20.000combatants, the world's largest guerilla group (Braham, 2004). These combatants were organizedon 62 fronts, and exercised an active presence in 622 towns and cities of Colombia, roughly 60%of the country’s total (Aguilera Peña, 2010). FARC’s key war strategy was the attacks on the infrastructure. By attacking roads and bridges,this group wanted to keep their enemies (the Colombian Military Forces and the AUC) awayfrom the rural and strenuous paths and trails they well dominated (Medina Gallego & BeltránBeltrán, 2011). The group also aimed to display a destabilizing power by attacking electricitytransmission towers and official buildings in towns, such as city halls, town councils, andbuildings that belonged to public and private companies (CNMH, 2013).FARC also attacked civilians following some constant violent patterns:● Kidnappings: 2947 people● Attacks on towns: 242 attacks, killing 143 people4● Massacres: 77 massacres resulting in 442 civilians killed● Targeted killings: 525 people killed4 This type of military action greatly impacted the Colombian population, given the level of infrastructuredestruction that these attacks left. The CNMH describes the attacks on towns as “any incursion that implies thetemporary occupation of a territory, as well as a continuous military action aimed at destroying a military objectivewithin an urban area” (CNMH, 2013).11● Terrorist attacks: 8 terrorist attacks, killing 22 people5● Forced Displacement● Landmines plantingThey also affected civilians through mugging, extortions, and obstruction of local elections(CNMH, 2013). 1.2.2 Dynamics of the AUC's acts of violence during 1999-2002During the time frame selected for this analysis, the AUC criminal organization was at the heightof its power. It operated in approximately two-thirds of Colombia and had a heavy presence overthe Caribbean Coast and north of the Antioquia and Choco provinces (Insight Crime, 2011).Between 8000 and 12000 combatants operated in the country, distributed on ten fronts (M.Romero, 2003; Rutas del Conflicto, 2017).The primary war strategy of the AUC paramilitary was the use of violence to achieveintimidation. Therefore, massacres played an essential role in the group’s repertoire of violence.Due to their visibility and cruelty, massacres delivered a sobering message to the people living inthe area. The AUC hoped this would prevent them from collaborating with or aiding the guerillagroups (CNMH, 2013; M. Romero, 2003).The acts of violence against civilians committed by the AUC show some distinctive patterns:● Targeted killings: 1815 people killed● Massacres: 459 massacres resulting in 2995 civilians killed● Kidnappings: 981 people kidnapped5 The CNMH defines a terrorist attack as “any random attack committed with explosives against civilian objectivesin public spaces with a high potential of devastation or lethality” (CNMH, 2013).12● Tortures6 ● Sexual violence7The AUC’s acts of violence also involved mugging and threats. A particular characteristic ofAUC was the extreme cruelty in their attacks against civilians (CNMH, 2013). 1.3 The Colombian news media ecosystemRegarding how news media informs an audience about events of reality, Jayaka & Jayaka (2000)affirm that:It is truism that news media do not merely report facts. They also interpret or make senseof realities by framing them using a certain lens, and through that shaping the publicunderstanding of the world, especially regarding subjects that are far from the domain ofthe audience’s personal experience. (p. 154)In the Colombian context, the news media has shaped how the public understands and makessense of the national reality. Before the arrival of mass internet consumption and social media,the Colombian population knew of the events that took place beyond their direct domain throughprint, TV and radio news outlets (Marín-Arroyave, 2015; Medina Gallego, 2016). Regarding thecountry's armed conflict, these news outlets played a pivotal role in disseminating informationsurrounding attacks on towns, kidnappings, massacres, and selective assassinations, amongothers (Bonilla & Tamayo, 2005; Marín-Arroyave, 2015).7 United Nations defines conflict-related sexual violence as “rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forcedpregnancy, forced abortion, enforced sterilisation, forced marriage, and any other form of sexual violence ofcomparable gravity perpetrated against women, men, girls, or boys that is directly or indirectly linked to a conflict”(United Nations, 2002, p. 12).6 Torture, as defined by Colombian law, is the act of causing harm to a person to obtain information, punish them, orfor any other reason, employing force and causing physical or mental harm (Código Penal Colombiano, 2000).13It is essential to consider the dynamics of Colombian news production. Medina Gallego (2016, p.21) says that the Colombian news ecosystem comprises three distinct types of media outlets. Thefirst type is corporate news media, which typically follows the narrative dictated by largeeconomic and political conglomerates and incumbent governments. The second type is localnews outlets, which strive to mobilize their audiences by fostering a sense of togetherness.Finally, the third type is independent news anchors not affiliated with either of the above groups.In this context, the monopoly of the information in the country is owned by the corporate newsmedia, among which is El Tiempo newspaper. Nevertheless, independent, local and citizenjournalism news organizations have strived to distance themselves from this hegemonic narrativeby performing relevant coverage of local news, speaking to victims, armed actors and officialsources, and even being the source of resistance against violent groups during town attacks andmassacres (Rodríguez, 2011).1.3.1 El Tiempo newspaperEl Tiempo newspaper, the largest and most consulted source of information in Colombia (ElTiempo, 2009), is the logical choice for this analysis. El Tiempo is published daily, and duringthis study’s time frame, it had the highest circulation in Colombia: its average weekly readershipreached approximately 1,265 0000 people at the end of the 90s and the beginning of the 00s(Bonilla & Narváez Montoya, 2008). El Tiempo is part of a media conglomerate called CasaEditorial El Tiempo, which controls over 30 outlets, including newspapers, magazines, podcasts,and two TV channels. In May 2012, the Colombian richest man, Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo,purchased all the stocks belonging to the Casa Editorial El Tiempo (Agencia EFE - Colprensa,2012). He is now the sole owner of the entire conglomerate.14During the time frame selected for this analysis, the newspaper owners were Enrique SantosCalderón and Luis Fernando Santos. Its director was Enrique Santos Calderón.1.3.2 Colombian news media coverage of the armed conflictA rich corpus of research literature explores the news coverage of the Colombian armed conflict.A common observation from this literature is how the country's news media has reportedviolence in times of high intensity of the conflict and how they have represented the armedgroups. The authors have outlined the excessive reliance on official sources, the disparity in therepresentation of the armed groups, and the absence of the voice of the victims in the newscoverage of this conflict (Bonilla & Tamayo, 2005; Bonilla Vélez & Patiño Díaz, 2001; Serrano& Samouth, 2012).A 2003 United Nations Development Program Report describes the characteristics of theColombian news media and the historical stages it went through in the coverage of the armedconflict until then (United Nations Development Programme, 2003). The report affirms thatsince the 1990s, the Colombian news media ecosystem has adopted the rules imposed by theglobal market. As a result, there has been a war for the audiences. News outlets took theaudience members as mere consumers and assumed they needed to attract these consumers withemotional, encapsulated news reports (United Nations Development Programme, 2003). Thisspecific characteristic is helpful in understanding patterns that are discussed in Section 4.2.1.Medina Gallego (2016) comments on some of the most visible characteristics of news media inColombia and identifies five attributes of their role in the armed conflict. First, conglomeratenews media have ceded to the interests of the country's big social, economic, and political elites.Second, ideology has been instilled in their news coverage, affecting journalistic methods by15aligning these outlets with one part of the political spectrum and discrediting the non-hegemonicnarrative. Third, their news coverage is shallow and arbitrary, with no contextual explanation orthorough investigation regarding the cause of the conflict. When a feature or an in-depth story isreleased, their quest is motivated by the outlet's editorial line. Fourth, these news outlets haveachieved considerable weight in determining political stability, and both governments andpolitical parties have seized this to pursue their interests. Medina Gallego also observes howindependent news media outlets have used contemporary technology to reach audiences despitethe monopoly held by conglomerate news media.1.4 Study purpose and motivationThis thesis aims to study the news coverage that El Tiempo newspaper did of the massacrescommitted by the FARC guerillas and the AUC paramilitaries during the 1999-2002 Colombiangovernment - FARC peace talks. I chose to analyze the massacres, out of all the acts of violencecommitted by these two groups, for two reasons: first, as mentioned in sections 1.2.1 and 1.2.2,the FARC guerrilla and the AUC paramilitary had distinct military dynamics, and their acts ofviolence often differed. However, during the selected time frame, both the FARC guerrilla andthe AUC paramilitary committed massacres, allowing for a comparison of how El Tiempoframed this act of violence when committed by two different groups. The second reason waspersonal motivation: when I was growing up, my first contact with journalism came with ElTiempo Sunday editions that used to report the Colombian armed conflict and its more relevantevents across the country during 1999 - 2002. Aside from the profound horror that those newsstories caused me growing up, I grew intensely interested in news media and journalism byreading those reports, the editorial columns, op-eds, and cartoons that would discuss those16events. I would also be impacted and intrigued by the photographs accompanying the newsstories.My academic motivation to analyze Colombian news media is rooted in how this news mediahas historically been perceived by academia and the country’s audience. Marín-Arroyave (2015),a human rights researcher and professor, says that the Colombian news industry has always sidedwith the economic, political, and religious sources of power, which have guaranteed the newsoutlets’ participation in the consumption spectrum. The news outlets have allowed the powers toslide into their news reporting and editing decisions to determine how news are framed (p. 49).Specifically, regarding the coverage of the conflict, some previous studies seem to confirm thepropensity of major Colombian news media to frame the news about FARC violent eventsdifferently from those committed by the AUC or the Colombian military (García-Marrugo, 2012;Leech, 2008; Serrano, 2014). Authors have stated that many Colombians perceive a bias in thejournalistic work of big news conglomerates in favour of the powerful elites (Restrepo Betancur,2019). Some specific news outlets, such as RCN (a major broadcast outlet ), have a reputationfor being openly uribistas (followers of Alvaro Uribe, the ex-president referenced in Section1.1.4). Analyzing the coverage of Colombia’s flagship newspaper during one of the mostsombre periods in the country’s armed conflict provides a unique perspective on the debatesmentioned above.This study hopes to contribute to communications and journalism studies in at least three ways.First, it will use framing analysis techniques to study how one of Colombia's most influentialnewspapers covered relevant historical events in the country’s recent history. Second, it will addto the understanding of how Colombian journalism and news outlets operated in times of crisis in17the pre-social media age. Third, it also promotes this type of analysis in Colombian journalisticstudies by showing the use and research advantages of KH-Coder as a text analysis software.88 An explanation of how this software was used in this analysis can be found in Section 3.3.182 Literature ReviewThis literature review will explore key concepts in journalism studies related to framing andprovide a theoretical context from which the research method and analysis will stem. This reviewclarifies the key concepts and research strategies that were the foundation for this framinganalysis.2.1 A review of the literature on agenda-setting and framing analysisIn journalism studies, the agenda-setting theory has been used to examine the effects of mediamessages. It was initially conceptualized by Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw in theearly 1970s. Their landmark study analyzed the media coverage of the 1968 US presidentialelections and its impact on voters’ perception in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Their researchconcluded that the issues these voters deemed significant, such as foreign policy, law, order, andfiscal policy, were closely related to the issues emphasized by the news media in their newscoverage (McCombs & Shaw, 1972).The agenda-setting theory challenged the perception that news media had minimal effects onhow the audience prioritized societal issues and events (Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2006).Subsequent research and application of the theory elicited more concepts that analyze thesalience the news media give to specific characteristics of the events they report on. One of theseconcepts, known as framing, first emerged in psychology (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984),anthropology (Bateson, 1973), and sociology (Gamson & Goffman, 1975). When applied tocommunication and journalism studies, framing describes how the way an object or issue iscovered in a news report influences how this object or issue is understood by the audience of that19news report since both actors in this information exchange share some common frames (Entman,1993).2.1.1 Defining framingThe identification, differentiation, and limitation of research regarding framing is still an ongoingdiscussion in communications and journalistic studies (Golan & Wanta, 2001; McCombs &Evatt, 1995). Some scholars have provided a distinction between agenda setting on the one handand framing on the other, especially by giving framing a different and detailed definition. ForEntman (1993):To frame is to select mostly important aspects of a perceived reality and make them moresalient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problemdefinition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation. (p.52)Neuman et al. (1992) consider frames as conceptual elements that media and audiences use andrely on to make sense of information. Frames, Goffman (1981) affirms, are defined by, and are acentral part of, culture, and when reporting about issues, news outlets and their journalists startby grasping these conceptual elements present in culture, then magnify them, frame them, andfinally deliver them to the audience (Shoemaker & Reese, 1995). Based on this culture-baseddefinition of frames, the framing process that news media develops involves a complexrelationship between the journalist reporting the news and the individual in the audience, arelationship mediated by the culture where they live and interact (Van Gorp, 2007, p. 62).Framing is, at its core, a social interaction where journalists interact with sources, and people inthe audience interact with the news content and each other, all mediated by culture-based frames20(Steinberg, 1998). Van Gorp calls this the “constructionist approach to framing” (Van Gorp,2007, p. 60).Given that newsworthy events are usually complex, and considering the usual restraints of timeand space, frames become the toolset for journalists to present complex objects or issuesefficiently and clearly to be accessible to audiences (Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2006). Gitlin(1980) states that:Media frames, largely unspoken and unacknowledged, organize the world both forjournalists who report it and, to some important degree, for us who rely on their reports.Media frames are persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, ofselection, emphasis, and exclusion, (…). Frames enable journalists to process largeamounts of information quickly and routinely: to recognize it as information, to assign itto cognitive categories, and to package it for efficient relay to their audiences. (p. 7)2.1.2 The roles of frames in news media messagesNow that we understand frames as a culture-based concept, we can discuss some of these frames'characteristics. Entman (1993) identifies the roles that frames play in the news media message,stating that frames detect an object or issue, then evaluate its characteristics, make moralassessments, and give a potential solution for that issue or object. Following Entman’scharacterization, one could adapt it, for exemplary purposes, to the topic of the COVID-19pandemic (the issue or object). A news media outlet could frame this issue as follows:● Frames determine what the issue or object is in terms of the common-shared culturalconcepts:21COVID-19 is a highly infectious and potentially deadly respiratory virus causing amassive crisis in the healthcare system.● Frames make an evaluation to identify the source of the issue.Non-vaccinated individuals and people not following the mandates. Some governmentsare too lax with the mandates.● Frames make judgments to identify agents, their causes and their effects:People not following the mandates or not getting the vaccine are putting health servicesat stake.● Frames recommend a solution:Everyone should get vaccinated.People need to follow the mandates at all times.Entman (1993) shows that it is not necessary or expected that all these four framing functionstake place in one text. One sentence can perform more than one of those functions, and manysentences in a news text may not perform any function at all. As long as one frame is conveyedand performs one of those four functions, the researcher might consider that a framing processwas carried out.2.1.3 Framing armed conflictsThere is a plethora of helpful research literature analyzing the framing processes that mediaoutlets have performed while reporting armed conflicts. Several books and articles compiling anextensive analysis of journalistic reporting of conflict and editorial influence on conflictcoverage have been published (Livingstone, 1994; Hoskins & O’Loughlin, 2010; Allan &Zelizer, 2004; Tumber & Webster, 2006) and insightful research on the coverage of the first and22second Gulf Wars (Allen et al., 1994; Baudrillard, 1995; Keeble, 2007; Mowlana, 2018), theSyrian and Lebanese Civil Wars (Briggs et al., 2017; Dib, 2019), and the Bosnian War (Auerbach& Bloch-Elkon, 2005). A particular interest of the framing research literature has been focusedon the visual framing of wars since, as Allan & Zelizer (2004) put it, journalistic images of warprovide the depiction of these tragic events of humanity for those who do not experience itfirst-hand and who sometimes prefer not to see.2.1.4 Frames and news influenceNews frames concentrate the attention on academic research, given the influence they canexercise on societies. As mentioned above, framing is choosing the essential elements of a givenreality to highlight them in news stories. Framing emphasizes a particular interpretation of theproblem, provides any causal explanation associated with it, and performs an evaluation basedon the relevant moral values (Entman, 1993).Academic research exploring how the framing process influences people has been robust. In anexperiment-based study involving subjects being exposed to frames previously manipulated byresearchers, Shen (2004) found that, while news frames may influence how people interpretparticular issues and shape their attitudes, the degree of impact is moderated by individuals'pre-existing frames. Suppose the news frames coincide with individuals' prior knowledge of thetopic. In that case, they are more likely to form related thoughts and potentially modify theiroutlook.On the other hand, and finding more conclusive evidence on the influence of news media onaudiences, Major (2018) suggests that, after reading stories about depression containing aspecific loss-related frame, people tend to be more willing to support government funding for23research and prevention. Furthermore, those who read these stories show increased empathy withpeople going through depression.2.2 Journalistic sourcesJournalists rely on others to access information about an event and construct a story. In mostnews stories, journalists tell what someone (their source) said occurred, not what actuallyoccurred. They take these sources’ information as the closest they can get to the fact. Paletz andEntman (1981) state that:Reporters find it expedient to see the world from the perspectives of their sources.Sources provide reporters with the frames and themes to structure the news. What attractsthe source’s attention, attracts the reporter’s attention. What repels the source, repels thereporter. (p. 20)The sources’ information and perception of the world are not the only factors influencingjournalists. Scheufele (1999) has outlined three factors that influence how journalistic work isconducted: the influence of the media outlet, the individual journalist’s influence in theirreporting, and the influence of external sources such as political actors and interest groups.Nevertheless, for this analysis, that third source of influence is of particular interest, given thecontext of the Colombian armed conflict in the time frame selected for this analysis.As argued by Hoskins & O’Loughlin (2010) and Keeble (2007), in a context of an armedconflict, the official sources (government officials) and the armed actors, most of the time,become the only source of information for journalists, who eventually use this information intheir news reports and omit other types of sources, affecting both plurality and balance (Serrano,2016). These sources have already framed this information using their narrative to justify their24involvement and operations in the conflict, so the information has already undergone an initialframing process. Without the proper news edition and fact verification, the frames these sourcesrely on to understand and describe reality will pass on into the news stories.It has been argued that the journalistic reliance on official sources when reporting crimefacilitates the advancement of the official narrative (specifically the police forces’ narrative) andits frames into the news story (Bennett, 1990; Sacco, 1995; Speer, 2017).2.3 Journalistic verificationThe verification of the facts is an intrinsic part of journalistic work. The information sourcesprovide journalists with is just an account of reality. This account has subtle or profoundpersonal, sociological and ideological biases. Consequently, in journalistic work, this informationmust be verified. When journalists verify the information they previously gathered, they aim toachieve veracity, one of the journalism tenets. They also want to ensure that the facts delivered toaudiences are as free from political influences as possible, as this can distort the veracity of thoseclaims. By exercising the verification of information, journalists achieve both a political and aprofessional accomplishment (Tuchman, 1978). A survey made in 2012 with journalists ineighteen countries showed that 71.5% of them always stay away from stories and informationthat cannot be verified (Weaver et al., 2012).Section 5.2 in the Discussion chapter will explore journalistic verification further. There, I willexamine whether the narrative expressed by the official sources permeated the news stories by ElTiempo’s journalists and whether the journalistic verification process was accomplished.253 MethodsThis study performed a framing analysis of the news coverage that El Tiempo newspaper did ofthe massacres that took place during the 1999-2002 peace talks. The analysis shows the framingstrategies that El Tiempo’s editors and journalists utilized to cover these events. The analysis alsorevealed what essential facts and topics were omitted in their journalistic work.As discussed in Section 1.4, the massacres were chosen as the primary news event to analyze outof all the acts of violence committed by the FARC guerilla and the AUC paramilitaries. Therewere two reasons for this: first, while the FARC guerrilla and the AUC paramilitaries had distinctmilitary dynamics and their acts of violence differed, during the time frame selected for thisanalysis both groups committed massacres. This permitted me to compare how journalistsreported the same act of violence committed by two different groups during the same time frame.The second reason was more personal, and it is well explained in Section 1.4.The framing analysis for this study included two datasets:● The texts, headlines and leads of the news stories covering the massacres.● The front-page headlines and standfirsts9 referring to the massacres.In this chapter, the rationale for collecting the analysis dataset is explicated, showing thedifference between the factual events (the number of massacres in the selected time frame) andthe newspaper’s reported events (the number of massacres that were reported by El Tiempo9 A standfirst, also known as a subheadline or a deck, is a short introductory summary that appears just below theheadline on the front page of a newspaper. It typically provides additional context, elaborates on the main headline,or highlights the most important information in the article. The purpose of a standfirst is to capture the reader'sattention and entice them to read the full article.26newspaper). Also, the description and use of the text analysis software are described, showingthe methodological reasons for using this particular software and how it was used in this study.3.1 Framing analysisFrames are manifested in news content through several elements, namely the frame package: theselection of words, metaphors, examples, descriptions, arguments, and depictions of eventsthrough images. (Pan & Kosicki, 1993) [emphasis added]. All these elements constitute a centralelement: the frame. Entman (1991) explicates:News frames are constructed from and embodied in the keywords, metaphors, concepts,symbols, and visual images emphasized in a news narrative. Since the narrative finallyconsists of nothing more than words and pictures, frames can be detected by probing forparticular words and visual images that consistently appear in a narrative and conveythematically consonant meanings across media and time. By providing, repeating, andthereby reinforcing words and visual images that reference some ideas but not others,frames work to make some ideas more salient in the text, others less so-and othersentirely invisible (p. 7)The analysis in this thesis examined the words, phrases, descriptions and arguments that werereinforced and constituted the frames that El Tiempo journalists and editors used during theircoverage. The analysis also aimed at identifying primed ideas and those that went invisible in thenews texts.273.1.1 Automated framing analysisHistorically, content analysis in linguistics, communications, comparative politics, and newsmedia analysis involved human coding, with investigators retrieving and analyzing data piece bypiece (Lucas et al., 2015; Popping, 2020). However, the arrival of large sets of informationthrough internet-mediated methodologies and, consequently, larger research datasets involvinghundreds or thousands of texts challenged the feasibility of the manual task (Popping, 2020).Understandably, a growing number of researchers adopted the use of computers software toperform this endeavour, as it allows a more extensive scope of data to be analyzed, offers moreresearch options, expedites the research times, and facilitates the visualization of the findings forreaders (Neuendorf, 2017). This technical approach, also known as Computer Assisted TextAnalysis (CATA), was used in this study. However, as Conway (2006) suggests, a qualitative setof manual steps need to be taken to adapt the software and guarantee the reliability of the results.3.1.2 Inductive approach to framing analysisCATA-based framing analyses have followed two approaches to identify frames in a news textdataset. The inductive approach allows the analysis of a news text without a predefined, specificset of variables. It allows having an “open view" attempting to identify some ranges of potentialframes. Conversely, a deductive approach starts from a set list of frames identified in an exampleanalysis or previous works and attempts to find the same frames in the main analysis (Semetko &Valkenburg, 2000). The inductive approach, as defined above, guided the framing analysis of thisthesis. This approach was ideal for this research because it allowed me to identify dominantframes in El Tiempo news coverage.283.2 Search rationale and data selectionThis thesis used the data of El Tiempo’s news coverage of the massacres committed by the FARCguerillas and the AUC paramilitaries during the 1999-2002 Colombian government – FARCpeace process. The specific time frame is from January 7, 1999, to February 20, 2002.This study follows the definition of a massacre that the Grupo de Memoria Historica (HistoricalMemory Group) (2013) developed for the specific context of the Colombian armed conflict. Theresearchers in that group based this definition on International Humanitarian Law :(A massacre is) the intentional homicide of four or more persons in a state ofdefenselessness. The homicide shares the exact circumstances of manner, time and place,and its main characteristic is the exhibition of violence. A massacre is committed in frontof others or exposed to others as a spectacle of horror. It results from the brutal encounterbetween the absolute power of the murderer and the total impotence of the victim (p. 36).I established the following search criteria in order to search and select data:1) Only the massacres committed by the FARC guerillas and the AUC paramilitaries wereincluded in the data. Massacres committed by other armed groups were not included.102) Massacres and no other acts of violence (such as kidnappings, town attacks or selectivekillings) were considered.1111 Given the dynamics of the Colombian armed conflict, a massacre may have started as a different act of violence,such as a kidnapping. That was the case of the Jardin massacre, committed by the FARC guerilla on December 8,2001. The group initially kidnapped a group of civilians and then assassinated 5. These events were included aswell, as a massacre was eventually committed.10 The FARC guerilla committed a few massacres in joint actions with other armed groups, such as the ELN guerilla.These massacres were also included in the dataset.293) Only the massacres committed from January 7, 1999, to February 20, 2002, wereincluded in the dataset. Massacres happening one day or more before or one day or moreafter this time frame were not considered.4) Only news texts directly referencing the massacre as a news event were included. Noletters to the editor, editorials, opinion or analysis columns or incomplete news articleswere included.3.2.1 Data collection processAll the specific information regarding dates, places and victims of the massacres committed bythe FARC guerillas and AUC paramilitaries was retrieved from two databases:1) National Centre for Historical Memory (CNMH12 in Spanish) - ¡Basta Ya!Massacres database (CNMH, 2013). From 2010 to 2013, this public institutionconducted a large-scale research to identify the Colombian armed conflict'scauses, characteristics, and social impact. In 2013, the institution released ageneral report of this investigation: ¡Basta Ya! (Enough Already), a 432-pagedocument showing the magnitude of the tragedy caused by this conflict. Thisinstitution made all the databases used in their investigation available throughtheir official webpage. This thesis used the database called Masacres 1980-2012(massacres 1980-2012).2) Rutas del Conflicto database (Rutas del Conflicto, 2014). Rutas del Conflicto(The conflict’s routes) is an independent digital news outlet established in 2014.Through data journalism techniques, this news organization has published stories12 See List of Abbreviations.30of war and resistance from the victims’ perspective, offering valuable visualrepresentations of database information. In 2014, together with CNMH and theweb portal Verdad Abierta, Rutas del Conflicto released an interactive mapdocumenting 730 massacres committed in this armed conflict from 1982 to 2012.In this analysis, I started looking for information about the massacres by altering the ¡Basta Ya!database filters to comply with the search rationale described in Section 3.2. Once the detailsabout the massacre were identified (date and place), I contrasted the information with Rutas delConflicto’s database. This contrast was performed to identify additional facts about the massacrethat would facilitate the search process in El Tiempo’s search portal. Details such as the name ofthe village, town, or region where the massacre was committed, the number of victims, and theperpetrator were contrasted.Once the information regarding a massacre was retrieved from the databases, the next step wasmanually searching and finding the news texts on El Tiempo's search webpage,https://www.eltiempo.com/buscar. To do so, I followed these steps:1) The name of the village, town, region or city where the massacre occurred wastyped in the search box.2) The date filters were modified with the following conditions: A) Start Date: oneday after the massacre was committed. B) End Date: five calendar days after.3) The resulting articles (if any13) were then manually consulted by the researcher toconfirm they matched the rationale explained in Section 3.2.13 During this analysis stage, I found the information discussed in Section 5.6.31The five-day time frame matters because, given the dynamics of the Colombian conflict, distantrural communities were usually the epicentre of the massacres. For many events happening inthese remote regions, it would take days for the news to spread around the country, as theseplaces are difficult to reach.14An example of how the data collection process was performed can be found in Appendices B andC.3.2.2 Units of analysisAfter the data collection steps described in the previous section were performed, the resultingnews articles were classified and cataloged based on who the massacre perpetrator was.As mentioned in the introduction of this chapter, this study was based on a framing analysis oftwo different parts of the data:1) The texts, the headlines and the leads of news stories covering the massacres committedby the FARC guerilla and AUC paramilitary armed groups.2) The front-page headlines and their standfirsts that made any reference to these massacres.Each of the two parts of the data mentioned above was analyzed separately. The objective was toidentify and confirm the frames in the front-page texts (headlines and standfirsts) separately fromthose in the news stories texts. Van Dijk (1990) affirms that news as a discourse can beintuitively tracked through the headlines, standfirsts and leads as they give structural clues,14 The journalist who wrote one of the news stories about one FARC massacre in a rural part of Cajibio, in the Caucadepartment on October 7, 2000, describes the area as follows: “It’s a village with 400 inhabitants, that can bereached after 2 hours by car and another 2 hours on foot or riding a horse through a very thick forest.” (El Tiempo,2000d, p. 1). Another news article covering the same event dated October 9, 2000, describes how the bodies of themassacre's victims could not have been rescued as the governmental authorities and the Red Cross could not reachthe zone (El Tiempo, 2000c).32synthesize the events of a news story and centralize the core topics of a social phenomenon.Based on a study performed on audiences’ perceptions and recall of news, Van Dijk also statesthat most readers remember essential information on the front page of newspapers more than anyother part of the story and that the structural organization of newspapers' front pages elicits aspecific impact of these headlines on audiences (Van Dijk, 1990, p. 167). In this sense, a newsstory on the other pages of a newspaper is just a development of the condensed topic put forwardin its front–page headline. This condensation responds to some framing decisions aimed atmanifesting an idea in a certain way (Pardo, 2007). These considerations closely align with thequery of this study given that the dataset of analysis is the printed news stories of El Tiemponewspaper, not their website articles.After the data collection phase, the total number of news articles and front-page headlines withtheir standfirsts was 375 (n=375), divided as follows:● Data sample of massacres committed by FARC (n=94):News articles: 64Front-page Headlines with their standfirsts: 30● Data sample of massacres committed by AUC (n=281):News articles: 223Front-page Headlines with their standfirsts: 58The difference in numbers between the datasets has to do exclusively with the dynamics of theColombian armed conflict. Section 1.2.1 explains these dynamics in detail.Every front-page headline and its standfirst was taken as one text for this analysis. The totalnumber mentioned above represents the front pages and their standfirsts.333.3 Content analysis softwareStemming from the CATA approach explored in Section 3.1.1, I performed the framing analysisin this thesis through a free data visualization and text mining software called KH Coder.Developed by Social Sciences professor Koichi Higuchi, this software permits the analysis oflarge sets of texts. It also provides researchers with various data visualization options that werehelpful for the analysis classification that this study followed (see Section 3.4).One important reason that justified the use of this software in this analysis was the ways thearmed groups in the Colombian conflict are named in news stories. In Colombia, journalists andthe public use different nouns to refer to the FARC guerillas, the AUC paramilitaries, and theColombian Military Forces. Examples of such names are subversivos (subversives), para (shortfor paramilitary) and tropa (troop). KH Coder allows the researcher to group similar words intoone code to facilitate the analysis. For instance, all the possible denominations that the FARCmay have in the news texts (guerrilla, guerrilleros, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias deColombia and others) were organized in one single code: FARC. Some other codes were alsoprogrammed and used with the same idea in mind. Appendix A includes all the codesprogrammed and used in KH Coder in the analysis for this thesis.KH Coder has been used in fields as varied as medicine studies (Ono et al., 2021), linguistics(Higuchi, 2017), social media analysis (McNeill et al., 2016), and journalistic studies (Hinck etal., 2016; Vu & Lynn, 2020).3.4 Classification of analysisAs mentioned in Section 3.1.2, this study used an inductive approach to framing analysis, so nopre-defined set of frames existed. This inductive framing analysis was first performed with the34dataset of news stories for every perpetrator separately: FARC n=64, AUC n=223. The keywordsand codes used in every analysis for every perpetrator can be found in Appendix A.The methodological framework in this study is based on the framework established by Pardo(2007, p. 124). She proposes the classification of news texts analysis into various degrees ofcomplexity and presence within the news text: a) most frequent words in the dataset, b)co-occurrence or segmental classification, c) type of nomination (how the actors of the newstexts are called) used in dataset d) concordance classification of a specific word or subject in atext, e) correspondence classification f) strategic classification.Based on these classification techniques, a sample analysis taking five news stories coveringFARC massacres was performed to illustrate the use of these techniques in this study. Figures3.1, 3.2, and 3.3 and Table 3.1 show the results of this example analysis.Figure 3.1 Top 10 most frequent words in news texts and headlines/leads coveringFARC massacres (n=5)Figure 3.1 above shows the most frequent words in the example dataset. This type of analysisconfirms the presence or absence of relevant news subjects, in this case, the different actors in35the armed conflict. It also helps to identify the words used to refer to the victims. Another helpfulcharacteristic of this classification is the presence, absence or frequency of relevant words. Forinstance, in the figure above, the FARC is mentioned more times than the word victim, and morethan farmers, persons and some of the victims’ last names.Figure 3.2 Co-occurrence of words in news texts and headlines/leads covering FARCmassacres (n=5)The segmental classification in Figure 3.2 shows the co-occurrence of words based on theirproximity in a sentence in the example dataset. In the figure above, the subgraph in green colour(01) shows that the noun FARC is near the verb asesinar (to assassinate), as well as campesino36(farmer), which confirms that the three words appear recurrently close to each other in the newstexts. The words persona (persona) and morir (to die) are also part of the subgraph, showing aclose relationship among them across the texts. The thickness of the connecting lines expresseshow frequently the related words appear close to each other.Figure 3.3 Nominalization of the FARC guerilla in headlines/leads covering FARCmassacres (n=5)In the analysis for this thesis, one area of focus was the language used to describe theperpetrators of the armed conflict, which builds upon the groundwork laid by García-Marrugo(2013). Figure 3.3 shows the use of different nouns to refer to the FARC group in the headlinesof the news texts for this example. The choice of nouns to refer to a single perpetrator may revealthe intention of the journalists and their editors to consolidate a specific frame for that particularviolent perpetrator. The legend for the chart above includes the words guerrillero (guerillamember), FARC, manteco (an alias of a FARC combatant), homicida (murderer) and sujeto(subject, individual).37Table 3.1 Top 20 keywords associated with the word FARC in news texts andheadlines/leads covering FARC massacres (n=5). Word POS Distance1 Frente (front) N 0.41672 Hecho (event) N 0.30773 Autoridad (authority) N 0.23084 Comandante (commander) N 0.21435 Asesinar (kill) V 0.26 Declaración (statement) N 0.18187 General (army general) AQ 0.18188 Poder (power) V 0.18189 Sábado (Saturday) N 0.181810 Persona (person) N 0.166711 Antioquia (Antioquia) N 0.166712 Ejército (army) N 0.166713 Hombre (man) N 0.166714 Lugar (place) N 0.166715 Brigada (brigade) N 0.153816 Dejar (leave) V 0.153817 Grupo (group) N 0.142918 Hacer (do) V 0.142919 Informar (inform) V 0.142920 Jardín (A town’s name) N 0.1333In any written text, words are in determined proximity to others, given the grammar rules of thelanguage and the linguistic decisions made by the author of the text. A correspondence analysisidentifies the more relevant associations between words based on their proximity. This proximityis set by calculating the value that separates one word or phrase from another. This value, knownin mathematics as Euclidean distance, goes from zero to infinite, where zero (0) is the maximumdistance possible. The resulting value indicates how close those words or phrases are in a textand shows how strong their association in the dataset of texts is.38As an example, in Table 3.1 above, the correspondence analysis shows that word FARC is morefrequently accompanied by the words frente (front), hecho (event), autoridad (authority),comandante (commander), and asesinar (kill). The journalistic decisions to choose specificwords and make them frequently associated with a specific armed actor reveal patterns in thejournalistic news writing about a particular issue or a specific character, in this case, the FARCguerilla. It helps to define which words were associated with each armed actor in the newsreports about massacres.394 FindingsThis chapter explores the findings produced by the framing analysis in this thesis. The followingsections will illustrate these findings and analyze their relevance to the subject of this study.This chapter is separated into two sections. The first section explores the findings obtainedthrough the analysis of texts belonging to the news stories. The second section examines thefindings produced by the front-page headlines and standfirsts analysis.4.1 News texts analysisThe following sections explore the most significant findings from the framing analysis of thenews texts covering the FARC and AUC massacres.4.1.1 Excessive reliance on official sourcesAs discussed in Section 1.3.2, one of the most recurrent observations about how Colombianjournalists have covered the country’s armed conflict is the omnipresence of the official narrativethroughout the news reports. While this is a relatable reality in most news media in the Westernworld, given the fact that western institutionalized voices have always had greater access to themedia (Van Dijk, 1990), in Colombia, this excessive reliance on the official narrative in thecontext of armed conflict and human rights violations has influenced how people perceive theconflict (Medina Gallego, 2016; Serrano, 2014).Utilizing a KH Coder code called Fuentes Oficiales (Official Sources), the analysis in this thesispermitted confirmation of the frequent use of institutionalized voices as sources in the newscoverage of El Tiempo about FARC and AUC massacres during the time frame selected for thisanalysis. The code divided the official sources into two categories: the Military Forces of40Colombia (FFMM) and the government, using a diverse set of positions and ranks of bothinstitutions such as teniente (lieutenant) general (general), comandante (commander), alcalde(mayor), secretario (secretary), autoridades (authorities) or gobernador (governor). Similarly,several verbs such as explicar (to explain), decir (to say), confirmar (confirmar), and informar(to inform) were associated with the abovementioned ranks and positions to confirm theirparticipation as sources in the news stories. This research exercise was possible thanks to a KHCoder formula that permits linking verbs and subjects (see Appendix A).Figure 4.1 shows the presence of the FFMM and the government as sources of information in thenews texts about FARC and AUC massacres. Most news texts refer to the FFMM as a source ofinformation, with the news texts about FARC massacres showing this institution in 50 newstexts, that is, 78% of the total. In comparison, the texts covering the AUC massacres show theFFMM as a source of information in 163 news texts, 73 % of the total.Figure 4.1 Use of the Fuentes Oficiales code in all news texts41While the references to sources coming from the government are less constant, in the textscovering FARC massacres, the presence of these official sources is more constant than in thenews texts covering AUC massacres, appearing in 39% of the texts versus 27%. This differencemay be related to the peace process, where the FARC and the government were the two actors inthe negotiation. It is also worth noting that only a few texts had no reference to either institution(no code column). In these texts, the information comes directly from the community: witnesses,campesinos (farmers), victims’ relatives, and other individuals with direct knowledge of theevents. In a few of these texts, there is no source specifically mentioned.Section 5.1 discusses the use of official sources in the coverage of the Colombian armed conflict,including the use of members of the society as sources in the news stories. Section 5.2 exploresthe journalistic verification of the information coming from these official sources.4.1.2 FARC in active voice sentencesKH-Coder software allowed me to identify certain trends in using a linguistic device in ElTiempo news texts about FARC massacres. The analysis confirmed the prevalence of using theactive voice when reporting these massacres. The FARC was often the subject in sentencesdescribing an act of violence, following this linguistic structure:FARC (SUBJECT) + VERB + COMPLEMENTAs in:En Antioquia , las Farc asesinaron a 3 campesinos de una finca bananeraIn Antioquia, the FARC assassinated 3 farmers on a banana plantation42Or in:Los guerrilleros de las Farc (…) habían asesinado, frente a su familia , a Duván María ChatéThe guerrilla members of FARC (...) had killed Duván María Chaté in front of his familyThis prevalence of the use of FARC as an active doer of the action was present in using otherverbs denoting the act of killing, such as matar (to kill) or masacrar (to massacre). Figures 4.2and 4.3 show the prevalence of the active verb conjugations of asesinar (to murder) and matar(to kill) in the texts.Figure 4.2 Number of occurrences of active verb forms of asesinar (to murder) in newstexts covering FARC massacres43Figure 4.3 Number of occurrences of active verb forms of matar (to kill) in news textscovering FARC massacresIn discourse analysis, the use of active and passive voices to represent the social actors in a newsevent is known as rearrangement. Section 5.3 will discuss this discourse strategy and how itimpacted the perception of the FARC massacres during the time frame selected for this analysis.4.1.3 AUC in passive voice sentencesContrasting the finding about the use of active voice in El Tiempo news texts about FARCmassacres, the analysis of the linguistic devices used by the journalists of this newspaper in thenews texts about AUC massacres showed a prevalence of the use of the passive voice of severalverbs that refer to the act of killing. This tendency put the AUC paramilitary group in aperipheral position in the sentences rather than in a central position of the doer of the action. Thelinguistic structure that characterizes the passive voice in these sentences may be simplified asfollows:44(OBJECT OF THE ACTION) + VERB SER (TO BE) + MAIN VERB IN PAST PARTICIPLE VERB+ BY AUCAs in:21 campesinos de esta población (...) fueron asesinados por una fracción de las AutodefensasUnidas de Colombia21 farmers from this town (...) were killed by a division of the United Self-Defence Forces ofColombiaOr in:El alcalde Torres dijo que son 13 los civiles asesinados por los paramilitares.Mayor Torres said that it is 13 the number of civilians (that were. Omitted in the original) killedby the paramilitariesA code called Voz Pasiva (Passive voice) was used for this analysis. This code grouped all thepossible conjugations of the verbs "to kill," "to murder," "to massacre," and "to execute" in thepassive voice in Spanish.15 KH Coder confirmed that this code appears in 30.04% of the totalnews texts covering AUC massacres, that is, 67 news texts. Conversely, this same Voz Passivacode appears in 23 % of the total news texts covering FARC massacres, which is 15 news texts.Section 5.3 will discuss this propensity to use the passive voice grammatical structure torepresent the AUC paramilitary.15 For reference, the Appendix A lists the verb forms that were included in the code Voz Pasiva.454.1.4 Victims at faultIn her content analysis of the El Salado massacre news coverage, Moreno (2008) concludes thatduring the first days after the event, the journalists never questioned the official sources or theAUC paramilitaries on why they thought the victims of this massacre were at fault for theirdoom. Indeed, the AUC considered this town a haven for the guerilla groups, which was used tojustify this massacre. Moreno also states that the Colombian press “assumed and used theseaccusations within their news narrative without trying to understand why they are used and tooksides by labelling the actors and victims as good or bad” (p. 40).A code called Víctima Culpable (The victim was at fault) was used in KH Coder to identify howmany news texts referred to the accusations that the armed groups made to the victims of themassacres that they committed. This code included words and phrases such as colaborador(collaborator), acusar+de+ser (to accuse of being), antecedentes+judiciales (criminal records),and brindar+ayuda (to give support), and other common words that indicate accusations,presumptions and justifications made by the armed groups, the military and the members of thegovernment when they referred to the victims of the massacres.The analysis showed that 19% (n=12) of the news texts covering FARC massacres included theseaccusations, and 20% (n= 45) of the news texts related to AUC massacres showed the presenceof the code. While these percentages may only represent one-fifth of the total of news texts, itwas questionable that these accusations have made their way into El Tiempo news texts,reproducing this stigmatization of the victims performed by the FARC guerilla and AUCparamilitaries. It is also questionable that the journalistic verification of these claims was notperformed, as most of the texts did not include any alternative version or sources that would46question these accusations against the victims, nor an investigation performed by El Tiempojournalists aiming at verifying those claims (see Section 5.2 regarding fact verification).Section 5.4 discusses this finding and includes two examples of news stories containing thisVíctima Culpable frame, chosen randomly.4.1.5 FARC – AUC clashAnother consequence of the unification of the paramilitary groups under the AUC label was themultiple names that the Colombian public opinion, the government, and the news media gavewhen referring to this paramilitary organization. Changing from words like ACCU,16paramilitares (paramilitaries), paras (short for paramilitaries), autodefensas (self-defencegroups), and paracos (a short apocope for paramilitaries) to the unitary label of AUC was not aneasy task. In the analysis for this thesis, for example, El Tiempo journalists never unified thenaming of this armed group and used different words to refer to it.In Section 3.3, it was noted that the different namings of the FARC guerillas, the AUCparamilitaries, and the Military Forces of Colombia were organized into codes in KH Coder.17These codes allowed me to identify the theme of the FARC-AUC clash. There was a highprevalence of AUC code in the news texts about FARC massacres, appearing in 31 of the 64news texts (48.44% of the total). In some reports, the AUC was used as the main reason toexplain why the FARC massacred the victims, as the guerrilla accused them of being members orproviding aid to that paramilitary organization. In other reports, the AUC was mentioned in thedescription of combats that occurred before or after massacres. Using the FARC code, the17 See Appendix A.16 See List of Abbreviations.47analysis also showed that, in reporting the massacres committed by the AUC paramilitaries,60.09% of the news texts include at least one reference to the FARC guerilla (134 news texts).The following three samples exemplify the different uses of the FARC code in these news textscovering the AUC massacres:18Monsignor Larios also referred to a statement issued by the Self-Defence Forces ofCórdoba and Urabá stating that they will take reprisals against government officials,members of the civilian population and contractors who maintain contact with guerrillagroups operating in the country (El Tiempo, 1999a).According to Juan Gonzalez, commander of the Calima block of the self-defence groups,there was a clash with the FARC, and 15 guerrilla members were killed (El Tiempo,2000a).Signs were left over their bodies: "We came down from El Naya to stay here, massacreand death to the guerrillas." However, the commander of the Naval Forces of the Pacific,Captain Alberto Rojas, informed that according to the first versions gathered among thefarmers, the massacre would be an action carried out by the FARC (El Tiempo, 2001b).The news reports covering the acts of violence during this time frame frequently described othercriminal activities committed by either the same armed group or any other group. In some cases,the journalists included formulaic and canned quotes from official sources condemning the actsof violence of all groups without specifying one. In other cases, the quotes came from the armed18 I translated all the news stories and excerpts that have been included in the thesis. To see the Spanish original,check the citation and find the corresponding reference in Chapter 7. That chapter includes links to all the newsstories that were used in this thesis.48actors, who said that the murdered individuals were members of a rival group (a topic I discussin Section 5.4).4.1.6 The peace processSection 1.1.3 noted that the 1999 - 2002 peace talks between the FARC guerrilla and theColombian government concentrated the attention of public opinion and the news media. Thesepeace talks were seen as a signal of hope after decades of bloody conflict that have left thousandsof victims and countless financial losses for the state and the private sector.Using the code called Proceso (Process), KH Coder found that 26% of the news articles coveringFARC massacres make at least one reference to the peace talks, that is to say, 17 out of the total64 news texts. The year where most references to the Proceso code were found was 2000, asshown in Figure 4.5. The intensity of the green colour and the number represent the percentageof news texts from each year of the peace process that included this Proceso code.Figure 4.4 The Proceso code in news texts covering FARC massacres, distributed byyear49In the news texts covering massacres committed by the AUC, the presence of the Proceso code iscomparable to what we see in the news texts about FARC massacres. In three out of the fouryears of the time frame determined for this analysis. 1999, 2001, and 2002, this code is morefrequent in the AUC massacres news texts than the FARC massacres news texts. That becomesparticularly interesting because the AUC was not part of the peace talks.Figure 4.5 The Proceso code in news texts covering AUC massacres, distributed by yearAnother insightful finding regarding the peace process and the coverage of FARC massacres wasobtained by using KH Coder to perform a co-occurrence analysis with the top 100 most frequentwords in the news texts. Figure 4.6 shows how the words gobierno (government), paz (peace),proceso (process), crimen (crime), asesinato (murder), and presidente (president) are the wordsin closest proximity to the word FARC. The constant association of the FARC massacres andmilitary actions with the peace process in El Tiempo news reports reveals how its journalistsgave a high relevance to the impact of these FARC massacres on the peace process. The presence50of words referring to the president and the government also shows how the journalists looked forand included quotes from government officials to show how they perceived and condemnedthese FARC attacks.Figure 4.6 Co-occurrence network of most frequent words in news texts covering FARCmassacres4.1.7 The armed groupFigure 4.6 in the previous section shows how analyzing the 100 most frequent words in the newstexts covering FARC massacres revealed the close association of some peace process-related51words with the word FARC. Another co-occurrence classification was performed in the analysis,this time with the news texts covering the AUC massacres.Figure 4.7 shows the visualization of the results. This analysis gathered the top 100 mostfrequent words in that dataset and established co-occurrence connections, that is, the linksbetween those frequent words depending on how close they appeared in the dataset.Figure 4.7 Co-occurrence network of most frequent words in news texts covering AUCmassacresThis classification allowed me to identify a visible difference from the analysis discussed in theprevious section: words or expressions referring to the government or the peace process are not52near the paramilitar (paramilitary) word. Another difference lies in the fact that nouns such ascrimen (crime) and asesinato (murder), which were close to the word FARC in Figure 4.6, areabsent in this analysis, and the verbs asesinar (to murder) and morir (to die) are often near theword paramilitar (paramilitary). In the top 100 most frequent words in news texts covering theAUC massacres, the abbreviation AUC is not included (it is in position 116). I discuss this lackof direct reference to the AUC in Sections 4.2.3 and 5.5.Another finding that this co-occurrence or segmental classification revealed was the presence ofa phrase that addresses the perpetrator of the massacres as “an armed group.” Words directlyaddressing the AUC paramilitary, such as paramilitar (paramilitary) and autodefensa(self-defence group), appear in the list of most frequent words. However, the phrase grupoarmado (armed group) is constantly present throughout the news texts covering the AUCmassacres. This presence can be seen in light blue at the bottom of Figure 4.7.19Subsequently, a code called Grupo Armado (armed group) was used in KH Coder to identifyhow many texts included this phrase. This procedure showed that 85 news texts covering AUCmassacres included that phrase, which is 38% of the total of these texts. This exact phrase onlyappears in 10 news texts covering FARC massacres, 19% of those texts. The Armed group is ageneral identification that does not specify the group committing the massacre.Section 5.5 proposes a hypothesis on why El Tiempo journalists frequently used this expressionin their news coverage.19 KH Coder groups all the possible conjugations of a verb and uses its main form to represent the results. Thatmeans the verb armar (to arm/to supply with arms) groups this verb's future, present and past conjugations inSpanish. KH Coder understands that the adjective armado (armed) is the past participle of the verb armar. That iswhy the figure above shows its main form near the word grupo (group).534.2 Front-page headlines and standfirsts analysisFront-page headlines and standfirsts are the newspaper’s most potent tool to captivate readers.When deciding which news stories should be primed on their front pages, journalists and editorsanalyze their relevance, newsworthiness, any available images and quotes, and the eventualimpact of the story. When media workers perform this analysis and make choices, they manifesttheir editorial position about relevant events in a specific time frame (Tejedor et al., 2020).Synthesization and prioritization characterize newspaper headlines. As the idea is to captivateand provoke readers, a print news outlet's language in its front-page headlines differs from thatused in the following newspaper sections. The words used in these headlines are often veryappealing, meaningful and brief (and, many times, sensational. See Section 4.2.2) to catch theattention of the reader (Elyas & Al-Zahrani, 2019). For this reason, analyzing the language usedin this newspaper section provides a necessary understanding of how the process of newsproduction primes certain pieces of information and not others in the coverage of news events.The following sections explore the most significant findings resulting from the framing analysisof the texts found in the front-page headlines and standfirsts covering the FARC and AUCmassacres during the time frame selected for this analysis.As mentioned in Section 3.2.2, the number of texts retrieved from the search were the following:● Front-page headlines and standfirsts covering massacres committed by FARC: 30● Front-page headlines and standfirsts covering massacres committed by AUC: 58The numbers above represent front-page headlines and their standfirsts; each pair was taken asone text.544.2.1 Use of stirring language and disparity in the coverageThe front-page headlines and their standfirsts of El Tiempo newspaper covering the massacresduring the time frame selected for this analysis were often provocative, if not sensational. Likeany other newspaper, El Tiempo’s goal with its headlines was to captivate the readers’ attentionso they would buy and read the paper. The selected time frame was one of the most criticalstages of the armed conflict, and most newspapers, TV News channels and radio newsprogrammes in the country would constantly cover the conflict. Therefore, details such as thelanguage used in headlines represented a game changer in the competition for readability.Consider the following example showing the headline and standfirst reporting the Nariño,Antioquia massacre, committed by the FARC between July 30 and August 1, 1999, leaving 16people dead.NARIÑO, IN RUINSIn 36 hours, 300 guerillas in the Antioquian population of Nariño murdered nine policeofficers and eight civilians, including four minors. They also burned down 40 buildings,including homes and commercial businesses, and made the hospital their operationalcenter. Last night, seven police officers remained missing. (El Tiempo, 1999e)As mentioned in section 1.2.1, one of the acts of violence the FARC most employed was theattacks on towns. This action consisted of temporarily occupying an urban area to destroy themilitary objective located there (CNMH, 2013). Aside from the deaths of members of theMilitary Forces of Colombia and civilians, these attacks greatly impacted the local and regionalpopulations. The damage caused as a consequence of these attacks largely affected the economyand communication of these towns and, consequently, impacted the morale of the populations55residing in those areas. The massacre reported in the news story above was committed in thecontext of one of these attacks on towns.The headline text certainly paints the picture of destruction caused by this attack on the town ofNariño, located in the Antioquia department. It sets the tone of the news texts to be found insidethe newspaper pages, and while the massacre itself is not explicit in the headline text, the attackon the town is revealed by using the expression “in ruins.” The reference to the massacre comesin the standfirst, where it is specified that the FARC murdered four minors, intensifying thedaunting scenario and eliciting condemnation from the readers.Using a code in KH-Coder named adjetivos (adjectives), I confirmed that, in the front-pageheadlines and standfirsts covering FARC massacres, El Tiempo used adjectives such as destruído(destructed), devastado (devastated), deplorable (deplorable), trágico (tragic), cruel (cruel),adjectival clauses like en ruinas (in ruins), and nouns such as tragedia (tragedy), crueldad(cruelty), and llanto (cry) in 16.5% of the news texts dataset (n=5). This vivid description depictsa graphic image of the violence committed by the FARC and its disastrous impact, prompting thereaders to connect with the victims and condemn this armed group.Let us examine the following excerpt from a front-page headline and standfirst reporting theCalima (Darién) massacre, where the AUC murdered 19 farmers on August 24, 2001:DEATH AND DESTRUCTION IN SANTA MARÍAOne civilian dead, four police officers wounded, and seventy houses destroyed (left) theFarc attack on the municipality of Santa Maria in Huila. José Sacaramboy, an 18-year-oldyoung man, was yesterday looking for money for his father's burial, the only attackvictim. The attack lasted 14 hours.56On the other hand, in Putumayo, the Army dismantled a small Farc refinery that produced6,000 gallons of gasoline weekly and operated 12 kilometres from Puerto Asis. Sixguerrillas were killed in the fighting.And in Valle, four farmers were killed in a paramilitary attack in a rural area ofCalima-Darién.As in the previous news story, this headline includes meaningful words about a daunting townscene. Similarly, its standfirst reports the FARC’s attack on a town, the losses of lives and theimpacts on the victims’ families. It also gives several details on the duration of the attack and thedestruction it caused. It narrates in a very moving way how the victim’s teenage son wasstruggling to pay for his father’s funeral.Nevertheless, the significant particularity of this news text is that it only talks about the AUCmassacre in the final paragraph. The description is succinct, using the passive voice (see Section5.3) to talk about the murder and lacking the use of stirring language that the first four linesshow.As I discuss in Section 5.2, the lack of or very little coverage of massacres and the poor factverification may be explained by the lack of available information during the five-day span that Iused during the data collection stage. However, in the example below covering the same Calima(Darien) massacre, the headline and its standfirst may provide insights into a disparity of ElTiempo coverage:57MORE BODIES IN CALIMAWith the discovery of the corpses of Gilberto Papamija, 56, and José Arturo Cifuentes,61, there are now six victims of the paramilitary incursion in the Riobravo village inwestern Calima-Darien. The authorities said the fate of the other six farmers, who werepart of the list with which the paramilitaries arrived last Thursday and whom theyaccused of being guerrilla helpers, is unknown.This headline and its standfirst were published exactly one day after the previous one above, andyet it is diametrically different from it and the first one in this section. The words in the headlinedo not denote frightful scenes of destruction and chaos. It adds up to the information provided inthe previous issue of the newspaper by mentioning that more corpses have been found in Calima.The standfirst omits the direct use of an active structure, such as the AUC paramilitaries killed xfarmers. Instead, it uses the more indirect the victims of the paramilitary incursion. Additionally,it does not mention the AUC directly (see Section 4.2.3) and quotes an official source for thereported information. Furthermore, it exercises victim blaming (see Section 5.4) by repeating theaccusation that the AUC would make against the murdered civilians, calling them guerrillacollaborators.In the headlines and standfirsts covering the AUC massacres, I used the same code in KH-Codermentioned above. In the resulting analysis, only 6% (n=4) of the news texts showed the presenceof these adjectives. The headline and standfirst below show one of those news texts. Thismassacre, where the AUC murdered seven people, was committed on February 22, 2001:58MASSACRES IN CÚCUTA SPREAD TERRORThe horror produced by the massacre of seven people in Cúcuta's downtown on Thursdayat noon was added to two others, which left three dead and six injured. The victims werestreet vendors and occasional traders. The first murders occurred in Antonia Santos Park,and the following ones were two blocks away. Relatives of the dead say these are socialcleansing plans announced days ago. There is one person detained for the deaths.As with the other headlines discussed above, this headline refers to the act of violence rather thanthe perpetrator. It includes a noun, terror, complemented by another noun in the standfirst,horror, to give the story a sombre tone. It is striking to notice the absence of any reference to theAUC paramilitary, a topic that will be explored further in Section 4.2.3. Furthermore, it sharplycontrasts with the finding in the next section: the recurrent presence of the FARC in headlinesand standfirsts covering their massacres.4.2.2 FARC: omnipresent across the headlines and standfirstsAn analysis of the most frequent words in the front-page headlines and standfirsts was performedin KH Coder, using the news dataset covering the massacres committed by the FARC and AUC.This analysis revealed the propensity to mention the FARC guerilla (in all its possible namings.See Appendix A) in the headlines about massacres committed by them but also the massacrescommitted by the AUC.The word FARC appears 35 times in the total number of front-line headlines and standfirsts(n=30). As Figure 4.8 shows, some words that followed FARC in frequency across the texts arewords referring directly to the acts of violence: asesinar (to murder - in different verb forms),which appeared 15 times in a total of 46% (n=14) of these news texts, masacre (massacre and to59massacre) that appeared ten times in 30% (n=9) of the texts, and the noun ataque (attack)referring to the town attacks that FARC perpetrated.Figure 4.8 Top 10 most frequent words in front-page headlines and standfirsts coveringFARC massacresIt is also relevant to see that the word “person”, appearing ten times in 33% (n=10) of the texts,represents the only reference to the victims in this dataset's top 10 most frequent words.A co-occurrence analysis was performed with this list of the most frequent words in this dataset.This analysis established the relevant co-occurrence connections, such as the links between themost frequent words depending on how close they appeared in the news texts. It also showed thatthe words “authority” and “massacre” appear near each other, denoting the use of the Colombianmilitary, the police, or members of the Office of the Attorney General Investigation Unit assources for this news report. FARC appears close to the verb asesinar (to murder) and the wordpersona (person). Figure 4.9 represents this co-occurrence analysis.60Figure 4.9 Co-occurrence network of most frequent words in front-page headlines andstandfirsts covering AUC massacresUsing the code AUC, I could also confirm that 23% (n=7) of these texts about FARC massacresrefer to the AUC, most of the time mentioning the FARC-AUC clashes that preceded or followedthe massacre. As discussed in Section 4.1.5, this association of the combats between the FARCand AUC with the massacres of civilians framed these massacres as a direct consequence of thewar these two armed groups were fighting. By doing so, the news coverage vindicated the role ofthe government in these acts of violence.614.2.3 No direct reference to the AUCCompared to those news texts reporting FARC massacres analyzed in the previous section, theanalysis of the most frequent words in the front-page headlines and standfirsts reporting AUCmassacres emphasized describing the violent event and less on directly naming its perpetrator.Figure 4.10 shows the most frequent words in this dataset of headlines and standfirsts coveringthe AUC massacres. The word persona (person) appears 42 times in 57% of the texts (n=33).The word asesinar (to murder) 32 times in 45% of the texts (n=26). Farmers, the members of theColombian society that were mostly affected by these massacres, are mentioned 25 times in 43%(n=24). The word massacre appears 30 times in 39% (n=23) of these headsets, standfirsts. Therest of the words in this list refer to the time and place circumstances.Figure 4.10 Top 10 most frequent words in front-page headlines and standfirsts coveringAUC massacresSection 3.3 noted that the Colombian news media often gave different denominations to theright-wing paramilitaries. This analysis confirmed that 67% (n=39) of these front-page headlines62and standfirsts covering AUC massacres include several denominations to the paramilitaries.However, only 14% (n=8) of those headlines/standfirsts directly referenced the AUC specifyingit with that acronym. Instead, most news texts used other denominations: paras, self-defencegroups, paramilitary, or groups.In Section 1.1.3, I discussed how the right-wing paramilitary groups that used to operateindependently in several regions of Colombia merged into a national group called AUC in 1997.At the beginning of the peace process in 1999, although small fractions of paramilitary groupsdid not make part of the AUC and kept on operating independently, the AUC concentrated allcontrol of the right-wing paramilitary criminal activities (M. Romero, 2003). This analysis showsthat El Tiempo would still refer to this group with the generic paramilitary, paras, self-defencegroups, paramilitary, or armed groups, even after they were already known as AutodefensasUnidas de Colombia, or AUC.I will discuss this lack of direct identification of the AUC further in Section 5.5.635 DiscussionThe frames and themes identified in this analysis are not unique to the Colombian mediaecosystem and can also be found in the journalistic context of other countries. Nevertheless,Chapter 4 noted some particular characteristics of El Tiempo’s coverage of the massacrescommitted by the FARC guerilla and the AUC paramilitaries during the 1999-2002 peaceprocess. In this chapter, I discuss the findings elicited from the analysis and theorize on thereasons that may explain them.5.1 Use of official sourcesThe lack of diversity and balance in sources, as well as the excessive reliance on official orinstitutionalized sources of information, is a widespread practice in the Western press (Van Dijk,1990), as well as in news coverage of conflicts (Allan & Zelizer, 2004; Bennett, 1990; Sacco,1995b; Speer, 2017). Paletz and Entman (1981) affirm that this dependence on official sourcesmay even be necessary for journalistic practice, as journalists are instructed by their editors andfellow reporters that these official sources make the most important political decisions in acountry. They also allow simple access to information regarding their activities.It is fair to assert that the frequent reliance of El Tiempo journalists on information coming frommembers of the Colombian government and the military responded to the specific characteristicsof the news coverage of the Colombian armed conflict. Due to the nature of this conflict, whichfrequently impacts distant rural areas that are difficult to reach, and the rapid succession ofevents, with frequent acts of violence happening one after the other, Colombian journalists oftenstruggle to gather information and find themselves in a challenging position. (Medina Gallego,642016). Under these circumstances, using official sources guarantees quick access to news eventsbefore reaching the area where the act of violence occurs. Moreover, it is worth mentioning that,given the research method I utilized, having a five-day span after the massacres were committed,the resulting news texts that were analyzed were primarily the first accounts of the massacres.More news texts that include more sources or question the official ones may have come after thattime frame, as eventually happened with the El Salado massacre committed by the AUCparamilitaries (Moreno, 2008).One news story taken from this research’s dataset exemplifies this use of official sources incontexts of difficult access to information during the coverage of the Colombian armed conflict.This news story was one of the three covering the Río Manso massacre, committed by the FARCguerilla between May 22 and May 24, 2001:The town's mayor, Sigilfredo Senior, said that it could not be officially confirmed thatthese people were dead. However, that possibility is not ruled out either because somefarmers have stated that they were recruited to bury corpses in the region of the Mansoriver. "We will have to verify this when the security forces enter the area," he said.The situation is so alarming that members of the International Red Cross, NGOs andhumanitarian organizations had to postpone their intention to go to the massacre sitebecause the guerrillas have three checkpoints two and four hours away from Frasquillo,the closest port to the site. The bodies of the 24 dead have not been recovered from thearea. (El Tiempo, 2001c)Another factor to consider concerns the interests and circumstances surrounding the sources.Andrés Mauricio Garibello, a veteran El Tiempo journalist, affirms that in the Colombian armed65conflict, it was always challenging to obtain information coming from sources as they wereunder the influence of their own goals or subdued by fear:Journalists who have covered the armed conflict know that sources are scarce anddifficult to handle because, on one side and the other, they are interested in reportingwhat they want and how they want. When one goes to conflict zones, one finds acomplex landscape to unravel: the authorities say one thing, the counterpart says another,and, in the middle, there are populations completely taken hostage by fear. There is nodoubt that we believe the authorities and, when possible, the counterpart is consulted,despite knowing that almost all the time it is not possible, even if the news media intendsto consult it. (Medina Gallego, 2016, p. 25)While this contextual characteristic of the armed conflict may explain the tendency to rely onofficial sources, the frequent voice that Colombian journalists give to official sources bringsabout questionable scenarios in news reporting. Serrano (2013) says that Colombian journalistsuse official and institutionalized sources in their news stories about the conflict because thesesources can easily be held accountable for what they say. The problem with their presence in thenews stories, Serrano adds, is that these official sources (the Colombian military and members ofthe government and the Colombian state) make part of one of the parties in conflict. Thus, theirversion will tend to justify their acts of violence and discredit the enemy, as their objective is towin the war (Borja et al., 2009; Serrano, 2013).In the figure below, Moreno (2008, p. 6) visualizes the flow of information that starts with theoccurrence of an event and ends when the information reaches the public. The gatekeepingfunction of news media is exercised when sources are selected and others are omitted, impacting66the news story narrative. In the case of El Tiempo’s news reporting, the excessive use of officialsources resulted in the omission of other sources of information that would have given balanceand veracity to the facts surrounding the massacres.Figure 5.1 Moreno’s flow of information in the journalistic exerciseFigure 5.1 has been removed due to copyright restrictions (I received no response fromthe copyright holder). It was an English-written adaption of a diagram showing the flowof information beginning when an event occurs and ending when the event reaches thenews audiences. Source: Moreno, M. L. (2008). El papel de la prensa en la construccióny representación del relato mediado de la masacre de El Salado [Uniandes].In war and armed conflict contexts, relying on official sources has limited journalists’ access toalternative information. The officialdom (governments and military sources) constantly seeks tolimit access to information by pre-selecting journalists going to the conflict areas, rationingtransportation and communication or keeping them in the military areas (Allan & Zelizer, 2004).Through a framing analysis, Speer (2017) examined the use and impact of the informationcoming from official sources in the context of the Iraq War and confirmed that the framescoming from these official sources were given more prominence. Speer affirms that thisoverreliance on official sources in news coverage excludes views that do not fall within thebounds of institutional debate — a debate defined by the same official sources. This one-sidedversion of the events is often disconnected from the reality of the human rights situation on thewar ground. It leads to wrong conceptions about the perpetrators and their motivations (Leech,2008).675.2 El Tiempo’s fact verificationSection 2.3 noted the high relevance of fact verification in the journalistic work. If a story relieson the information provided by sources without confirming its veracity or by includingadditional, unrelated sources, the journalistic exercise has not been completed and affects thedelivery and reception of the news.As discussed in the previous section, much of the information that El Tiempo journalists used intheir coverage of the massacres came from official sources, that is, local, regional and nationalauthorities such as police and military members, mayors, civil servants, governors,commissioners, congress members and the president. Additionally, some news texts voicedmembers of the community where the massacres occurred. Farmers, victims’ relatives,inhabitants of the township closest to the place of the massacre, displaced people, and witnesseswere quoted. 19% (n=12) of the news texts covering the FARC massacres included at least onecommunity member as a source, compared to a higher 30% (n=68) of the news texts covering theAUC massacres. These numbers were obtained using the comunidad (community) code in KHCoder and are visualized in Figure 5.2.68Figure 5.2 The Comunidad code in the news texts covering FARC and AUC massacresThe presence of these community members as a source in the new stories was oftencomplemented by an official source who confirmed, reinforced or denied the version provided bythose non-official sources. That is the case of the following excerpt from a news story coveringthe Tarazá massacre, committed by the FARC on December 14, 2001, where 25 farmers weremurdered:The guerilla members arrived at the El Embaretado farm, where there was a laboratoryfor processing cocaine. There they gathered all the farmers and killed them.The commander of the XI Brigade, based in Montería, Colonel Jairo Ovalle Galvis, saidthat "these farmers had no weapons or military-exclusive uniforms."The official's version coincides with that of the displaced people who arrived in the urbanarea of Tarazá, who narrated that the guerillas attacked "the kitchen" where coca leaves69were processed and started a mortal carousel in the area of influence of the laboratory. (ElTiempo, 2001a)In some news reports, El Tiempo journalists quote one official source who retrieved theinformation from a community member. That is the case in the following excerpt from the newsstory reporting the El Firme massacre, committed by the AUC paramilitaries on April 27, 2001:Meanwhile, yesterday, the authorities confirmed the murder of seven farmers during theweekend by an armed group in the sector of Bocas de Yurumanguí in the lower Nayaregion. Five were murdered in the San Antonio settlement and two more in López deMicay (Cauca). One person managed to escape from the armed group.According to official versions, the farmers were shot and finished with hatchets. Signswere left on their bodies: "We came down from Naya to stay here, massacre and death tothe guerrilla."However, the Pacific Naval Force commander, Captain Alberto Rojas, reported thataccording to the initial versions collected among the farmers, the massacre would be anaction of the FARC. (El Tiempo, 2001b)20What can be concluded from most news texts is that journalistic verification was not attemptedby means of an investigation into the surroundings where the events occurred. There is nomention of journalists going to the area where the massacres occurred in any news texts,21 nor is21 It is worth mentioning again that the research in this thesis was based on the digital version of the news stories,nor the printed one. The digital version’s byline always mentions Redacción El Tiempo (El Tiempo’s news editingteam) as the author of the news story, but the printed version may have included the name of the journalist orjournalists that reported the event in byline20 The content of this news story, showing that FARC was first blamed for this massacre, exemplifies the challengesrepresented by the over-reliance on official sources, as discussed in section 5.1. This incorrect identification of theperpetrator by the authorities, and then replicated by El Tiempo in its coverage, happened on multiple occasionsduring the time frame determined for this study.70there a piece of investigative work confirming or denying the facts given by official sources andsources from the society.One of the reasons for this lack of in-depth investigation may be related to the research methodthat I used in this analysis, having a five-day span after the massacres occurred. As discussedbefore, rural communities where most of the massacres occurred are located in distant,difficult-to-reach regions. Having the journalists be deployed there (travelling on their own,transported on the news outlet’s vehicles or using the transportation of the military forces) wouldhave taken days, if not weeks. Long-form investigative journalism, if it took place, is to be foundin news stories happening longer than five days after the occurrence of the event.Furthermore, Colombia is one of the countries where it is more dangerous to practice journalism.Forty-nine journalists have been killed since 2000, 16 of whom were murdered in 2000, 2001and 200222 (Reporters Without Borders, 2023). If caution was behind El Tiempo’s decision not todeploy journalists to investigate the events further or go to the areas of the events and, by doingso, protect their lives, that is completely understandable.Nevertheless, regardless of the time frame between these events and when they were reported inthe news, the journalistic verification of Colombian news outlets in the context of the armedconflict has been questioned by researchers and journalists alike (Montoya, 2008; Rey et al.,2004). Jorge Enrique Botero, a veteran Colombian journalist who has covered the conflict fordifferent national and international outlets, affirmed in an interview with Medina Gallego (2016)that:22 The Reporters Without Borders’ database started gathering data in 2000.71The lack of rigour among journalists to verify information received from official sourcesis remarkable, so is the lack of context and the lack of risk and audacity of currentjournalism to cross what I have called the "invisible frontier," the country where theconflict is most acutely developed and where no one arrives to report on what ishappening. (p. 25)Either because of negligence or fear, El Tiempo’s fact verification regarding the massacres in thetime frame determined for this analysis was not achieved as expected by the journalisticstandards. As noted in Sections 5.4 and 5.5, this led to false attributions, incorrect assumptionsand stigmatizations made by the AUC and the FARC against the victims in the news stories.Future research may explore the degree to which this failed fact verification impacted theColombian audience during the time frame of analysis and whether this influenced their politicaldecisions after the end of the peace process.5.3 Grammatical representation of the FARC and the AUCSections 4.1.2 and 4.1.3 dealt with the use of certain grammatical structures to talk about themassacres committed by the AUC and the FARC. In those sections, it was noted that there was apropensity to represent the FARC as an active social actor and the AUC as a passive one in ElTiempo’s news coverage of the massacres,In Linguistic and Critical Discourse studies, this specific use of active and passive structures totalk about a subject and its actions in a text is known as a rearrangement strategy. It is one of theseveral strategies that the producer of a text or discourse uses to convey meaning and persuadethe recipients of that discourse. Pardo (2007) explains how rearrangement works:72The rearrangement strategy is the representation of social actors by transforming theirdiscursive or social roles through various linguistic strategies and processes. It aims tonaturalize phenomena or states of the represented reality. This strategy allows for thetransition between exclusion and inclusion by appropriating processes such as activatingor passivating the social actors involved. Rearrangement responds more to features oftransitivity in language, from which it is possible to generate alternative constructions ofwhat is represented so that the places of agent and patient are reinvented in discourseaccording to the proposals of meaning that require certain forms of exercise of power. (p.162)In active structures, the subject or actor is portrayed as able to take action. It is a subject thatdoes, produces, speaks, feels, assigns, or generates an effect. On the other hand, in passivestructures, the subject or actor is depicted as an entity on which an action is performed. Thesubject in passive structures is instead an object, a patient, or a beneficiary.This rearrangement of subjects in news texts is a widespread practice. It is also one of the mostvisible elements that reveal the discourse strategy the journalists and editors follow in theircoverage of a particular issue of reality. Van Dijk (1990) states that:The use of active and passive sentences, and the agent or subject position of news actorsin sentences, revealed much about the newspaper's implicit stance towards these newsactors. If authorities, such as the police, are agents of negative acts, they tend to occurless in the agent position. They may then be made less conspicuous in a prepositionalphrase of a passive sentence ("by the police") or remain implicit in an agentless sentencestructure ("Many demonstrators were injured"). (p. 81)73The decision to represent social actors in an active or passive sentence is not a random orunconscious choice but rather a deliberate decision made with particular goals in mind andwithin a specific social and institutional context that allows such representations. In news texts,active voice is preferred when the objective is to emphasize the subject and to give a sense ofimmediacy and clarity to the message. Passive voice is often used in news texts when the subjectis unknown or unimportant or when the news text editor or writer wants to avoid assigning blameor responsibility (Bell, 1991).Section 4.1.2 noted that, in the case of the news texts covering the FARC massacres, active voicestructures were prevalent. Let us analyze the following headline and lead reporting on theUbaque massacre, where the FARC guerrilla murdered five people on February 7, 1999:FARC KILLED AN ENTIRE FAMILYIn the early hours of yesterday morning, two FARC guerrilla members from thedemilitarized zone surprised a family of farmers who were sleeping in the village of Altodel Molino, in the rural sector of Ubaque (Cundinamarca), and massacred them. (ElTiempo, 1999c)This example shows an active representation of the FARC with the two verbs in active voice: “tokill” and “to massacre.” In the news texts covering the FARC massacres, such as this one above,the fact that the FARC guerrilla appears as an active actor or subject reveals the discoursestrategy from El Tiempo’s editors to highlight the guerrilla’s responsibility in the massacres andto shape their role in the conflict as killers or assassins.This grammatical representation is contrasted by the news texts covering the AUC massacres. Asnoted in Section 4.1.3, there was a propensity to utilize the passive structures to represent the74AUC paramilitary in the news texts. The news text below corresponds to a headline and leadreporting a massacre in Barrancabermeja, in the Santander department, on February 28, 1999:8 PEOPLE MASSACRED IN BARRANCAEight people were killed yesterday in Barrancabermeja during the incursion of aparamilitary group, which travelled through the northeast of this city and entered differentestablishments looking for their victims. (El Tiempo, 1999d)This news text contains a passive structure of the verb “to kill.” The sentence focuses on thenumber of victims rather than the perpetrator. Additionally, the sentence omits the presence of anarmed group as the perpetrator. Instead, it offers a contextual description as an explanation forthe killings: the incursion of a paramilitary group. Also, the AUC as an armed group is notexplicitly mentioned (a pattern I discussed in Section 4.2.3).This grammatical representation in El Tiempo’s news texts covering AUC massacres obscuresthe responsibility and avoids accountability of the AUC paramilitary. It also avoids assigningblame and prompts the reader to understand that the act of violence was a natural consequence ofthe war rather than a deliberate decision to cause harm. This representation also fails to offer anyconnection with the victims and to generate condemnation against the perpetrator.The propensity of El Tiempo news stories to represent these two armed groups in such a wayconfirms findings from previous research. García-Marrugo (2012) identified distinct semioticdomains created through the use of specific vocabulary and grammatical structures byconducting a lexicogrammatical examination of news articles from four Colombian newspapers,including El Tiempo, that covered the armed conflict. The author concludes that the tendency toutilize passive voice in news reports detailing the AUC massacres while using the active voice to75report on the FARC massacres was one of the grammatical tools utilized to downplay theaccountability of the AUC in their acts of violence, while simultaneously highlighting the actionsof the FARC.5.4 Victim blamingSection 4.1.4 showed the presence of word structures and enunciations following a pattern that Icalled Víctima Culpable (the victim was at fault). The news texts following that patterncontained versions coming from official sources and the perpetrators that blamed the victims fortheir fate. In the time frame determined for this analysis, the armed groups saw the violenceagainst civilians as a justified action because the victims were an extension of their enemy orbecause they saw their deaths as an unavoidable consequence of the war (CNMH, 2013). Themost common adjectives and nouns that the perpetrators used to denominate victims wereauxiliadores (auxiliaries, helpers), colaboradores (collaborators), traidores (traitors), andrepresentantes (representatives), among others. The following two excerpts from two newsstories exemplify the presence of that narrative in El Tiempo’s coverage. The first one reports aFARC massacre in Frontino, a town in the Antioquia department, where six people were killed.THE FARC ASSASSINATED 6 EPL EX-COMBATANTSThe subversives, who also burned ten houses, accused the farmers of collaborating withthe self-defence groups. (...)The attack began at 5:15 am on Saturday, and according to the reports of the residents tothe authorities, about a thousand militants entered the area. The attackers knocked downthe doors of the houses. (...)76Conrado Antonio Pérez was found in his house and was accused of being a collaboratorwith the self-defence groups. He was shot several times in the head, and two brothers anda sister were also killed. They also entered the houses of two neighbours and killed them.According to the authorities, the victims were former members of the EPL. They workedin agriculture on the farms Acido and El Chontaduro, which make up two hamlets in therural area of Frontino. (El Tiempo, 2000e)The accusation that the FARC made against the farmers to justify their murder makes its waythrough the news report, and it is explicit in the first paragraph. Later in the story, it is alsoindividualized with Mr. Perez's accusation of belonging to a self-defence group (the AUCparamilitary, most likely). We learn where the journalist gathered the information for the storywhen “the authorities'' are quoted as the main source. A second assumption is also explicit in theheadline: the farmers used to be part of the EPL, a Marxist guerilla largely de-mobilized by then.This information is central in the news story, but there are no follow-up verification attempts inthe rest of the text to confirm whether this was a fact. Mentioning that the victims used to be partof an armed group without verification is already problematic. However, in the case the victimswere indeed previous ex-combatants, mentioning that fact directly in the headline assigns anadditional justification to the massacre: the subtext can be read as: if these people were formerguerilla members and were killed, it was probably because of revenge from other groups. As amatter of fact, the stigmatization of ex-combatants is the second strongest explanation behind thekillings of ex-combatants23 in the Colombian armed conflict (Valencia Agudelo, 2021, p. 7).23 In the case of the EPL, the lethality of its ex-combatants is one of the highest among the armed groups that havedemobilized in Colombia. 14.6% (321) of those who demobilized in 1990 have been killed.(Valencia Agudelo,2021, p. 4).77The overreliance on official sources and El Tiempo journalistic verification that I discussed inSections 5.1 and 5.2 serve to understand the reporting work in this news text.Consider now the following excerpt from a news story covering a massacre committed in a ruralarea of Curumaní, a town in the northern Cesár department. The AUC paramilitary murdered 11people in this massacre on January 8, 1999, one day after the Colombian government - FARCpeace process officially started.BETWEEN FEAR AND GRIEF“I am not leaving because I have my job here, and I’d rather be killed by bullets thanstarve to death in another place,” said Ligia Carranza as she accompanied the funeralprocession of 7 of the 11 victims of the paramilitary incursion last Friday in this rural partof Curumaní. (...) They spent a night of fear and grief, keeping vigil for their dead.Like the other dead, they were accused of collaborating with the guerrillas.In a conversation with EL TIEMPO, Carlos Castaño, head of the self-defence groups,said that he has proof that they (the victims) had a close relationship with the ELN. Heaffirmed that they were part of the ELN's Camilo Torres front, which had been makingrandom roadblock kidnappings 24 on the road leading from Bucaramanga to the coast.According to him, 24 men who deserted from the ELN in the past three months and 42ex-FARC combatants took part in the offensive. (...)24 This kidnapping tactic consisted in forming illegal roadblocks in key or peripheral highways. Once the civilian carstopped, the guerilla combatants would detain people, and once they confirmed their names were in a pre-drafted listand checked their economic situation, they would kidnap them. Between 1996 and 2002, 5.354 people werekidnapped using this tactic (CNMH, 2013, p. 68). Although in this case, the AUC commander mentions the ELNguerrilla, the FARC also largely relied on this type of kidnapping. For more information about the FARC's violentdynamics during that time period, see Section 1.2.1.78The mayor of Curumaní, priest Jorge Escorcia, urged armed groups not to involve thecivilian population in the conflict. (El Tiempo, 1999b)The AUC intensified their acts of violence in January 1999, right after the official announcementof the peace process between the government and the FARC guerrilla. In that month only, theAUC committed 15 massacres, murdering 139 people. In the news text above, we find theparticular characteristic of having the commander in chief of that paramilitary organization,Carlos Castaño, as the main source of information in the story.The victimization of the murdered individuals is explicit in the news text. Castaño signals thevictims as collaborators of the ELN guerilla, mentioning their alleged connections with thatarmed group. By reading the story, we assume that El Tiempo journalists contacted Castañodirectly and asked his opinion about the event, the motives for this massacre, and the way it wascarried out. However, as it happened with the previous text, this information was not verified,and Castaño ended up as one of the two sources of the story, together with the town’s mayor. Nocommunity member was quoted as a source. Castaño’s unverified accusation made its way intothe news text, pushing a victim-blaming narrative that was present in 20% of the news textscovering the AUC massacre, as Section 4.1.4 noted.5.5. The armed group and the use of generic namesLet us take a look at the following excerpt, taken from El Tiempo’s news story covering the HatoNuevo massacre that the AUC committed on April 13, 2000. In this massacre, the AUCmurdered 13 people:79ARMED GROUP KILLED 10 IN MONTES DE MARIA(Lead) A total of ten people were killed in the village of Hato Nuevo, a district in themunicipality of El Carmen de Bolívar, following an incursion last Thursday by an armedgroup operating outside the law. (...)Harold Mantilla, commander of the Infantry Battalion operating in the area, stated thatthere are two versions of the new massacre.One of them relates the crimes to the activities of the self-defence groups since theyfound graffiti on the walls that read "by paramilitaries."However, the commander also commented that, according to intelligence reports, theaction might be part of an internal purge by the 37th front of the FARC to avoid moredesertions.After this new armed incursion, at least 200 people from the Hato Nuevo corregimientoarrived in the municipal capital of El Carmen as displaced persons. (El Tiempo, 2000b)As noted in Section 4.2.3, one of the challenges during the coverage of AUC military operationswas the number of potential names that this group may have had. Besides the words para,paramilitar or paraco, self-defence group, ACCU or AUC, in news stories about AUC massacres,El Tiempo journalists and editors referred to the AUC with the expression armed group, in nearly40% of the texts covering their massacres,The news excerpt above uses that expression in the headline and standfirst. The official sourcequoted in the story (an army commander) mentions two hypotheses about the suspectedperpetrators of the massacre, the paramilitaries (no direct reference to the AUC) and the FARC.80He even mentions a good piece of evidence to prove why the AUC are the perpetrators: a graffition the wall. One can understand the use of the expression armed group since the story’s mainsource was not convinced yet that the AUC indeed committed it, as it was later confirmed. ElTiempo journalists could not jump to easy conclusions given the information available then.What is questionable is the lack of fact verification (discussed in Section 5.2) and the absence ofadditional sources that would provide more information about this perpetrator (explored inSection 5.1).News reports like the one above were frequent in the coverage of the AUC massacres. Section4.1.7 showed the presence of the phrase the armed group in the list of most frequent words innews texts covering AUC massacres. Using these indirect expressions like the one above opensthe door to misunderstandings about who committed the massacres. The phrase armed groupdoes not specify which of the armed groups in dispute is to blame for this act of violence.Moreover, it makes the reader think there was no certainty about who committed the massacre,so no condemnation against a specific perpetrator can be elicited. The five-day span used in thisanalysis is a short time frame, and it was difficult for journalists to figure out with certainty whothe perpetrators of some of the massacres were. However, this does not explain why El Tiempojournalists and editors did not use the phrase “armed group” to the same extent in the news textsabout FARC massacres. Instead, they very often reported the FARC as the confirmed perpetratorin headlines and standfirsts and news story texts.Using these alternate names to refer to the AUC criminal organization results in a lack of directaccusation. It also contrasts significantly with the frequent presence of the FARC in news texts,as I discussed in Section 4.2.2. In all the headlines and standfirsts, we see El Tiempo journalistsand editors referring to FARC as FARC, not with words like guerilla or subversives. Conversely,81they frequently used generic names such as para, paramilitary or armed group when referring tothe AUC, thus failing to mention this criminal organization.This difference in identifying the massacre perpetrator in El Tiempo’s front-page headlines andstandfirsts supports the findings by García-Marrugo (2013). This author explored the linguisticpatterns in the news reports of four major Colombian newspapers (including El Tiempo) from1998 - 2006. Her research concluded that the news coverage of these newspapers tended to usegeneric, non-differentiated words to refer to the AUC. On the other hand, they referred to theFARC using words that allowed the easy identification of violent events.5.6 Unreported massacresDuring the data collection process explained in Section 3.2.1, I constantly struggled to find newsstories in El Tiempo’s database covering many massacres committed by the AUC and the FARC.In many instances, after finding the information about the massacre in the National Centre forHistorical Memory (CNMH) database, I would find no reference to the massacre whatsoever inEl Tiempo’s portal. Even if I tried to extend the five-day span after the day the massacre wascommitted, out of curiosity, I would not see any article covering the massacre. On two occasions,I found two news stories that made minimal reference to the massacre and completely changedthe facts of who murdered and who was murdered. I registered all these unreported andincorrectly reported massacres in a sheet file.During the time frame selected for this analysis, El Tiempo did not include any news storyreferencing 107 massacres. Seventy-three massacres were committed by the AUC paramilitariesand 34 by the FARC guerilla. In these 107 massacres, 589 people were murdered (Cinep, 2022;CNMH, 2013; Rutas del Conflicto, 2014).82One hundred seven massacres look like a very high number of unreported events, and the factthat they have not been covered by the biggest newspaper in the country where they werecommitted is indeed problematic. Several factors may explain this. The before-mentioned risk ofventuring to far-flung and perilous locations is an economic and organizational constraint thatcertainly affected the coverage of these events. Additionally, Colombia is a country with anincredibly fast-paced news cycle, with events becoming outdated within a matter of hours. Dailynewsworthy stories and headlines emerge, making it difficult for journalists and outlets to keepup with them. That was also the case during the time frame determined for this analysis. Garcia(2012) describes the stream of events that occurred in the last week of February 2002:Only in the last week of February 2002, the FARC hijacked a plane, kidnapping, amongothers, Senator Jorge Gechem, president of the Peace Commission. To stop militaryaction, the guerrillas dynamited several bridges, which led to the death of four peoplewho drove into the abyss. President Andrés Pastrana then decreed the end of the Peacenegotiations and gave the insurgents till midnight to abandon the area, which wasbombarded early in the morning. The next day, the presidential candidate IngridBetancourt and her running mate, Clara Rojas, were kidnapped by the FARC whileattempting to visit the area where the peace talks were being held. There is hardly anotherplace on earth where journalists have to work so hard to keep up with the pace of events.(p. 28)Still, for Colombian journalists, the constraint of catching up with this overwhelming number ofevents exemplified above is not nearly as coercive as having to risk one's life in search of a story.As outlined in Section 5.2, Colombia is one of the countries where it is most dangerous to be ajournalist. In the areas most affected by conflict, press freedom is seriously harmed due to the83silencing of journalists’ voices through intimidation, murder, and self-censorship (Bonilla &Narváez Montoya, 2008). A 2004 study showed that 65% of the journalists living in those areashad been intimidated by an armed group or the Military Forces of Colombia (Medios para la Paz,2004). Having 6 out of 10 journalists living under intimidation certainly harms freedom ofspeech and becomes the most complex constraint that may explain the absence of reporting ofthe massacres mentioned above.Therefore, rather than holding the journalists accountable for the absence of news reportscovering those many massacres, I would instead set the spotlight on the owners, the director andthe chief editor of El Tiempo news media conglomerate. During those years, it was evident thatthe armed conflict required more extensive news coverage while ensuring extraordinary safetymeasures for journalists. To achieve this, the outlets needed to build an organizational networkthat could coordinate with the national government to assign physical protection to journalistsliving under death threats or intimidation. Additionally, the newspaper needed to establish arobust journalistic presence in departments far from Bogotá by hiring more editors, journalists,on-ground reporters and media workers and guaranteeing better work conditions for theirthen-employed staff. In the case of El Tiempo, the fact that 107 massacres were not reportedconfirms that this organizational adaptation to the conflict's reality did not occur.846 ConclusionIn 2016, after a tortuous negotiation, the Colombian government and the FARC guerilla signed apeace agreement ending a 52-year-old conflict. One of the many academic discussions that havearisen after the end of such a long-armed confrontation is the role of the Colombian news mediacoverage of the conflict and the conditions of journalistic activity in the country during thoseyears.As discussed in Section 1.1.3, the highest number of victims during the Colombian armedconflict occurred during the government of President Pastrana from 1998 to 2002, whichcoincided with the failed peace agreement with the FARC guerrilla. One of the motivations thattriggered my interest in carrying out the analysis in this thesis was the role of the Colombiannews media in constructing the collective consciousness regarding the armed groups during theyears this conflict was more intense. Employing a framing analysis of the news coverage that ElTiempo newspaper made of the massacres committed by the FARC guerilla and the AUCparamilitary during the 1999-2002 peace process, this thesis allowed me to confirm some of theobservations that previous literature has made about the news coverage of the Colombian armedconflict. The analysis also permitted me to find some patterns in the journalistic work of ElTiempo that have not been previously examined.El Tiempo’s excessive reliance on sources from Colombia’s institutions has been noted inprevious literature (Bonilla & Tamayo, 2005; Moreno, 2008; Serrano, 2014, 2016). One elementthat the analysis in this thesis contributes to this finding is the distribution of these officialsources in El Tiempo’s news reports. Section 4.1.1 showed how much more the news storiesquoted members of the Colombian Military Forces than members of the government, which85becomes quite problematic in the context of an armed conflict. Serrano (2014) asserts that givingthe Colombian military and police forces preponderance as sources in the news stories seriouslyharmed the journalistic practice. By doing so, the author adds, the voice of one of the combatants(the Colombian Military Forces) was prioritized over the voice of the other parties in conflict andover that of the civil victims. Building upon these assumptions, I argue that the presence of theseofficial sources and their impact on how the news events were framed show another example ofthe indexing power of official sources. The “indexing theory,” first proposed by Bennet (1990),argues that official sources exercise decisive power over journalists in regard to how news eventsare framed. The frames that the official sources use to talk about an event usually make their waythrough the news stories and become an essential part of the news narrative (p. 106). In thecontext of Colombian news coverage, this thesis showed that the information coming from thearmed groups, the Colombian military, and the government made its way to the news storywithout any verification. Further research can expand this quest and confirm whether mostframes the Colombian Military Forces and the armed groups utilized to represent the conflictmade their way into the news coverage and became the news narrative.Another substantial contribution of this analysis is the confirmation that El Tiempo’s newscoverage of the massacres permitted the presence of unverified accusations against the victims.Section 5.4 confirmed that about one-fifth of the news coverage of the massacres included quotesfrom official sources, the FARC or the AUC saying that the massacres occurred because thesevictims were collaborating with the rival armed group or with the Colombian Military Forces.Due to the poor journalistic verification that I discussed in Section 5.2, these accusations againstthe victims were not confirmed or contrasted. They were included in the news stories, becomingjustifications for the violence against civilians. This finding was also noted by Moreno (2008) in86the news coverage of the El Salado massacre committed by the AUC paramilitaries in February2000. Future research may explore the impact that this victim blaming in news reports had on theColombian collective consciousness. Understanding whether news media had any impact on howthe Colombian population perceived the conflict's victims may provide a significant academicinsight into the influence of Colombian news outlets and how they frame the complexColombian reality in their reporting.The use of some linguistic devices that often showed the FARC as an active subject and the AUCas a passive subject in sentences of news texts covering the massacres they committed is afinding that confirms the conclusion reached by García-Marrugo (2012). Using alexicogrammatical analysis of news stories published by four Colombian newspapers (includingEl Tiempo) covering the armed conflict, the author’s work revealed how particular vocabularyand grammatical structures created distinct semiotic domains. In her analysis, the tendency to usethe passive voice in news reports covering the AUC massacres and the use of active voice in theverbal phrases reporting the FARC massacres was one of the grammatical resources thatdiminished the accountability of the AUC in their acts of violence. In contrast, the FARC’sactions were highlighted, which demonstrates a disparity in the coverage. This thesis contributesto this hypothesis by showing additional lexicogrammatical evidence from El Tiempo’s newstexts. Section 4.2.1 showed how this newspaper’s front-page headlines and standfirsts frequentlyused compelling language to describe the FARC massacres, while coverage of AUC massacresdid not feature such descriptions as frequently. That section also described how these headlinesand standfirsts would often depict a daunting scenario in their reporting about FARC massacresbecause the attacks on towns that this guerrilla committed were part of the coverage. Sections4.2.2 and 4.2.3 directly approached the discrepancy in the coverage of these two groups by87showing the frequent presence of the FARC in the news texts and the persistent absence of anydirect reference to the AUC as a criminal organization.One interesting conclusion of the research activity in this thesis was that one of the mostsignificant findings did not come directly from the framing analysis but rather from the searchand data selection process. Section 5.6 revealed that during the data collection stage of theanalysis, I found that over 100 massacres committed by the FARC and the AUC were notaccounted for in El Tiempo's news coverage. Beyond the possible reasons to account for thistroubling pattern, it is clear that press freedom in Colombia was seriously affected as aconsequence of the armed conflict. In turn, the Colombian public did not have enoughinformation about what was occurring. Information allows people to make better choices, and inpolitics, information may make a difference in high-relevance election times. Future academicresearch may use a different data collection process to confirm whether and how many of thosemassacres were reported. Research can also identify the specific reasons that explain this lack ofcoverage in the pages of the most relevant Colombian newspaper.This study has succeeded in answering the research questions laid out in Chapter 1. The analysisexplained how El Tiempo’s newspaper covered the massacres committed by the FARC and theAUC. It showed what news sources were used, how the journalistic verification was, how thevictims were represented in the news stories, what language was used to refer to the two armedgroups, and what the more relevant topics were in this news coverage. The study also showedthat, using certain lexicogrammatical representations of the FARC and the AUC, El Tiempo’snews coverage was not uniform and that the massacres were often framed differently.88This study's limitations predominantly concern the sample size of the news stories. Althoughboth the FARC guerilla and the AUC paramilitary committed massacres against civilians in thetime frame selected for this analysis, the AUC committed the higher number of these acts ofviolence. Section 3.2.2 showed that having 281 news texts (between news articles and front-pageheadlines with their standfirsts) covering the AUC massacres and 94 covering the FARCmassacres was an expected disparity deriving from the fact that the AUC committed moremassacres. Future research could analyze the news coverage of other acts of violence, such asattacks on towns, kidnappings, torture, sexual assaults and threats. More armed actors could beincluded, such as the Colombian Military Forces and the ELN guerrilla. Such research could giveimportant insights into how these acts of violence are framed depending on the armed actorperpetrating them.Another limitation had to do with the use of only one news organization. A much larger framinganalysis involving more Colombian newspapers and media forms, such as radio and TVchannels, would have allowed me to compare El Tiempo’s news coverage. Including a largerdataset from different news media would have confirmed whether this thesis's findings were atrend in the Colombian news media ecosystem. This larger research scenario was not achievedhere due to time and search limitations, but it could be the focus of future studies. It will also bequite insightful to see a framing analysis of the visual content of the news reports in theColombian armed conflict. Salamanca (2015) extensively analyzed the relationship between thevisual images surrounding the Colombian conflict and the perception of the battlefield in thecollective consciousness.To conclude, I want to emphasize the importance of comprehending the journalists' constraints intimes of conflict. It is crucial to consider that news production is not merely the labour of89reporters in the field and their journalistic decisions. A whole set of social and culturalconstraints restrict their work and impact them individually and collectively. The sameconstraints also influence their editors and news media, eventually affecting how news stories areframed. Furthermore, journalists worldwide endure daily challenges such as news mediabusiness and political decisions, threats to their safety and attacks on their reputation, harassmentbased on their gender, sexual preferences or ethnicity, and the psychological and emotionalimpact of reporting. Because of these macrostructural reasons, rather than analyzing the newscoverage of armed conflicts from an exclusively journalistic point of view, future research couldconsider the contextual conditions affecting journalistic labour in the context of war and thechallenges and limitations the journalists must endure when reporting.90ReferencesAgencia EFE - Colprensa. (2012, May 30). Sarmiento ya es dueño del 100% del diario El Tiempo.www.elcolombiano.com.https://www.elcolombiano.com/historico/sarmiento_ya_es_dueno_del_100_del_diario_el_tiempo-HVEC_184030Aguilera Peña, M. (2010). Las Farc: La guerrilla campesina, 1949-2010 ¿Ideas circulares en un mundocambiante? (1. ed). 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Colombia’s congress approves historic peace deal with FARC rebels—The WashingtonPost.https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/colombian-congress-approves-historic-peace-deal/2016/11/30/9b2fda92-b5a7-11e6-939c-91749443c5e5_story.htmlPastrana Arango, A. (Director). (2002). Alocución Presidencial sobre el final del Proceso de Paz -20 defebrero del 2002-. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1Z0qQfiNK0Popping, R. (2020). Computer-assisted text analysis.https://methods.sagepub.com/foundations/computer-assisted-text-analysisPosada-Carbó, E. (1998). Fiction as History: The bananeras and Gabriel García Márquez’s One HundredYears of Solitude. Journal of Latin American Studies, 30(2), 395–414.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022216X98005094Reporters Without Borders. (2023). Barometer | RSF. https://rsf.org/en/barometerRestrepo Betancur, F. (2019). Percepción sobre los noticieros que se emiten en la televisión colombianapor parte de estudiantes universitarios de la ciudad de Medellín Colombia. El Ágora U.S.B., 19,343–351.Restrepo, J. A., & Muggah, R. (2009). Colombia’s quiet demobilization: A security dividend? In Securityand Post-Conflict Reconstruction. Dealing with Fighters in the Aftermath of War (pp. 30–46).Routledge.Rey, G., Vélez, J. I. B., & Nariño, P. A. (2004). Calidad informativa y cubrimiento del conflicto:Estándares de calidad periodística en el cubrimiento del conflicto armado en Colombia. ProyectoAntonio Narino. https://books.google.ca/books?id=aN\_PyAEACAAJRichani, N. (2013). Systems of violence: The political economy of war and peace in Colombia (2nd ed).State University of New York Press.Rodríguez, C. (2011). Citizens’ media against armed conflict disrupting violence in Colombia. Universityof Minnesota Press.98Romero, M. (2003). Paramilitares y autodefensas, 1982-2003. Temas de Hoy : Instituto de EstudiosPolíticos y Relaciones Internacionales, Universidad Nacional de Colombia : Editorial PlanetaColombiana; /z-wcorg/.Romero, S. (2010). Ex-Minister Wins Election in Colombia—The New York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/world/americas/21colombia.html?searchResultPosition=1Rutas del Conflicto. (2014). Mapa de Masacres. Rutas del Conflicto.https://rutasdelconflicto.com/masacresRutas del Conflicto. (2017). Geografía Del Paramilitarismo En Colombia (1977-2006).https://rutasdelconflicto.com/geografia-paramilitarismoSaavedra, A. M. (2022). Collar bomba fue un acto de la delincuencia común, pero aún se lo atribuyenfalsamente a las FARC. Colombia Check.https://colombiacheck.com/chequeos/collar-bomba-fue-un-acto-de-la-delincuencia-comun-pero-aun-se-lo-atribuyen-falsamente-lasSacco, V. F. (1995a). Media Constructions of Crime. The Annals of the American Academy of Politicaland Social Science, 539, 141–154. JSTOR.Sacco, V. F. (1995b). Media Constructions of Crime. The Annals of the American Academy of Politicaland Social Science, 539, 141–154. JSTOR.Salamanca, C. L. (2015). 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(2007). The Constructionist Approach to Framing: Bringing Culture Back In. Journal ofCommunication, 57, 60–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00329.xWeaver, D. H., Willnat, L., & Taylor & Francis eBooks A-Z. (2012). The global journalist in the 21stcentury. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203148679Zartman, I. W. (2001). The timing of peace initiatives: Hurting stalemates and ripe moments. GlobalReview of Ethnopolitics, 1(1), 8–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14718800108405087101AppendicesAppendix A: List of codesCode Name Grouped WordsAdjetivos cruento | execrable | sangriento | doloroso | deplorable | horror | tristeza |llanto | consuelo | desolación | desolado | destrucción | ruinas | sangre |impresionante | triste | dolor | tragedia | trágico | sufrir | sufrimiento |cruel | crueldad | ruinas | Despreciable | Despiadado | sin+piedad |maldad | maligno | horrible | horripilante | desgracia | desgraciado |near(mucha-crueldad) | desdeñable | Repulsivo | Catastrófico | catástrofe| Malvado | maldito | monstruoso | Vil | virulento | Ominoso | Fatídico |Tenebroso | tragedia | miedo | SiniestroAUC AUC | Autodefensa | Autodefensas | Autodefensa |Autodefensas+Unidas+de+Colombia | paramilitar | paramilitares |paramilitarismo | paraco | comando+para | para | parasFARC farc | Fuerzas+armadas+revolucionarias+de+colombia | guerrilla |guerrillero | guerrillera | guerrilleros | guerrilleras | subversivos |subversiva | subversivas | subversivoFFMM fuerzas+armadas | ejercito | soldado | brigada | batallón | tropa | Policía |Policia | General | teniente | brigadier | coronelGrupo Armado 'grupo armado' | near(hombre-armar) | near(actor-armar) |near(sujeto-armar) | near(individuo-armar)Official Sources- FFMMnear(fuerzas+armadas-decir) | near(ejercito-decir) | near(soldado-decir) |near(Policía-decir) | near(comandante-decir) | near(general-decir) |near(teniente-decir) | near(brigadier-decir) | near(coronel-decir) |near(oficial-decir) | near(fuerzas+armadas-explicar) |near(ejercito-explicar) | near(soldado-explicar) | near(Policía-explicar) |near(comandante-explicar) | near(general-explicar) |near(teniente-explicar) | near(brigadier-explicar) | near(coronel-explicar)| near(oficial-explicar) | near(fuerzas+armadas-informar) |near(ejercito-informar) | near(soldado-informar) | near(Policía-informar)| near(general-informar) | near(teniente-informar) |near(brigadier-informar) | near(coronel-informar) |near(oficial-informar) | near(fuerzas+armadas-confirmar) |near(ejercito-confirmar) | near(soldado-confirmar) |near(Policía-confirmar) | near(general-confirmar) |near(teniente-confirmar) | near(brigadier-confirmar) |near(coronel-confirmar) | near(oficial-confirmar) |102near(fuerzas+armadas-anunciar) | near(ejercito-anunciar) |near(soldado-anunciar) | near(Policía-anunciar) | near(general-anunciar)| near(teniente-anunciar) | near(brigadier-anunciar) |near(coronel-anunciar) | near(oficial-anunciar) |near(fuerzas+armadas-asegurar) | near(ejercito-asegurar) |near(soldado-asegurar) | near(Policía-asegurar) | near(general-asegurar)| near(teniente-asegurar) | near(brigadier-asegurar) |near(coronel-asegurar) | near(oficial-asegurar) |near(fuerzas+armadas-sostener) | near(ejercito-sostener) |near(soldado-sostener) | near(Policía-sostener) | near(general-sostener) |near(teniente-sostener) | near(brigadier-sostener) | near(coronel-sostener)| near(oficial-sostener) | near(fuerzas+armadas-descartar) |near(ejercito-descartar) | near(soldado-descartar) |near(Policía-descartar) | near(general-descartar) |near(teniente-descartar) | near(brigadier-descartar) |near(coronel-descartar) | near(oficial-descartar) |near(fuerzas+armadas-segun) | near(ejercito-segun) |near(soldado-segun) | near(Policía-segun) | near(general-segun) |near(teniente-segun) | near(brigadier-segun) | near(coronel-segun) |near(fuerzas+armadas-indicar) | near(ejercito-indicar) |near(soldado-indicar) | near(Policía-indicar) | near(general-indicar) |near(teniente-indicar) | near(brigadier-indicar) | near(coronel-indicar) |near(oficial-indicar) | near(fuerzas+armadas-calificar) |near(ejercito-calificar) | near(soldado-calificar) | near(Policía-calificar) |near(general-calificar) | near(teniente-calificar) | near(brigadier-calificar)| near(coronel-calificar) | near(oficial-calificar) | near(autoridades-decir) |near(autoridades-explicar) | near(autoridades-informar) |near(autoridades-confirmar) | near(autoridades-anunciar) |near(autoridades-asegurar) | near(autoridades-sostener) |near(autoridades-descartar) | near(autoridades-segun) |near(autoridades-indicar) | near(autoridades-calificar) |near(fuerzas+armadas-reportar) | near(ejercito-reportar) |near(soldado-reportar) | near(Policía-reportar) | near(general-reportar) |near(teniente-reportar) | near(brigadier-reportar) |near(coronel-reportar) | near(oficial-reportar) | autoridad |near(fuerzas+armadas-comentar) | near(ejercito-comentar) |near(soldado-comentar) | near(Policía-comentar) |near(comandante-comentar) | near(general-comentar) |near(teniente-comentar) | near(brigadier-comentar) |near(coronel-comentar) | near(oficial-comentar) |near(autoridades-comentar) | near(fuerzas+armadas-descartar) |near(ejercito-descartar) | near(soldado-descartar) |near(Policía-descartar) | near(comandante-descartar) |near(general-descartar) | near(teniente-descartar) |near(brigadier-descartar) | near(coronel-descartar) |near(oficial-descartar) | near(autoridades-descartar)103Official Sources- Governmentnear(Presidente-decir) | near(Pastrana-decir) |near(Andres+Pastrana-decir) |near(el+presidente+de+la+republica-decir) | near(ministro-decir) |near(alto+comisionado+para+la+paz-decir) | near(comisionado-decir) |near(funcionario-decir) | near(alcalde-decir) | near(gobernador-decir) |near(diputado-decir) | near(diputado-decir) | near(secretario-decir) |near(Presidente-explicar) | near(Pastrana-explicar) |near(Andres+Pastrana-explicar) |near(el+presidente+de+la+republica-explicar) | near(ministro-explicar) |near(alto+comisionado+para+la+paz-explicar) |near(comisionado-explicar) | near(funcionario-explicar) |near(alcalde-explicar) | near(gobernador-explicar) |near(diputado-explicar) | near(diputado-explicar) |near(secretario-explicar) | near(Presidente-informar) |near(Pastrana-informar) | near(Andres+Pastrana-informar) |near(el+presidente+de+la+republica-informar) | near(ministro-informar)| near(alto+comisionado+para+la+paz-informar) |near(comisionado-informar) | near(funcionario-informar) |near(alcalde-informar) | near(gobernador-informar) |near(diputado-informar) | near(diputado-informar) |near(secretario-informar) | near(Presidente-confirmar) |near(Pastrana-confirmar) | near(Andres+Pastrana-confirmar) |near(el+presidente+de+la+republica-confirmar) |near(ministro-confirmar) |near(alto+comisionado+para+la+paz-confirmar) |near(comisionado-confirmar) | near(funcionario-confirmar) |near(alcalde-confirmar) | near(gobernador-confirmar) |near(diputado-confirmar) | near(diputado-confirmar) |near(secretario-confirmar) | near(Presidente-anunciar) |near(Pastrana-anunciar) | near(Andres+Pastrana-anunciar) |near(el+presidente+de+la+republica-anunciar) | near(ministro-anunciar)| near(alto+comisionado+para+la+paz-anunciar) |near(comisionado-anunciar) | near(funcionario-anunciar) |near(alcalde-anunciar) | near(gobernador-anunciar) |near(diputado-anunciar) | near(diputado-anunciar) |near(secretario-anunciar) | near(Presidente-asegurar) |near(Pastrana-asegurar) | near(Andres+Pastrana-asegurar) |near(el+presidente+de+la+republica-asegurar) | near(ministro-asegurar)| near(alto+comisionado+para+la+paz-asegurar) |near(comisionado-asegurar) | near(funcionario-asegurar) |near(alcalde-asegurar) | near(gobernador-asegurar) |near(diputado-asegurar) | near(diputado-asegurar) |near(secretario-asegurar) | near(Presidente-sostener) |near(Pastrana-sostener) | near(Andres+Pastrana-sostener) |near(el+presidente+de+la+republica-sostener) | near(ministro-sostener) |near(alto+comisionado+para+la+paz-sostener) |104near(comisionado-sostener) | near(funcionario-sostener) |near(alcalde-sostener) | near(gobernador-sostener) |near(diputado-sostener) | near(diputado-sostener) |near(secretario-sostener) | near(Presidente-descartar) |near(Pastrana-descartar) | near(Andres+Pastrana-descartar) |near(el+presidente+de+la+republica-descartar) |near(ministro-descartar) |near(alto+comisionado+para+la+paz-descartar) |near(comisionado-descartar) | near(funcionario-descartar) |near(alcalde-descartar) | near(gobernador-descartar) |near(diputado-descartar) | near(diputado-descartar) |near(secretario-descartar) | near(Presidente-segun) |near(Pastrana-segun) | near(Andres+Pastrana-segun) |near(el+presidente+de+la+republica-segun) | near(ministro-segun) |near(alto+comisionado+para+la+paz-segun) | near(comisionado-segun) |near(funcionario-segun) | near(alcalde-segun) | near(gobernador-segun) |near(diputado-segun) | near(diputado-segun) | near(secretario-segun) |near(Presidente-indicar) | near(Pastrana-indicar) |near(Andres+Pastrana-indicar) |near(el+presidente+de+la+republica-indicar) | near(ministro-indicar) |near(alto+comisionado+para+la+paz-indicar) |near(comisionado-indicar) | near(funcionario-indicar) |near(alcalde-indicar) | near(gobernador-indicar) | near(diputado-indicar)| near(diputado-indicar) | near(secretario-indicar) |near(Presidente-calificar) | near(Pastrana-calificar) |near(Andres+Pastrana-calificar) |near(el+presidente+de+la+republica-calificar) | near(ministro-calificar) |near(alto+comisionado+para+la+paz-calificar) |near(comisionado-calificar) | near(funcionario-calificar) |near(alcalde-calificar) | near(gobernador-calificar) |near(diputado-calificar) | near(diputado-calificar) |near(secretario-calificar) | near(defensor-decir) | near(defensor-explicar) |near(defensor-informar) | near(defensor-confirmar) |near(defensor-anunciar) | near(defensor-asegurar) |near(defensor-sostener) | near(defensor-descartar) | near(defensor-segun)| near(defensor-indicar) | near(defensor-calificar) |near(Presidente-comentar) | near(Pastrana-comentar) |near(Andres+Pastrana-comentar) |near(el+presidente+de+la+republica-comentar) |near(ministro-comentar) |near(alto+comisionado+para+la+paz-comentar) |near(comisionado-comentar) | near(funcionario-comentar) |near(alcalde-comentar) | near(gobernador-comentar) |near(diputado-comentar) | near(diputado-comentar) |near(secretario-comentar) | near(defensor-comentar)105Proceso Proceso | paz | proceso+de+paz | acuerdo | acuerdos | Caguan | Caguán |San+Vicente+Del+Caguán | San+Vicente+Del+Caguan | El+Caguan |El+Caguán | proceso+del+caguan | acuerdos+del+caguan |acuerdos+en+el+caguan | acuerdo+de+paz | acuerdos+de+pazSociedad near(campesino-decir) | near(campesino-explicar) |near(campesino-informar) | near(campesino-confirmar) |near(campesino-anunciar) | near(campesino-asegurar) |near(campesino-sostener) | near(campesino-descartar) |near(campesino-según) | near(campesino-indicar) |near(campesino-calificar) | near(campesino-comentar) |near(campesino-reportar) | near(habitantes-decir) |near(habitantes-calificar) | near(habitantes-explicar) |near(habitantes-informar) | near(habitantes-confirmar) |near(habitantes-anunciar) | near(habitantes-asegurar) |near(habitantes-sostener) | near(habitantes-descartar) |near(habitantes-según) | near(habitantes-indicar) |near(desplazados-calificar) | near(desplazados-comentar) |near(desplazados-reportar) | near(desplazados-decir) |near(desplazados-explicar) | near(desplazados-informar) |near(desplazados-confirmar) | near(desplazados-anunciar) |near(desplazados-asegurar) | near(desplazados-sostener) |near(desplazados-descartar) | near(desplazados-según) |near(desplazados-indicar) | near(testigo-decir) | near(testigo-calificar) |near(testigo-explicar) | near(testigo-informar) | near(testigo-confirmar) |near(testigo-anunciar) | near(testigo-asegurar) | near(testigo-sostener) |near(testigo-descartar) | near(testigo-según) | near(testigo-indicar) |near(testigo-comentar) | near(testigo-reportar)VíctimaCulpablecolaborador | near(brindar-ayuda) | colaboradores+de | sindicar+de+ser |'acusaron de ser' | acusar+de | near(brindar-colaboración) |near(brindar-alimentos) | antecedente+judicial | auxiliador | 'auxiliadorde la guerilla' | near(dar+ayuda-guerrilla) |near(dar+ayuda-paramilitares) | near(acusar-de) | presunto+colaboradorVoz Pasiva 'fueron asesinados' | 'fueron asesinadas' | 'fue asesinado' | 'fue asesinada'| 'fueron masacradas' | 'fueron masacrados' | 'fue masacrado' | 'fuemasacrada' | 'fueron matadas' | 'fueron matados' | 'fue matada' | 'fuematado' | 'fue ejecutado' | 'fue ejecutada' | 'fueron ejecutadas' | 'fueronejecutados' | 'fue rematado' | 'fue rematada' | 'fueron rematados' | 'fueronrematadas' | 'sido asesinadas' | 'sido asesinada' | 'sido asesinados' | 'sidoasesinado' | 'sido masacradas' | 'sido masacrados' | 'sido masacrada' |'sido masacrado' | 'sido ejecutada' | 'sido ejecutado' | 'sido ejecutadas' |'sido ejecutados' | 'sido rematados' | 'sido rematadas' | 'sido rematado' |'sido rematada'106Appendix B: Databases searchAppendix B shows an example of the data collection process in the ¡Basta Ya! and Rutas delConflicto databases.This example shows the process to find news stories covering the Hato Nuevo massacre,committed by the AUC paramilitaries on April 13, 2000 where 13 people were murdered.1. ¡Basta Ya! database.1072. Rutas del Conflicto database.108Appendix C: El Tiempo’s online portal searchAppendix C continues the demonstration of the data collection process by showing how newsarticles are retrieved on El Tiempo news search portal.1. El Tiempo’s online portal (https://www.eltiempo.com/buscar).109
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Journalism
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Barforoush, Saranaz
Riaño Alcalá, Pilar
Framing violence in times of peace talks : El Tiempo’s news coverage of massacres committed during the 1999–2002 Colombian government - FARC peace process
Text