Abstract
On 1 January 1994 the Zapatista Army of National Liberation took control of the main municipalities in Chiapas, Mexico. During this initial uprising, the commercial media overwhelmingly refused to reproduce Zapatista communiqués. In an attempt to remedy the situation, Zapatista supporters began to send them out over computer networks and in so doing catapulted news of the movement onto headlines around the world. While many are celebrating the new communication capabilities facilitated by the internet, others warn that the internet dangerously lowers traditional news standards. Taking the norms of journalism as its starting point, this article analyzes online Zapatista-related discourse in order to reveal characteristics unique to computer-mediated communication. Specifically of interest here are the mechanisms by which traditional journalism and computer-mediated communication each produce a particular truth about the Zapatista movement and how each truth, in turn, instigates its own methods of ascribing meaning to the movement.
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