Publications
Ortega Chávez, J.D. (2025). Understanding the role of the Colombian news media in a peace process during crisis times: The 2015 escalation of the conflict. Media War and Conflict
I applied Wolfsfeld's Politics-Media-Politics model to assess the role of the media during the escalation of the conflict in 2015. I argue that the news media intervened by amplifying the crisis, worsening the political atmosphere of the negotiations and pressuring both delegations to come to an agreement to change the approach of negotiating amidst the conflict.
Ortega, J. and Lawson, B. (2023). How journalists do memory work with numbers: The case of the 220,000 deaths during the Colombian conflict (1958–2012). Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism
We examined how the Colombian news media reported on the 220,000 conflict-related deaths using quantitative content analysis and thematic analysis. We found that journalists largely treated the figure as an uncontested fact and disproportionately attributed responsibility to FARC, contradicting the original historical report produced by the National Centre for Historical Memory.