Costa Rica

Newspapers, radio, television, magazines, and the internet all are powerful sources of news that play a vital role in society affecting the level that which a country in informed and how the people of that country react toward the information being reported to them. Every country is different in the way they practice journalism and the tactics they use to gain information. Costa Rica is unlike its neighboring countries economically and educationally; these factors combine to produce a media system unique to most South American countries.

Costa Rican newspapers are impressively flourishing. The tabloid-sized format standard to their newspapers communicates national and local news through daily, evening, and weekly publications. The newspapers of Costa Rica include five dailies, one evening, and an English-language weekly newspaper. Newspapers in the United States have experienced dramatic decreases in circulation since the introduction of other media outlets (specifically cable television), among other factors that had influence, yet newspaper circulation in Costa Rica has experienced a complete opposite affect than that of the U.S.; its circulation increased one and a half percent the past several years.

News magazines of Costa Rica include the national business magazine Actualidad Economica and the national monthly business magazine EKA (La Revista Empresarial), and the foreign business magazine The Economist. The Economist is most unique because it is a collectively written anonymous paper.

Costa Rica’s major television network news and news channels include the local cable service, privately owned stations, a publicly owned national television network and the cultural channel, SINART (Channel 13), which is run and controlled by the government. The majority of the Costa Rican media adheres to a right-leaning political perspective, yet a contrasting perspective does exist in broadcast media. This contrasting perspective is offered up by Channel 4, which supports a less popular left-leaning political perspective. The single government-controlled cultural channel, SINART (Channel 13), concentrates on numerous forms of cultural programming and often projects a liberal outlook on current events.

Outside of the nation’s capital of San Jose, the location in which most newspapers originate, radio is the most important primary media outlet by which people can access information, even surpassing the importance of the daily newspapers. The importance of broadcast radio to the people of Costa Rica is significantly greater than the seriously decreasing importance the American people place upon radio in the United States. News radio stations of Costa Rica are owned by a few large companies and often include U.S. Information Service programs that are widely broadcast by the radio stations of Costa Rica.

For more information on Costa Rica I am posting the following link: http://www.pressreference.com/Co-Fa/Costa-Rica.html

This source of information was the most useful I had found.