The historical literature on the Latin American mass media from the 1920s to the late 1960s – most of it published in small editions, often by the pioneers of broadcasting – is not abundant. The extensive literature on development communications in Latin America was written mainly in the United States. There is a significant Latin American body of critical work around media reforms and the New International Information Order, much of which is contained in Fernando Reyes Matta (ed.), La Información en el Nuevo Orden International (Mexico, D.F., 1977) and in UNESCO Reports and Papers on Mass Communication: 70, Television Traffic - A One-Way Street?; 92, Transnational Communication and Cultural Industries; 93, Foreign News in the Media: International Reporting in 29 Countries; 98, The New International Economic Order: Links Between Economics and Communication; and 99, International Flow of Information: A Global Report and Analysis, There have been some studies on the media under the military dictatorships of the 1970s and early 1980s, such as G. Munizaga, El discurso público de Pinochet (Buenos Aires, 1983) and the studies cited below on Brazil and Argentina. Finally, there is extensive descriptive and applied literature on the experiences of alternative communications.

There have been important efforts to collect and analyse the literature on Latin American communications. Four annotated bibliographies of national communication research have been published: P. Anzola and P. Cooper, La investigatión en comunicación social en Colombia (Lima, 1985); G. Munizaga and A. Rivera, La investigaciín en comunicacion social en Chile (Lima, 1983); O. Peirano and T. Kudo, La investigatión en comunicación social en el Perú (Lima, 1982); and J. B. Rivera, La investigatión en comunicación social en Argentina (Lima, 1986).