September 2: The Media Lies !?!

Should qualify this post by saying that it is a bunch of observation that is certainly from an outside viewpoint on Chilean society and should be read as such.

As I've become a bit more familiar with some of the issues going on in Chile, I've finally been starting to get sense of what some have complained about when they say the Chilean media is really one sided and weak. In general, it seems to me that the "lies" that the media perpetuate are not as much blatant manufacturing of falsehoods as much as things that go unreported, thereby creating an inaccurate picture of society. This is by no means a problem unique to Chile- for example, I was talking last night with a friend who was just in India about how the humanitarian crisis in Pakistan is going completely unreported in India due to their long standing conflict. Another problem in the way media outlets are increasingly being bundled into mega-mega corporations that can effectively decide what voices will and will not be allowed airing. However, in the specific case of Chile, because of the point where Chile is at as a nation, I believe that the absence of many issues and stories in the media may hurt its progress and development in the long run.

A couple examples to illustrate what I mean when I say the Chilean media is anemic at best:

- Since the dictatorship effectively shut down the leftist print media, little of it has returned and certainly not any slightly left but trying to be balanced NPR like entities.(GOD I MISS YOU NPR!!!!!!!!) The print media that remains is El Mercurio( a conservative daily), a bunch of sensationalistic tabloid type newspapers that probably only sell if they even do because they feature half or mostly naked women on them, The Clinic(a satirical although also featuring serious articles weekly) and a couple of leftist newspapers such as El Cuidadano that aren't on most stands. But just like in America, or possibly even more so, nobody really reads newspapers. Meaning that TV is the main source of news.

So, here's my beef with TV news:

-Generally, nightly news broadcasts (we watch during dinner almost every night) feature a segment about crimes that have occurred, generally robberies, the occasional home invasion, or somewhat recently, a bout of pyromania in the upscale neighborhood of Las Condes. Not to say this isn't important, but I can't help feeling that there's an eerie subtext to it, ie. justifying policies that deny civil rights at the expense of public safety and security, although to be fair, I may be reading into this with too much of an eye in the past. Of course, there's also always something about fútbol, whether or not there was a game, because between the various teams and their various stadiums and various international competitions, there's always something.

-Lately, there's been almost constant updates about the miners, which is understandable, given how miraculous it is they've survived. However, there's definitely a sick media circus sensationalized aspect to the way the story has been developed: while the miners have certainly been fleshed out as individuals, and their families, etc, their plight has, for the most part in the mainstream media, not been used to call for any examination of the larger issues surrounding mining, such as the working conditions for miners, Chile's economic dependence on mining or the way in which revenues from the mines of the North mainly benefit Santiago's coffers.

-Another story that is pretty much entirely absent from the mainstream TV media is the hunger strike that Mapuche political prisoners are currently enacting, which recently reached 50 days. The Mapuche prisoners are protesting the application of the "anti-terrorist law" [No.18.314], enacted under Pinochet, against them for crimes that are not capital offenses. The reason this absence from the media is so negative is that it deprives Chile of what I feel is an important discussion: is it acceptable for Chile as a democracy to have these kinds of double standards? Imagine if the US had never gotten to have discussions over Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo or extraordinary rendition. I know the scale and circumstances are hardly the same, but the basic principle is: I firmly believe societies, above all so-called democracies, lose out when we cannot discuss and evaluate the legitimacy of our policies.

-Any environmentally interested readers I'm sure will have heard about the recent Punta de Choros incident in which President Piñera saved a pristine wildlife area from a thermoelectric plant. While I am agreement with pretty much everyone that this was a good end result, Piñera's actions were of a dubious constitionality. In the TV media, people who protested the constitutionality of his actions were portrayed as people from opposite political parties just trying to protest for the sake of it, which they undoubtedly were but I also think they do have a point. Is it good for a society that has only returned to democracy in the last 20 years to be setting precedents of circumventing institutional channels?

-If we think about media/civil society as another wing of democracy, Chile and pretty much everywhere else, including the US, have a ways to go or at least a challenge ahead to prevent backsliding. With the blog, social networking sites and youtube atomizing the "official story," traditional media sources face the challenge of compellingly reinventing themselves.

Today, I went to a colloquim that a friend from soccer invited me to entitled "Culture and Citizenship: Somos o solo eres?" The title, which roughly translates to "Is there a we or are we alone?" implied the dichotomy between projects (national and transnational) that create collective identities and the individual. The colloquim was right on time for me personally since it touched on a lot of similar territory as my "Globalization and Copper" class, which has been on a kick lately about postmodernism and its vision of a world in which there are only fractured identities, rather than collective ones. While I definitely struggled to understand a lot of what was said due to the abstractness of the concepts, and the way that the Chilean students like to "ask questions" by giving their opinions for 5 minutes (and I thought people at Tufts were bad), something one of the panelists at the end really stuck out. He characterized democracy as an increase in conflict, at least in terms of discourse, rather than the sanitation and denial of difference within society. It's a really interesting way to look at it which I think really does have validity. I suppose the real challenge to creating a mature democracy comes in allowing competing discourses to thrive in a space where they are relevant yet don't threaten to displace the others.

Enough with me being semi-pretentious and ranting about the media. Other happenings today:
- Visited La Chascona, Pablo Neruda's Santiago hideaway (it started out as a home to hide his affair) which was simply delightful. Neruda's homes are filled with cool objects from all over the world as well as paintings that were gifted to him and inevitably make me want to interior decorate something.
- I'm not entirely horrible at salsa anymore! I actually knew what I was doing, more or less, although I still have no style whatsoever. As Carmen Gloria, our program assistant joked, half way to being a professional!
-1 Week til Peru! We're going for "Spring Break". Weird to be having "Spring break" before Tufts in actually in session.