ConferencePaper
 (2018)

Leaking and controlling: Simultaneous operations of muckraking within a neoliberal society

Lagos Lira, Claudia

Abstract

Whether defined as watchdog, as muckraking, as the Fourth Estate, or as a counterbalance to power, many authors highlight the value of investigative journalism (IJ) as a critical component of democratic societies (Bennet & Serrin, 2005; Coronel, 2010; Ettema & Glasser, 1998; Hamilton, 2016: Houston & IRE, 2009; Hunter, 2012). However, most of the conceptualizations of IJ and its role in democratic societies have been theorized in industrialized nations, within western media systems, and acknowledging mainstream models of journalism, especially in the US context. In that vein, an in-depth analysis of television Chilean muckraking -largely disregarded in the literature on the topic-, could provide nuances of what investigative reporting means in peripheral societies and discuss to what extent a rather critical cultural practice, such as investigative reporting, has been tightened by broad political and economic phenomena. Indeed, since the 1990s, global and regional corporations have acquired Chilean outlets, including broadcasters; several technological changes have shaped media production, and a market-based model has been hegemonic organizing Chilean media system, heavily relying on advertising and competing for audiences, especially in free-aired television. Thus, I examine the mechanisms, structural conditions, conjunctures, and main players framing production of investigative reporting. Therefore, I discuss some of the technologies and strategies deployed to disciplining journalism in contemporary Chilean media system, such as management practices and discourses; the increasing branding of IJ content and their journalists; the characteristics and role of labor in a rather critical and time-consuming form of journalism; the complicated participation of capital in the symbolic production of itself and of its own critic (transnational and local big money in media and journalism), and the critical role of muckraking in simultaneously criticizing and strengthening capitalism. Overall, I argue that investigative journalism in a post-authoritarian regime simultaneously performs both as a regulatory mechanism and as a transgressive role in a neoliberal society. Doing so, investigative journalism serves (either unconsciously or consciously) hegemony at the same time it is contributing to produce, provide, and spread public and valuable information. Indeed, the watchdog role of journalism would operate as a controlled leakage, as the tolerated transparency that neoliberalism itself allows in order to survive and spread.

Más información

Fecha de publicación: 2018
Año de Inicio/Término: Mayo, 2018
Idioma: Inglés
Notas: Esta ponencia fue parte del panel “New perspectives on democracy and media after the neoliberal turn in Latin America”, organizado en conjunto con Angela Arias Zapata (New York University) y Fabián Prieto (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Este es el resumen del panel: Latin America has been at the core of the adjustment policies in the 1980s applauded by local elites, promoted by international lending organizations, and encouraged by global capital. Indeed, the debt crisis has impoverished millions, dramatically reshaped local policy making process, compromised public budgets for years, and reorganized the political economy of Latin American states. The crisis was an opportunity to spread neoconservative economic frames and strengthen global positions of organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. At the same time that national economies were under strict adjustment policies, the continent was experiencing complex, intricate, and unstable process of political transitions from authoritarian to democratic regimes. These troublesome times have also implied radical shifts in communications, technology, media, and cultural landscapes as re-regulation. By discussing and problematizing three Latin American experiences interconnecting media, infrastructure, technology, and identities, the work presented in this panel shed light into the specific ways in which regional and global paths of contemporary late capitalism have adopted local strategies and faces. In particular, the panel problematizes three critical practices in media, communication, and technology, such as the emergence of community television in Colombia, the struggles against land dispossession in Colombia in the 1990s and the contested ways in which communities use and deploy media technologies, and the performance of muckraking in Chile after the dictatorship. These three phenomena involving social, media, and technological practices embedded problematic interplays of agency, empowerment, and progressive agendas at the same time foster neoliberal discourses and material policies. These three Latin American processes illuminate larger global trends with regional flavors of what Harvey defines as “political economy practices” under institutional frameworks promoting “private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade” as the best ways to enlarge well-being (Harvey, 2007), strongly shaped by public policies inspired by the so-called “Washington consensus”. Indeed, financial and international lending institutions have been promoting (in many cases, forcing) fiscal discipline, trade liberalization, liberalization of foreign investment, privatization, and deregulation as the best recipe for economic growth and development (Williamson, 2009), representing both neoliberal policies and the US hegemony in the field (Dreher & Jensen, 2007; Fleck & Kilby, 2006). Finally, these Latin American contemporary experiences involving media, technologies, and communication also illuminate the complicated faces that neoliberalism adopts on what Ong has stated as Neoliberalism as an exception and exceptions to neoliberalism (Ong, 2006).