Abstract

This research presents a critical review of communication policies in Chile, which focuses on the situation of community radio, television and Internet initiatives in the country. The hypothesis is that the legislation and the type of communication policies implemented since the end of Pinochet's dictatorship follow a privatizing inertia that results in a lack of recognition of the specificity of communitarian and / or non-profit communication initiatives and the impossibility of being sustainable in the time, pressed to remain in the scarcity, to disappear or to become commercial initiatives. Ultimately, the main result of the describe before is its negative impact on the diversity of the communications system. This situation is exacerbated as it occurs in the scenario of increasing media concentration in terms of ownership and content generation, in the context of convergence (Breull, 2015). In the scenario described, the public interest perspective has been introduced by civil society organizations and the proper community media organizations rather than by state and government agencies charged with ensuring fair competition and equitable access to spectrum. However, the instances of citizen participation are also weak and do not have the capacity of incidence necessary to transform this situation in a structural way. In this sense, it is possible to observe an institutional coherence in the treatment of the third media and the treatment of civil society organizations from the state.