Claudia Lagos’s research while affiliated with University of Santiago Chile and other places

Este artículo discute los resultados de un análisis narrativo y televisual cualitativo de la serie de televisión chilena Ramona (Wood Producciones, 2017-2018). A partir de un diario de recepción, del visionado de los doce episodios y de la caracterización de sus condiciones de producción, argumentamos que Ramona permite comprender mejor la obra de Wood producciones y caracteriza su marca autoral (temática, estética, narrativa), hasta ahora estudiada en su filmografía, pero no en su producción para la pantalla chica. El análisis también demuestra que, a través de la gramática audiovisual desplegada por la producción, Ramona inserta (y se inserta en) la Historia y utiliza diversos elementos referenciales que operan como recursos nostálgicos. En esas coordenadas de lectura, Ramona contribuye a una identidad y memoria chilenas y a comprender mejor el rol de la nostalgia en la ficción televisiva contemporánea. Finalmente, y a pesar de sus referencias híper locales, Ramona también evoca procesos mayores en Latinoamérica, como la migración campo-ciudad, la falta de vivienda y la pobreza urbana, el sujeto popular y la acción política organizada, entre otros fenómenos constitutivos de la historia social reciente en el continente.

En septiembre de 2017, el gobierno chileno aprobó la ley que despenalizó el aborto en tres causales. El proyecto demoró tres años en tramitarse y los medios (re)produjeron un debate álgido alimentado por organizaciones feministas y de derechos humanos, activistas tanto a favor como en contra de la reforma, y actores políticos tanto en el Congreso como en el poder ejecutivo. El presente trabajo analiza temáticamente las fotografías publicadas en diez medios digitales chilenos durante un año en artículos referentes al aborto, las categorizamos intentando responder a la pregunta sobre el papel jugado por éstas en los intentos por influir en opinión pública, configurando audiencias ideales. A partir del material analizado, constatamos que las imágenes utilizadas no son neutras, son creadoras de efectos de verdad y van configurando una memoria social que mantiene y refuerza el orden hegemónico patriarcal que predomina en el imaginario colectivo nacional.

This chapter addresses the symbolic violence against women in the South American digital public sphere. Indeed, femicides, rapes, and sexual harassment are pervasive problems in South America, while abortion is still totally or partially banned in most of the countries in the sub-continent. Thus, local feminist organizations heavily deployed multimedia strategies alongside traditional grassroots practices in claiming women’s rights. Eventually, this agenda has made its way into traditional media coverage, too. Nonetheless, conservative forces are contesting them with misogyny, hate speech, and trolling in a rather fragmented digital public sphere. The authors examine the visual representations in comments’ sections of articles uncovering high-profile cases of abortion and femicides in contemporary South America, and content shared through social networks about those cases.

In this article, the main results of a qualitative study that is based on reports and interviews are presented to understand the characteristics of the media coverage of the political arena of Chilean national and regional newspapers. Considering the process of mediatization of politics, it is concluded that these journalistic texts are aimed at people who are already part of the political world, as such a kind of "political manual" is emerging, which teaches, cautions and shapes these people. In addition, the photographs constitute the configurating anchors of sense to provide complementary information to the traditional journalistic level, but also in key reading, emphasizing the focus of the note to simplify it to a metaphorical or metonymical level. In short, politics is treated as a subject geared towards specialists and has an exclusive character.

We analyzed the media freedom indexes of Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders to determine which areas they focus on and which they omit. We also assessed the degree to which these indexes are appropriate for measuring media freedom in democratic countries. We concluded that these instruments—with their focus on violence against journalists and government constraints on media—are more appropriate for assessments in nondemocratic countries than for understanding the subtle problems of democracies, often related to the media ownership structure, media’s dependence on advertising, self-censorship, and the scant presence of citizen voices. The instruments examined reduce freedom of expression to its negative dimension, freedom from government interference, and ignore positive freedom that is the universal right to free speech.

Los casos de femicidio que se registran año a año en nuestro país son relevados por los noticieros televisivos por su gran impacto emocional, pero también porque estas historias dramáticas se prestan para su organización narrativa y pueden operar como propuestas de ordenamiento social. A partir del análisis del tratamiento narrativo de los casos de femicidio registrados el primer semestre de 2007, en los noticiarios de la televisión abierta chilena, es posible advertir la forma en que estas noticias son puestas en escena, los supuestos que están a la base y la manera en que proponen restablecer el orden social, abordando su análisis desde una perspectiva crítica.

This article examines the presence of six dimensions of professional roles in news-watchdog, disseminator-interventionist, civic, loyal-facilitator, service, and infotainment-by means of a quantitative content analysis of 1,988 news stories published by the national desk of five Chilean national newspapers in 2010. The study also analyzes differences between the quality press and the popular press, as well as between different news topics, providing empirical evidence about the ways in which media orientation and journalistic beats can shape journalistic performance. Our results indicate that, overall, the disseminator role is the most commonly used in Chilean news, followed by the entertainment and civic roles. The watchdog, service, and especially the loyal-facilitator roles were, in turn, almost absent. The data also show "that the presence of the analyzed dimensions of professional roles in news content depends on both the media orientation and the journalistic beat. While the infotainment and disseminator roles are more influenced by the orientation of the media-elite versus popular-the watchdog, service, civic and loyal-facilitator roles are more influenced by the main topic of the story.

Based on one of the most influential proposals intended to analyze media systems from a comparative perspective (Hallin and Mancini, 2004) as well as the criticism it has attracted, this work suggests that the manner in which the different elements of media systems have been operationalized has proven insufficient in the task of contextualizing predominant models of journalistic role performance in parts of the world other than the West. By examining the political, economic, social, cultural and technological factors that have defined the development of journalism in Latin American countries, and specifically in Chile, we propose both widening and redefining the aspects that have to be considered in order to analyze media systems in a comparative fashion, including the reality of new democracies.

This article analyzes the reality of wages for Chilean journalists, the importance they place on wages, their levels of satisfaction, and the effects of individual and contextual factors on how much they earn for their work. The figures show the salaries of Chilean journalists are low in relation to other media professionals and compared to other professions. Pay satisfaction levels also are quite low. Nevertheless, the results indicate that salary is one of the two aspects journalists give more importance to in their work. The study also demonstrates that professional experience, level of hierarchy, region, job satisfaction, working hours, the type of journalistic medium and having multiple jobs are the factors that have the greatest influence on the salary of Chilean journalists.

Using survey data, this study proposes a series of indexes of restriction on freedom of expression as perceived by journalists from the principal Chilean media outlets. It finds that restriction levels are high, particularly in the subindex ‘restrictions coming from superiors in the workplace’. The study also shows that journalists with higher levels of education tend to perceive that there are more restrictions to their work.