2026/05/01 by Oscar Basulto, Ignacio Riffo-Pavón · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Media and Communication Studies #Cultural and political discourse analysis #Gender, Health, and Social Inequality
paper · doi:10.17141/iconos.85.2026.6852
openalex publication_date 2026/05/01 · openalex created_date 2026/05/04 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
The objective of this research is to identify, in the context of the 2019 Chilean social unrest, the constitution of the imaginary of otherness around protesting citizens, through the media representation of violence constructed in textual and visual content in the newspaper El Mercurio. The theoretical reflections are framed in political communication, focusing on this medium and on the protesting citizens. In addition, it delves into the conceptualization of the imaginary of otherness and media representation of violence. In terms of methodology, a qualitative content analysis and a semiological analysis of images were applied to a corpus of 160 photographs related to forms of violence, along with their respective texts and captions, published between October 18 and 29, 2019. From the analysis, it was identified that El Mercurio mainly conveys media content referring to direct violence that harms people or destroys public and private property. At the same time, the presence of cultural violence was detected in the form of representations of citizens as Others, denied agency. Collaterally, the presence of structural violence is revealed, since the origin of the movement is rendered invisible and the country’s dominant political-economic model is not questioned.