Politics and media in Latin America. The hazards and fortunes of a troubled relationship in audiovisual democracies.

DAGATTI, MARIANO

Liverpool

Congreso; Society of Latin American Studies Annual Conference 2016; 2016

Society of Latin American Studies

From Athens on, public opinion rules overdemocracies, said Walter Lippman in Public Opinion. This premiseprovides a direction to investigate any change in the mechanisms of trust inpolitics, media and civil society. The decline of the old collective actors,the progressive processes of individualization and the loss of trust inpolitical parties have changed the constellation of contemporary politics andits connection with the role of media in mediated contemporary democraticsocieties.The consolidation of democracy as apolitical system and a way of life finds in therelationship between politics and media one of its keystones.The bids within public opinion are largely constrainedby discourses and practices of political and mediaticactors. Different regional political experiences ?as in thecase of neoliberalism and postneoliberalism? are marked by aspecific interweaving of political and mediasystems. As some recent research has showed, the so called'video-politics', with its rules of time, space and visibility,has closed bonds with neoliberalism. Similarly, theso-called 'left turn' in Latin America has brought a growingconcern in national Executives for the role of media in theinstalling or debunking political forces and new leaders. In the context of communication and discoursetheory, this paper proposes three axes to investigate therelationship between politics and media in current Latin Americansocieties, taking into account the passage froma neoliberal democratic consensus to a post-neoliberal democraticconsensus. Primo, weconsider various global studies of media systems and theformation of public opinion in industrial democracies. Secundo, we contrastively analyze the political cultureof the 90s and the derivations of ?left turn? in the firstdecade of this new century. At last, we problematize therelationship between media and leadership, in a Latin American presidentialistdemocratical scenario.