Media cases and social memory in Argentina post 2001

Memory (Hove, England), 2018

Studies on collective memory have recently addressed the distinction between cultural and communicative memory as a way to understand how the source of a memory affects its structure or form. When a groups' memory is mediated by memorials, documentaries or any other cultural artifacts, collective memory is shaped by cultural memory. When it is based mostly in communication with other people, its source is communicative memory. We address this distinction by studying two recent events in Argentinean history: the 2001 economic-political-social crisis (communicative memory) and the 1976 coup (cultural memory). We also examine the political ideology and the type of memory involved in collective memory. The memory of the studied events may occur during the lifetime of the rememberer (Lived Memory) or refer to distant events (Distant Memory). 100 participants responded to a Free Recall task about the events of 2001 in Argentina. Narrative analysis allowed comparing these recalls with ...

Comunicación y Sociedad, 2019

La ejemplificación es clave para la percepción de las personas sobre el mundo y es común en los medios. Los ejemplos en las noticias, sin embargo, no son necesariamente precisos y podrían confundir a la audiencia. A partir de un análisis de contenido, este trabajo examina la presencia de casos particulares (ejemplos) en una muestra de diarios chilenos de 1991 a 2015. Los resultados muestran que la ejemplificación está extendida en la prensa de Chile, con un continuo aumento a lo largo de los años. / Exemplification is crucial for people’s perception of the world and is common in mass media. Exemplars in news stories, however, are not necessarily accurate and could mislead audiences. This study relies on a content analysis to examine the extent of particular case reporting in a Chilean newspaper sample covering 25 years (1991-2015). Results show that particular cases (or exemplars) are widespread in the Chilean press, with a steady increase over the years.

Brazilian Journalism Research, 2010

This article explores the hypothesis that the meta-category “conflict” centralizes and structures newscasts based on a bipolar framing. Characters from the political scene are placed successively against each other, interweaving the narrative texture. Conflict is taken as a pre-category preceding that which will become news, from which other subcategories (protagonist, antagonist, enemy) derive. Thus, news coverage not only represents political reality, but delimits and institutes it as well. The empirical analysis presented in the article focuses on the coverage of a recent political scandal by the Jornal Nacional, the main television newscast in Brazil.

Latin American Perspectives, 2016

Television represents Argentina’s recent past through three specific links with social memory: as an “entrepreneur of memory,” shaping public agendas, as a vehicle of intergenerational transmission of past events, and as a creator of meaning through images, sounds, and words, a “stage for memory.” An analysis in terms of the links between television and the memories constructed around the forced disappearance of persons during the 1976–1983 military dictatorship reveals the complex way in which the obstacles when narrating an extreme experience are combined with the attempt to sell a product and entertain the spectator. La televisión representa el pasado reciente de la Argentina a través de vínculos específicos con la memoria social: como un “emprendedor de la memoria” definiendo las agendas públicas, como un vehículo de transmisión intergeneracional sobre el pasado y como un creador de significados por medio de imágenes, sonidos y palabras, esto es, un “escenario para la memoria.” ...

2018

The last Argentine military dictatorship (1976-1983) employed strategies of extreme violence against its own people, including kidnapping and killing an estimated 30,000 people. After the dictatorship ended in 1983, the country began a process of reconstructing the collective societal memory of the dictatorship years, which involved individuals processing their memories of family members and friends who had “disappeared” (now known as los desaparecidos or “the disappeared in Spanish”). This investigation focuses on how former Argentine Presidents Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) and Cristina Kirchner (2007-2015) reignited the national discourse around the dictatorship years and shaped the collective memories of the public in recent years. Specifically, this work is a discourse analysis of three speeches given by Néstor and Cristina Kirchner in recent years. All three of the speeches analyzed were given on March 24, the anniversary of the coup that installed the dictatorship, and all thre...

Public memory and the contemporary epideictic genre: Death notices devoted to Jorge R. Videla Summary The article draws on contributions from the old and new rhetoric to explore the relationship between the epideictic genre and the construction of public memory. It analyzes the death notices dedicated to the former dictator and their controversial relationship with a hegemonic memory that condemns Argentina's last military dictatorship of the twentieth century. To this end, it explores what the author call rhetorical-argumentative memory, that is, the recycling and reformulation of previously used persuasive strategies in a new situation.

2012

Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2018

Punitive populism is common throughout Latin America. It involves political and public opinion support for more police officers, greater police autonomy, and tougher laws to punish crime—options that often perpetuate old police practices and resist police reform efforts. This article critically examines the role of the media in fostering punitive populism by examining the sources used by journalists. Comparing the ‘most different’ cases of Argentina and Chile and drawing on interviews conducted from 2009 to 2015, I argue that the choices made by journalists regarding their sources are affected by neoliberal media policies in a particular way that favours tough‐on‐crime discourses.

Thirty, the title of Miguel Repiso's mural that commemorates and encapsulates in that number of frames the years of state terror in Argentina, is also the number of intervening years between the Argentinian coup in 1976 and the mural Repiso painted in Rosario, Santa Fe, in 2006. The year before the coup, in 1975, Franco died, and in 1976 Pinochet attended the ceremony in which King Juan Carlos I was asked to preside over a thenuncertain post-Franco era. Today, thirty years after the end of the dictatorship in Uruguay in 1985, every other evening or so, our family of four-including a son fifteen years of age and a daughter of six-sits glued to our thirteen-inch television to watch a rerun of Cuéntame cómo pasó (Tell Me How It Happened), a series that premiered in 2001 and went on for twelve seasons on Spanish public television (TVE) and that now, thanks to a favorable political context in Uruguay, is shown on our own Televisión Nacional, run by filmmaker Virginia Martínez. Modeled after ABC's The Wonder Years-part nostalgic memoir, part bildungsroman-Cuéntame tells the story of an archetypical lower-middleclass family and working-class neighborhood in Franco's Spain, beginning in 1968 and through the transition in the 1980s, as remembered by Carlos, who was eight years old in 1968 (Carlos would now be somewhere in his early 50s). 1 Yet the various characters-grandmother, father, mother, sister, older brother, uncle, cousin, friends, neighbors, workmates-provide plenty of opportunities for all viewers-from every generation-to identify with and somehow "experience" and remember those years, as well as the fears REMEDI ♦ 216 HIOL ♦ Hispanic Issues On Line ♦ Spring 2014 and hopes of those times. As it goes back and forth between the microhistory of everyday life and the macrohistory of national politics, Cuéntame is able to capture an intricate, multilayered, and multifaceted historical process in all its complexity and contradictions. Therein lies, indeed, much of its appeal and productivity. Now, more than the series itself, or the stories it tells-part actual documentary footage, part historical reenactment and fiction-what needs to be noticed is that we are watching Cuéntame on television, the latemodern public sphere. Also, that this almost daily activity enables us not only to talk "naturally" about Spanish history-in so many respects so similar to our own-but also to evoke, compare, and discuss our own past and present situation. It is quite puzzling and yet rewarding to see my son being genuinely invested in the lives and misadventures of our characters and in Spanish history and politics as well, or to see my daughter taking in images of Franco's coffin or of the Communist Party demonstrations of 1977 following the assassination of the lawyers of Atocha. I want to think that this is the kind of story that Brecht, Benjamin, and Marcuse had in mind when they grasped-and got excited about-the possibilities opened up by radio, records, and film; that captivated Williams's imagination in The Long Revolution (1961); that led Arguedas to conceive of-and resort to-records and radio as allies to popular music and indigenous culture (García Liendo); and that even changed the late Adorno's mind about the new media (Ortiz 65). I began with the story of my family getting together to watch Cuéntame cómo pasó in part because it provides a social and cultural space-a here and now, in this torrid and calm January of 2013-from which I am reading and thinking the present volume, its subject and problematic, and in part to attest to, and somehow celebrate, the relevance and interest that "the historyof-the-recent-past"-as we call it in Uruguay-elicits today in second and third generations, perhaps even more so than two or three decades ago, when "people just did not want to listen" (Wang, qtd. in Kaminsky 108). But also to make the point that the more we talk about the past-and of our symbolic elaborations of that past-and the more we speak of human rights, both those that were trashed during the years of state terror but also those that we now embrace as a new foundation (ethical, aesthetic, political, etc.) for the present times and the times to come, the more we must reflect critically about these matters and be aware of the many risks, contradictions, and dangers that pave the search for truth and justice, the fight for human dignity and respect for human rights, seen as a means to transform and bring about a better society and culture. Some of these risks are, paradoxically, that of forgetting what we also need to remember; that of failing to understand the deep-and latentcauses and dynamics that led to the years of state terror that seem so distant and implausible now; that of not honoring the inalienable, indivisible, and universal character of human rights; that of not grasping the way in which