Morfología del cuento: las (re)creaciones discursivas de la noción de la libertad de expresión en los editoriales de los principales diarios de Chile

When referring to “freedom of expression”, the editorials of the major Chilean newspapers focus exclusively on the limitations imposed on the mass media by the State. Hence they see the concept of freedom of expression only in terms of its negative dimension (i.e. as freedom from interference). In bellicose tones the editorials narrate the story of the struggle for the “magical object”, that is freedom of expression, in fact reduced to a minimal concept of press freedom, which is to say freedom for the established media outlets. In the structure of this discourse there are certain countries that are painted as the “villains” (essentially those that have an active media policy) while the private media play the role of “victims”, and international organisations (including the Inter-American Press Association that represents media owners) are painted as the “heroes”. Citizens and civil society are mentioned only sporadically and it is assumed that their interests are identical to those of the mainstream media. There are numerous structural absences in this discourse (i.e. issues that are important precisely because they are never mentioned). These include the extremely concentrated structure of media ownership in Chile, together with other limits on freedom of expression imposed by the market, and the topic of active cooperation of the main Chilean newspapers with the Pinochet dictatorship.