Intercultural Journalism: Peruvian and Bolivian Representation in the Chilean Daily Press News

Abstract

This article examines the processes through which the massive press generates and represents the cultural discourses of two of the most polemic migrant groups coexisting nowadays in Chile: Peruvians and Bolivians. The representation that the communication media carries out regarding the studied cultures strongly influences the imaginaries of the Chilean audiences. That calls for special concern so as to propose the necessary spaces for intercultural exchange as much in the media as in the social institutions. These spaces will be the ones in which communication studies and intercultural journalism can unite, in order to offer meeting and communication alternatives between culturally different groups. The principal goal of this research study is to understand how, in the processes of social construction of reality through the communication media, are represented the Peruvian and Bolivian «discourses of difference» in Chile. The methodology employed to validate such proposal is the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) applied to the news in «La Cuarta» and «Las Últimas Noticias» newspapers, belonging to the press groups with the greatest circulation of the country: the consortia Copesa y El Mercurio S.A.P. The results of the research allow us to conclude that these press media represent realities which tend to marginalise the «migrant other», through the reinforcement of identity imaginaries constructed upon the frontier relationships among the three national-states..