In May 2017, the private broadcast Mega revealed that the Chilean socialist party has been investing billions of dollars in national and international companies in order to maintain and enlarge the party’s assets . Indeed, the explosive story explained in detail the strategies and financial instruments that Salvador Allende’s party has been using in the last 13 years. In its official statement, the party argues that it was the best way to guarantee its financial independence from what McChesney and Nichols (2013) have denominated “dollarocracy”. Nonetheless, the controversy triggered by the TV report was twofold: In one hand, it exposed the ideological contradiction of a leftist party acting as a shareholder and, in the other hand, it brought …show more content…
Overall, I disentangle the complex ways of consecration, distinction, and recognition in the particular field of watchdog reporting. Doing so, the research aims to craft a situated conceptualization of investigative journalism in a post-authoritarian society and problematize hegemonic conceptualizations coined in most stable democracies, more consolidated media systems, and within thicker fields of IJ.
Particularly, I argue that investigative journalism in a post-authoritarian regime simultaneously performs both as a regulatory mechanism and a transgressor role in a neoliberal society. Doing so, investigative journalism serves (either unconsciously or consciously) hegemony at the same time it is contributing to produce, provide, and spread public, valuable, information. The watchdog role of journalism would operate as a controlled leakage, as the tolerated transparency that neoliberalism itself allows in order to survive. This project inquiries into these entangled connections, acknowledging their
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To do so, I propose a close reading of its practices and products, identifying the particular emphasis regarding larger political, cultural, and organizational epochal conjunctures. Therefore, any notion of what investigative journalism signifies since the 1990s in Chile becomes more a process than a static object of research. Theoretical concepts coined in contexts different than those I am investigating are certainly suitable to understand local or regional problems as a part of global trends, but it is necessary to frame these phenomena in a local fashion because cultural production and its performance are embedded in their own