‘Flaites’, ‘Rotos’ and ‘Choros’: A Polyphonic Analysis of Op-Ed Pieces Dealing with Crime during the 2019 Chilean Social Outbreak

Abstract

The way crime is portrayed in the media always influences public opinion and citizens' behaviour, but specifically in social uprisings, crime becomes ubiquitous and the way it is presented by the media becomes even more important. Therefore, the need to explore how it is reported in media arises, especially in opinion genres of widely read newspapers. Po-ed pieces, subjected to journalistic and situation restrictions, aim to interpret and explain events, which becomes a challenge in extraordinary contexts. This is why we pose the question: how is the discourse about crime presented in the frame of the 2019 Chilean Social Outbreak through the polyphony that is present in op-ed pieces of widely read newspapers with a great impact on citizens? With the use of polyphony, we aim to reveal implicit attitudes and capture an instance of the public discourse about crime. The question is answered following a qualitative analysis of a corpus of thirty-nine op-ed pieces about crime during the first month of the Chilean uprising of 2019. In the results section, we present the polyphonic features that have an impact on crime presentation, we detail the types of crime which are present in the polyphony of the op-ed pieces, and we compare the attitudes towards crime in each newspaper. We observe a tendency towards presenting crime in its physical form between marginal groups and security forces, a 'good versus bad guys' fight, from which the image of injured eyes stands out but death is minimised. Thus, the predominant fear is the one towards marginal groups to which urban violence is attributed.