Polyphony and pluralism in crime presentation in press editorials during the 2019 chilean social outbreak

Abstract

Polyphony, the coexistence of various voices in a text, is closely related to pluralism of voices, one of the ideals journalism has to meet. At the same time, the media seek to exercise social influence, while safeguarding their interests as well as those of the elites, especially in editorials, the genre where the medium's discourse is transmitted par excellence. However, social protests seek to pose certain issues in the public space and, thus, challenge the media's capability of pluralism. During the 2019 Chilean Social Outbreak, journalistic discourse was crucial for the public debate on crime, a key issue for understanding the social protest's legitimacy and which sheds light on the media's role in public debate. We, therefore, pose the question: how is pluralism of voices expressed in the editorials that deal with crime in the two Chilean reference newspapers during the first month of the Chilean uprising of 2019? Our aim is to characterise the pluralism of voices in the discourse about crime in the context of the Chilean uprising of 2019, by describing polyphony in the editorial genre. With the qualitative analysis of a corpus of editorials that deal with crime in the context of the 2019 Chilean Social Outbreak, we identify the actors whose voices are present in the corpus and characterise their utterances. This allows us to detect six modes of intertwining utterances and the impact polyphonic features as discourse modalities have on promoting the stance of the writer and the medium. The tendency in the corpus is that of a 'disguised' polyphony, closely attached to the genre's restrictions, which is used with persuasive ends, in order to promote mostly an elite discourse regarding social phenomena.