The Old Is Dying And The New Cannot Be Born: Media and Neoliberalism’s Gramscian Moment

The 2023 Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy was just kicking off when one of the most interesting discussions of the whole event took place. Is there an intellectual revolution against neoliberalism going on as we speak? Is the fact that power and control are in the hands of a few really being challenged right now? Coming from Chile, a country where “a naked and ruthless version of neoliberal economics was applied” (Solimano, 2014: 9) in the 1970s under the military rule of General Pinochet, the controversy generated by the discussion quickly caught my attention.

“In the country where I come from”, I said, “we have a very clear understanding of what the systems of control are; the problem is how to counter that power”. Feeling all eyes were on me, I tried a provocative sentence to follow up. “We Chileans come from the future”, I said. Not only did we democratically elect the first socialist President in 1970 with Salvador Allende, but we also became some kind of guinea-pig for neoliberalism during Pinochet’s dictatorship. More recently, in 2019, a massive social uprising put this socioeconomic system imported from Chicago under siege. That same year, protests arose in cities as diverse as Paris, Beirut, Quito and Tehran; however, few had consequences as deep as the ones that began in Santiago, where a new constitutional process was born. Finally, two years later, we elected one of the youngest presidents in the world, Gabriel Boric, who boldly stated: “If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave”.

But what happens when millions of citizens take to the streets against a model from which the traditional media have benefitted from for decades? What occurs when legacy print media – that constitute the country’s most influential set of outlets – act more like gatekeepers of change rather than actors who police the powerful and challenge a set of inequalities that are inherent to the system?

In December 2019, only a couple of months after the uprising that contested established political, economic and social norms, Chilean journalist Roberto Herrscher was invited to write an opinion piece for The New York Times. After stating that Chile had woken up and that it was time for journalism to do the same, he wrote: “For too long, the mainstream media failed in its primary duty to seek the truth without bias. But the demonstrations, which have brought millions of Chileans to the streets to demand more equality, are forcing them to improve their coverage to recover a confidence in journalism that seemed lost”.

As was the case in other Latin American countries, Chilean traditional newspapers were heavily involved in supporting the local military regime and later developed close relations with the governments that replaced them (Guerrero & Márquez-Ramírez, 2014). Indeed, as Chilean economist Andrés Solimano (2014) posits, the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1990 did not mean the end of neoliberalism in the country but rather its consolidation by a series of social-democratic governments based on a political alliance between Socialists, Christian Democrats and other center-left parties.

But, what happened with the country’s media system once the dictatorship was over? The transition into what has been defined as a “protected democracy” did not imply major changes in media power dynamics, and rather cemented the same practices that were born during the Pinochet years for the following three decades. As Silvio Waisbord (2000: 51) puts it, the “affirmation of liberal democracy has not resulted in the democratization of media access. Quite the opposite. It has coincided with the further consolidation of market principles and media concentration”.

As can be deduced from these lines, the Latin American media systems – and the Chilean one in particular – contain a series of characteristics that make them unique in the world. And it is precisely for these reasons that their analysis cannot start from conceptualizations born, for example, from Europe or the United States. Rather, new epistemological angles to theories relating to the field of media and communication studies need to adopt Global South approaches in order to understand these complex phenomena. In other words, epistemologies whose trajectories depart from European thought cannot just be imbued with Latin American particularities; rather, we need to reorient our research and set the media systems of our continent not only as an object of study, but also as a potential site where new theories and academic traditions can arise from.

In the words of American scholar Michael Schudson (2019: 145), “economic perspectives in Anglo-American media studies have generally taken liberal democracy for granted”, therefore ignoring the specificities of political systems in the rest of the world and remaining insensitive to other political, economic and legal factors that determine news production. Schudson’s words, which I had recently read for my doctoral research at Goldsmiths, came to mind as we discussed this series of issues in the heart of Vienna.

As expected, during the seminar the understanding of power as a conceptual framework was alluded to in a number of panels, switching from the painful agony of traditional media to the irruption of online platforms. “How do they compare to preceding monopolies?”, asked one of the panelists. The idea that this transition from traditional to digital media had not affected the existence of a handful of winners and a boatload of losers made sense to most attendees. “We have to debate on monopolies and not separate digital power from other forms of power”, argued one of the participants, who highlighted that the hegemony of legacy media in this “new world” had merely updated old problems and created repurposed media moguls. Referring to traditional newspapers that struggled to navigate digital times, the same participant was ruthless: “Dinosaurs can be very vicious in their twilight years”.

Nowadays, the debate on the democratizing character of digital media – which was so on vogue in the early 2000s – has reached a stalemate. As discussed on a panel on “The Future of Digital Monopolies”, the very platforms that some argued helped catapult the Arab Spring or the protests in Hong Kong are now in the hands of billionaires like Elon Musk, whose understanding of free speech seems closer to that of Donald Trump than that of our colleagues in the academic world.

“We’re no longer moving on”, argued another panellist. “Until 2012 we were always on the move, but no we can’t go anywhere else”, they said referring to the impossibility of leaving a platform”. The words shared on the panel by some of the participants seem more relevant than ever, but more importantly, the question that remains to be answered is how to escape this seemingly endless cycle of repetition in which power in the hands of a few remains an inescapable reality.

But let’s go back to Chile, where three and a half years after the so-called Chilean Spring, the image of these “vicious dinosaurs” resonates strongly the country’s political present. The irruption of ultra conservative forces in the elections of May 2023 – some of whom do not dissimulate their nostalgia for the Pinochet years – can be partly understood after analyzing the role played by some of the country’s legacy newspapers. Fifty years after the coup that ended with Salvador Allende’s presidency, El Mercurio newspaper still stands as one of the most determinant political forces in the nation. It’s ability to validate sources, act as a mirror where the country’s elites need to look at and, most importantly, set the agenda for the rest of the media, are still unrivaled.

If there is effectively an intellectual revolution against neoliberalism taking place, it is also true that there are a number of advocates that will fight back in order to defend the system they helped to install. As Soto Gamboa (2003) has explained, the newspaper became one of the pillars for the dissemination of the neoliberal doctrine. Today, half a century later and despite the several crises experienced by traditional outlets, conservative media have firmly opposed any kind of radical change to the constitution drafted during the dictatorship.

Is it too soon to announce the death of print media? As Chileans have learnt in the last couple of years, the same question could be asked regarding neoliberalism. Everything indicates that the country’s media and sociopolitical systems are going through a Gramscian moment, where “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. If this is really the case, it would be a big mistake to underestimate the levels of influence that traditional media still have. But this is not necessarily a grim conundrum; it is precisely in these moments of transformation that the role of knowledge producers acquires a new value. To understand the world is to aim to change it and as we navigate the tides of contemporary life there is always the possibility to set a new more equal course.

References

Guerrero, M.A. & Márquez-Ramírez, M. (eds.) (2014). Media Systems and Communication Policies in Latin America. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Schudson, M. (2019). Approaches to the sociology of news. In Curran, J. & Hesmondhalgh, D. Media and society. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 139-166.

Solimano, A. (2014). Economic elites, crises, and democracy: alternatives beyond neoliberal capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Soto Gamboa, Á. (2003). El Mercurio y la difusión del pensamiento político económico liberal, 1955–1970. Santiago: Centro de Estudios Bicentenario.

Waisbord, S. (2000a). Media in South America: Between the rock of the state and the hard place of the market. In Curran, J. & Myung-Jin, P (eds.) De-Westernizing Media Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 43-53.