Alternative media training (Between political effects and affects: media, audiences/citizenships, and battles for cultural sovereignty)
Overview of Strategies (translation from the slides of the course in castellano)
COLONIZATION
Following the plundering of the riches of our territory, the elites defend their privileges through cultural instruments—among them, the media. To do so, they must destroy languages, cultures, and traditions, turning into a caricature everything that looks, smells, or feels like a "sudaca," Indigenous person, Black person, or mestizo.
The nobodies, as Galeano called them. The Wretched of the Earth, said Fanon. This exercise of imposition is tied to a pedagogy of cruelty that teaches a predatory gaze toward the other, one that erases the possibility of empathy and incites violence (Saintout, 2018).
INTELLIGENCE BARRACKS
In this new cultural order, shielded by illegal repression, the hegemonic media power not only played a decisive role in the establishment of dictatorships, but also acted as an intelligence barracks, probing and manipulating the social mood.
The horror of the dictatorship’s crimes would not have been possible—or even thinkable—without the prior symbolic configuration that killing thousands of compatriots was both urgent and imperative.
An enemy was thus constructed, stripped of their humanity, which allowed genocide to be built upon that platform of logic and sedimented common sense—upon which torture, abuse, and murder could be carried out without disturbing public morality.
DEPOLITICIZATION
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the declaration of the “end of grand narratives,” what remained was to accept the triumph of the market and to relegate any political activism for a more just order to the realm of nostalgic minds.
The emptying of language became the hallmark of the hegemonic media during the long neoliberal decade: spectacle, celebrity gossip, and scandal. The strategy of depoliticization was complemented by the caricaturing of politicians, the trivialization of popular struggles, and the reduction of social mobilization to mere “chaos.” It included the dramatization of others’ pain to the point of dulling the viewer’s sensitivity.
All of this was intertwined with the production of subjects within a managerial and competitive paradigm, where each person is expected to manage their own success, earn merit, live austerely, and pay their debts—with the always unreachable goal of self-fulfillment and happiness (Saintout, 2018).
WAR OF POSITIONS
Alongside regional right-wing forces, smear campaigns were launched against the popular governments that began to take hold across Latin America, restoring the history and language that neoliberalism had stripped from the truth of their peoples.
These governments denounced inequality and asserted that there are sides to take: Identifying where and by whom the hegemonic media speaks would lead to the recognition that they are monopolistic corporations with economic interests and political intentions.
HYPERCONCENTRATION OF MEDIA
In Argentina, the electoral victory of the right in late 2015 revealed that even when coming to power through democratic means, a de facto regression—a kind of institutional coup against hard-won rights—can still be carried out. Shortly after taking office, Macri implemented a series of measures designed to favor media hyperconcentration.
Among these actions were the repeal by decree of the anti-monopoly clauses in the Audiovisual Communication Services Law, the removal of its regulatory authorities, and the forced intervention of the relevant agencies. He also fired dozens of opposition journalists from public media and reprivatized the broadcasting rights to football matches.
The response from the concentrated media was marked by a kind of loyalty that, functioning as a shield, protected the image of the ceocracy and its officials.
FROM MAGIC MEDIA TO MALICIOUS MEDIA
The power of these corporations, as we can see, lies in their ability to shape common beliefs and establish meanings around what is considered truth. This operation works like magic—through the double play of collective unawareness and recognition. This is how media power operates: through the illusion of a magical group that legitimizes it.
But something has changed. In times of total exhibitionism, the magic media have become malicious media: their magical groups are no longer glued to the TV but have moved on to social networks (and now it’s the media corporations that follow them to X, Meta, Telegram, BlueSky, Google, etc.).
Media tricks and narratives have become predictable, and the new right doesn’t stop showcasing their schemes while pointing fingers at the media as actors who demonize, censor, stigmatize, and merely aim to preserve a status quo that benefits them. “Paid-off journalists,” says Javier Milei in Argentina, as he cuts public funding to the press.
Just like the media once did, today it seems the technocrats and CEOs of tech companies—hand in hand with “politically incorrect” leaders—are the new bearers of contemporary magic.
Once again, we are faced with sorcerers who dazzle with their novelties, digital updates, and eccentric behaviors, producing magical groups whose representations we are now beginning to recognize. These are tied to celebratory beliefs in the end of the commons.
Budget cuts in public spending (like health, education, housing, and labor) are celebrated; anger and damage to social bonds are normalized; and singular narratives prevail, laden with a sense of superiority of some subjects over others—even when those voicing these claims are, paradoxically, that very “other.”
José Rojo Martínez (2024) points out that in the shift from offline media to online media, we are witnessing a crisis of media credibility: audiences seem to be abandoning the habit of informing themselves and instead only read their leaders/influencers or their satellites.
And this reading is, almost always, literal—straightforward, with no time or tolerance for nuance. In this way, the digital sphere develops its own strategies and gives rise to a fragmented media arena, with an infinite and personalized content supply that favors misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Digital communication products depend economically on the behavior patterns of platform users. Algorithms reward “negative” content—the kind that grabs attention and goes viral. Another factor that deeply unsettles democratic discourse.
Topics are quickly exhausted, making political conversation increasingly difficult… In this way, collective memory also becomes saturated, and content creators are forced to resort to—or submit to—strategies rooted in so-called disruptive creativity, often crafting false narratives just to regain attention—that is, power within the conversation.
The content produced must stimulate specific opinion climates that generate higher engagement, triggering emotions in a cycle of support and attack. Those who are politically incorrect tend to come out on top—they’re more profitable in terms of the attention economy.
NEW RIGHT-WING MOVEMENTS, AFFECTS, AND CULTURAL REACTIONS
These new right-wing movements view communication as a key tool for breaking the established order. They are highly skilled at producing and appropriating a countercultural, transgressive, and rebellious aesthetic—one that can resemble the ethos of “forbidden to forbid” (Nagle, 2018).
We can see this clearly at Conservative Political Action Conferences (CPAC), where the goal is not to preserve old customs, but to dismantle any institution whose outdated rules require taxes, create too many obstacles, and offer little in return.
The idea that the modern state no longer works is spreading through societies. It finds its most powerful expression in the metaphor of the chainsaw—symbolizing how libertarians envision the future: no institutions wasting public money, no corrupt officials, no politicians telling people what to do.
AFFECTIVE POLARIZATIONS (The Divide)
To understand these strategies—the illusions that sustain this new kind of magic—it is important to revisit the concept of affective polarizations.
According to Mason (2018), affective polarization is characterized by:
Mutual prejudice among supporters, as a result of a social identity that creates competing groups,
A predisposition toward political activism and defense of one’s own positions among those who feel strongly identified with a group, and
Emotional reactivity in strongly identified individuals, expressed both as angry responses to potential defeat and excessive enthusiasm over their own side’s victory.
As a result, elections become intense emotional challenges, seemingly independent of the actual level of disagreement between opposing groups on public policies.
Moreover, in psychological terms, partisan identity under high polarization fosters the effect of cognitive biases, broadly understood as “a wide range of deviations from what is commonly considered rational judgment and decision-making.”
BIASES AND MORALITY
(Santoso, 2020)
A high level of group antagonism in an affectively polarized context leads to perceiving the other as immoral, simply because they belong to—or are ideologically aligned with—the opposing party or figure.
It also leads to the dehumanization of opponents, meaning a failure or refusal to recognize certain mental or emotional attributes in those on the other side.
1. Confirmation Bias:
In polarized societies, this refers to the tendency to seek out favorable information about one’s own party and unfavorable information about the opposing party.
2. Disconfirmation Bias:
This is the tendency not to update one’s prior beliefs, in order to avoid information that could contradict them. For example, actively searching for reasons to dismiss the possibility that representatives of one’s own party have engaged in immoral actions.
CULTURAL AND COMMUNICATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY
“Behind every culture there is always the soil […] And that soil, so stated, which is not a thing,
cannot be touched, but still carries weight, is the only answer when one asks the question of culture.
It symbolizes the margin of rootedness that every culture must possess. That’s why one belongs to a culture and turns to it in critical moments—to root oneself and feel that part of one’s being is clinging to the soil.(Kusch, 1976: 74)
As we’ve seen, culture and communication are among the most strategic resources of the people, crucial for societies to achieve cultural and communicational sovereignty.
Four decades ago, Jesús Martín Barbero warned that new communication practices and technologies were reshaping the role and relationships of the state and the media—pointing out that the hyperconcentration of scientific and productive developments in this area was undermining the entire Western democratic model (Martín Barbero, 1983).
In the early 2000s, the internet served collective causes, empowering young people (and not only them) to organize, take to the streets, and demand their rights. Some examples: #YoSoy132, the Chilean student movement, the Arab Spring... and the list goes on.
But the logic has changed. Today, a few actors—one foot inside democracy, one foot out—pull the strings of digital platforms, in alliance with powerful interests. One striking example is the Donald Trump–Elon Musk duo, who dominate agendas that reject the world of rights and social justice.
That is why defending our sovereignty—both cultural and communicational—is no longer optional, but an urgent obligation.
To address today’s communication landscape, we need to stop thinking of audiences as merely consumers, users, or “prosumers” within the framework of commodification. Instead, we must understand them through the paradigm of “communicational citizenship” (Mata, 2003).
This means recognizing the possibility of people being disruptive rights-bearing subjects—not only capable of giving and receiving information, searching for it, spreading it, creating it, and sharing it—but also of demanding accountability for communicational acts that violate their rights, within a new institutional framework aimed at redressing harm. The ultimate goal is to participate in building inclusive communication, advancing toward the realization of the human right to communicate (Ottaviano, 2021).
Sovereignty: the power that exists above individualities, and the capacity to make decisions about the popular architecture of that power—as the Latin origin super omnia (“above all” or “supreme power”) suggests. The battle for communicational sovereignty must be understood as part of the broader cultural struggle for democratic hegemony.
We must continue to nurture communication agendas that represent us, because what is at stake today is hope and the future.To democratize communication, it is essential to deepen the dialectics of recognition. This is the process through which we assume the responsibility of opening ourselves to others and responding to one another (Butler & Athanasiou, 2017:98).
As Judith Butler puts it, “to ask for recognition or to offer it does not mean asking for acknowledgment of what one already is. It means invoking a becoming, instigating a transformation, demanding a future that is always in relation to the Other” (Butler, 2006:72).
Respons-ibility (in this sense) is an ethical relationship that calls us to care for the other and involves a commitment—making it the site of political struggle. This notion of respons-ibility does not carry the usual connotation of simply being accountable or offering explanations. Rather, it refers to “the ethical mandate to develop the ability to respond to ‘others,’ to take responsibility for the entanglements of our rationalities.”
This implies that respons-ibility is linked to processes of becoming different in and through the act of response(Meissner, 2014:39). If we recognize our interdependence with other humans as constitutive of our very existence, then “the political is no longer about choosing and deciding, but about connecting, about encounters and involvement.”
FAKE NEWS, TROLLS Y OTROS ENCANTOS (Ernesto calvo , Natalia aruguete)
In recent years, a growing number of researchers have begun working on what is called “affective polarization.” That is, the increasing gap in feelings of liking, hatred, disgust, or joy expressed by voters of different parties when they encounter a political message.
The paradox these studies attempt to resolve is the following: even though most voters claim to be moderate, and many political parties propose relatively similar policies, the affective distance between different political groups has been increasing—dramatically so.
The affective response is not merely a cognitive alignment with the interpretation of the event, but above all, a fervent defense of one’s own beliefs in the face of the communicational objectives of the “other.”
Noam Chomsky and the 10 Strategies of Media Manipulation
1. The Strategy of Distraction
The primary element of social control is the **strategy of distraction**, which consists of diverting the public’s attention from important issues and the decisions made by political and economic elites, through a flood of **continuous distractions and insignificant information**.
The strategy of distraction is also essential to prevent the public from becoming interested in essential knowledge in areas like science, economics, psychology, neurobiology, and cybernetics.
> *“Keep the public’s attention distracted away from real social issues, captivated by matters of no real importance. Keep the public busy, busy, busy, with no time to think; back to the farm with the other animals.”*
*(Quote from the text "Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars")*
2. Create Problems, Then Offer Solutions
This method is also known as **“problem-reaction-solution.”**
A problem is created—a “situation” intended to provoke a certain reaction from the public, so that the public then demands the measures the elites intended to impose from the beginning.
For example:
- Allow urban violence to unfold or intensify, or orchestrate bloody attacks, so the public demands more security laws and policies—at the expense of freedom.
- Or create an economic crisis to make the rollback of social rights and the dismantling of public services seem like a necessary evil.
3. The Strategy of Gradualism
To get the public to accept an unacceptable measure, it is enough to apply it gradually, drop by drop, over the course of years.
This is how radically new socioeconomic conditions (such as neoliberalism) were imposed during the 1980s and 1990s: minimal state, privatizations, precarious labor, flexibility, mass unemployment, wages that no longer guarantee a decent income—so many changes that would have sparked a revolution if they had been introduced all at once.
4. The Strategy of Deferral
Another way to get an unpopular decision accepted is to present it as “painful but necessary,” securing public consent in the moment for implementation at a later date.
It is easier to accept a future sacrifice than an immediate one.
First, because the effort isn’t required right away.
Second, because the public tends to naively hope that “things will get better tomorrow,” and the sacrifice might be avoided.
This gives the public more time to get used to the idea of change and resign themselves to it when the time comes.
5. Speaking to the Public as if They Were Children
Most advertising directed at the general public uses language, arguments, characters, and tone that are particularly childish—often bordering on the silly—as if the viewer were a small child or mentally deficient.
The more one tries to deceive the audience, the more likely one is to adopt an infantilizing tone.
Why?
“If you speak to a person as if they were 12 years old or younger, then—due to the power of suggestion—they are likely to respond or react with little critical thinking, much like a person of that age.”
(See: “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars”)
6. Use Emotion Much More Than Reflection
Making use of emotional appeal is a classic technique for short-circuiting rational analysis and ultimately the critical thinking of individuals.
Moreover, the use of emotional registers allows access to the unconscious mind, making it possible to implant or inject ideas, desires, fears and anxieties, compulsions, or to induce certain behaviors.
7. Keep the Public in Ignorance and Mediocrity
Ensure that the public is unable to understand the technologies and methods used for their control and enslavement.
“The quality of education provided to the lower social classes must be the poorest and most mediocre possible, so that the gap of ignorance between the lower and upper social classes remains insurmountable for the lower classes.”
(See Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars)
8. Encourage the Public to Be Complacent with Mediocrity
Promote the idea that it’s trendy to be stupid, vulgar, and uneducated—encouraging the public to see ignorance and mediocrity as fashionable or desirable.
9. Reinforce Self-Blame
Make individuals believe that they alone are to blame for their misfortunes, due to a lack of intelligence, ability, or effort. As a result, instead of rebelling against the economic system, the individual becomes self-deprecating and blames themselves, which leads to a depressive state. One of the effects of depression is the inhibition of action—and without action, there can be no revolution.
10. Know Individuals Better Than They Know Themselves
Over the past 50 years, rapid scientific advances have widened the gap between what the public knows and what the dominant elites know and use. Thanks to biology, neurobiology, and applied psychology, the system has developed an advanced understanding of human beings, both physically and psychologically.
The system has managed to know the average individual better than the individual knows themselves.This means that, in most cases, the system wields greater control and power over people than they have over themselves.
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