- Both MDIA 571 “Proseminar I” and MDIA 572 “Proseminar II” provided a broad overview about the history, the main topics, and some of the major problems in the field of communications from a global, intercultural, and interdisciplinary perspective. Also, both courses introduced several epistemological and methodological frames under which communication research has been developed worldwide. Through the strategy of special guests, they included lectures on the political economy of communication (Professors Robert McChesney and Amanda Ciafone, for example) and on international communication research (Professor Angharad Valdivia) that situated media …show more content…
In Media 568, the specific case study of a global corporation, as Coca Cola Co., guided the intellectual exploration of the foundations of the field and its main concepts, as commodification, fetishism, coding and decoding, mass production, cultural industries, structuration and marketing, and distinction, among others. The book of Vincent Mosco on the Political Economy of Communication was the trunk from which we entangled basic readings on, for instance, Marx, Bourdieu, Adorno and Horkheimer, Williamson, and Harvey. In that path, through the seminar CMN 529, Professor McChesney guided us through a body of both classical and more contemporary literature on the Political Economy of Communication, like Baran and Sweezy or Williams, but also Pickard and McChesney’s books, too. Based on critical readings and group discussions, I wrote a final essay for each CMN 529 and MDIA 568 and upon them, I was able to develop a paper I presented at a graduate students’ conference that took place at the UIUC (Lagos, 2016). The topics of labor, …show more content…
As long as my proposal deals with the political and economic conditions under which investigative journalism has been performing in a post-dictatorship environment and because of my historical perspective, it became fundamental to dive into the national archives in order to explore and characterize some roots of the current status of the Chilean media system. To do so, I examined three types of archives: the history of the legal changes on television in Chile, the archives on political accusations conducted within the School of Journalism at the Universidad de Chile after the military coup, and media archives. Firstly, I review the legal archives about the regulatory changes on television in Chile since the late 1970s and during the 1980s, under the rule of the military dictatorship, and until the early 1990s, focusing in three main body of legislation: the Constitution passed by the regime, the television act, and the public television law. Due to I plan to focus on the investigative journalism broadcasted, understanding the particular moments and players that established a commercialized television system, the political and economic forces tightly entangled in the period and out of the public scrutiny, is at the core of my research problem. Secondly, the archives about the administrative processes conducted against professors and