Through a post-political gaze
On the ideological loading of democracy in
the coverage of Chávez’s Venezuela.
ERNESTO ABALO
Media and Communication
Örebro Studies in Media and Communication 20 I ÖREBRO 2015
2015
ER
N
ES
TO A
BA
LO
Th
ro
ug
h a p
os
t-p
oli
tic
al g
az
e
ernesto abalo (b. 1982) is affiliated with the Department of Media and Communication Studies at Örebro University.
Through a post-political gaze studies the construction of
democracy in the coverage of Venezuela under the era of president Hugo Chávez (limited to the years between 2002 and 2013), through an ideology critical framework. The aim of this endeavor is twofold. First, the dissertation aims to understand the relationship between ideology and the construction of democracy in journalism on foreign political phenomena. Second, it attempts to explore the ways in which the relationship between ideology and democracy in journalism serves to legitimize or delegitimize the struggle for social justice in nations in the global South vis-à-vis the political and economic fundamentals of global capitalism. The coverage of the deve-lopments in Venezuela under Chávez’s presidency constitutes an informative case for capturing the interrelation between ideology and the construction of democracy, since the Venezuelan government under this period of time, while relying on a vast popular support, also challenged two dominant aspects of global capitalist hegemony: neoliberalism and liberal democracy. In this sense, Chávez’s political project posed a problem to established notions of politics in general and democracy in particular. The backbone of the dissertation is constituted by three articles that are methodologically rooted in critical discourse analysis and rely on materials from a sample of three elite news-papers. Across the studies, the dissertation discusses the existence of several macro-strategies that serve to ideologically load constructions of democracy. The dissertation critiques the post-political character of the construction of democracy, thus its acceptance of the global power relations that be; which in the end leads to an understanding of democracy that generally takes for granted the political and economic fundaments of global capitalism.
issn 1651-4785 isbn 978-91-7529-083-6
