On the front page: media, audiences and death function

Abstract

This work starts from considering the central role that the media occupy in the operations of a biopower that exercises the function of killing or that requires a thanatopolitics to ensure one's own life, that is, to attend to the primary place of these in information and communication societies in which the dominant mechanisms are no longer disciplines and biopolitics but security and control, since in them power operates by addressing, before individuals and the population, mainly the "public".

Thus, it proposes to reflect, recovering both some of the main conceptualizations in this regard and results of ethnographic fieldwork developed in the newspaper Crónica, on the ways in which in control societies the media intervene in the modulation of concepts, classifications and hierarchies about lives that are worth more and lives that are worth less, contributing to the distinction and identification of the alien and the own, of the one and the other, of the just and the unjust and to the construction of a border that separates what must live from what can (or should) die, that is, contributing to the legitimization and acceptance of certain deaths, in short, to the existence of a biotanatopolytic.

For while it is clear that the media are not the sovereign nor do they exercise the power to kill that was previously an attribute of this, the truth is that they exercise the power to legitimize certain conceptions about death and the dead and fulfill, like the agents of other institutions, sovereign functions (they build public, mark the norm,  etc.), appealing to socio-cultural models that make possible their integration or recognition in the daily life of multiple agents from imaginaries – political, ethnic, generational, gender, etc. – or from operative concepts such as those of "justice", "crime" or "violence" depending on which these agents act, contradictory and differentiatedly, in the face of death in contemporary Argentina.