Deshumanización y economicismo en crónicas periodísticas

Abstract

The author analyzes –from the point of view of critical discourse analysis– a corpus of news published in 1997 and collected from an electronic newspaper in Santiago de Chile. All texts deal with natural catastrophes affecting people. The author hypothesizes that the economy-oriented discourse used in the texts influences their contents shaping society’s values in a negative way. He then reviews linguistic devices that produce a dehumanizing effect, such as the use of rhetorical devices, the positive presentation of texts, the order in their presentation, and the equivalence or translation of complex formulations. Results are analyzed from an underlying value perspective which favors material over human consideration.