Medios locales y noticias sobre violencias en pandemia: El caso del partido de San Martín

Abstract

El presente artículo se desprende de un proyecto PISAC que indagó enlas formas que adquirió la intervención de las fuerzas de seguridad ypolicías durante la pandemia por Covid-19 en el Partido de San Martín,provincia de Buenos Aires. Allí nos preguntamos por el rol de los mediosde comunicación en las configuraciones de las violencias durante elprimer año de pandemia. Se buscó reconocer, explicar y contextualizarlas formas y contenidos puntuales que toman las noticias sobreviolencia policial en dicho escenario. Para ello se realizó una selecciónde noticias donde las fuerzas de seguridad aparecían representadascomo actores centrales en el período abordado, junto con unacaracterización de los medios relevados a partir de entrevistas a susperiodistas. El artículo se fundamenta entonces en una estrategiametodológica cualitativa, que combinó el análisis de contenido de lasnoticias que conformaron nuestro corpus con la realización deentrevistas a periodistas de algunos de los medios relevados. Por otra parte, la investigación puso demanifiesto que, a contramano de la tendencia observada en los mediosnacionales, en los medios locales y zonales analizados las noticiaspoliciales tienen un lugar acotado, que busca cumplir con las demandasdel público respecto de este tipo de información. Así, las noticiaspoliciales se sustentan en la información aportada por los cables deagencia y otros medios más que en coberturas propias. Comoresultado, en líneas generales, las noticias locales no discuten, sino queterminan reforzando, las representaciones negativas sobre estosterritorios y la caracterización de su población más vulnerable comopeligrosa, y justificando el accionar de las fuerzas de seguridad sobreestos sectores.

This article originated from a PISAC project focused on the forms that took the intervention of security forces and the police during the Covid19 pandemic in the district of San Martín, province of Buenos Aires. In that research, we wondered about the role of the media in the configurations of violence during the first year of the pandemic. The objective was to recognize, explain and contextualize the specific forms and contents that the news about police violence took in this scenario. For this purpose, we carried out an exhaustive classification and analysis of the news that involved the security forces in the period addressed, together with a characterization of the surveyed media from interviews with their journalists. As a result, the article is based on a qualitative approach, which combines the content analysis of the news in our corpus with interviews with journalists from some of the surveyed media. The survey in search of cases involving the security forces revealed three cases of lethal violence, one case of disappearance, and a series of news related to evictions, police abuses, and harassment. Regarding the cases of lethal violence, the journalistic approach revealed tensions in the assignment of responsibilities regarding victims and perpetrators, with episodes characterized as "confrontations" where the hypothesis of "legitimate defense" gains ground over the position of a case of "easy trigger". Regarding the cases of evictions, persecution and police harassment, which were addressed only in two of the surveyed media, we observe that they pose a questioning of the authority assigned to the police forces in the pandemic context in situations in which economic, labor and housing issues make the restrictions imposed problematic. On the other hand, the research revealed that, contrary to the trend observed in the national media, regarding the growing importance of the sections reserved to police news, in the local and regional media this type of news has a limited space, to comply with public demands regarding this type of information. Therefore, police news are based on information provided by agency cables and other media rather than on their own coverage. As a result, in general terms, the local news does not discuss, but instead ends up reinforcing, the negative representations of these territories and the characterization of their most vulnerable populations as dangerous, and justifying the actions of the security forces against these sectors.