Abstract
The article analyses the communication factors that led up and contributed to General Pinochet’s coup against Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government in Chile in September 1973. Empirically based on interviews held with Chilean politicians and journalists in autumn 1972 and a content analysis of changes in key newspapers’ political coverage between 1970 and 1973, lessons and warnings for communication roles in present-day liberal democracies are drawn from two features of this case: (1) intense political and media polarisation, and (2) challenges to and confusion over conventional journalistic norms. The possibilities and difficulties of overcoming the resulting problems are canvassed in the article’s conclusion.
In September 1973, Chile’s Popular Unity government, led by President Salvador Allende, was overthrown by a military coup staged by General Augusto Pinochet. This article discusses and analyses the communication factors that led up and contributed to that tragic event. Altogether, the Chilean case is a petri dish of what happens when the wrong ‘bacteria’ are mixed together – elite polarisation, exacerbated mobilisation and intense media partisanship.
The article draws on two sources of material. One is a set of notes from 25 interviews conducted by the first author in autumn 1972 with media and political personnel in Santiago and Valparaiso Chile. He had visited the country at the request of Essex University’s Department of Government, which through an arrangement with the Catholic University of Chile was promoting the academic development of some of its young scholars in various areas of political science. Lacking a political communications academic, the Department asked the first author to spend 6 weeks in Chile (financed by a Ford Foundation grant) to work with two PhD candidates wanting to build research careers on studies of Chilean media and politics. Lasting at least an hour each, the interviews, which were arranged and facilitated by one of the scholars (Gonzalo Fernandez), were held with newspaper editors and journalists, television station directors and newspeople, university rectors responsible for overseeing three TV stations they owned, radio station managers, and Socialist and Communist Party officials. Each informant’s perceptions of politics-media relations were sought. Otherwise, lines of questioning were individually tailored to explicate their roles in the country’s political communication system, including any problems and tensions they were experiencing in performing them. The comments of almost all interviewees were strikingly frank and open.
The other source is a report drafted recently by the second author about changes in Chilean political journalism (reporting, commentary and advertising) between April 1970, soon after Allende’s election as President, and August 1973, shortly before the coup. Analysing data available in the Chilean National Library, he compared a week’s political content across the period in newspapers Clarin and El Mercurio, which can be regarded as the flagships of each side of the political divide. In total, 783 newspaper pages were examined for this purpose.
Political background
Popular Unity had promised in its 1970 manifesto to pursue a uniquely ‘Chilean road to Socialism’. This would combine a Marxist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and class-based analysis of Chilean society with commitments to constitutional means of political advance and humanist values. Although Allende accepted the need for armed political struggle by socialists elsewhere, Chile was in his view one of the countries in which non-military struggles still had a real meaning (conversations with Regis Debray, 1971). In Chile, ‘constitutional legality’ could even be a weapon in the socialist cause. Although Allende had won more votes and seats than his main rivals in 1970, he had to be confirmed as President by the Parliament in which Popular Unity lacked an overall majority. This was achieved by passage of a Statute of Constitutional Guarantees, which Popular Unity accepted, ensuring the maintenance of civil liberties, including freedoms of expression, the press, assembly and education.
The Popular Unity government was a coalition of five political parties, each with a somewhat singular ideology, notion of socialism, set of political priorities, and ideas about tactics for realising its goals and meeting challenges to them. On the left, outside the coalition, there stood Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), a more orthodox Marxist party that was sceptical about the prospects of transforming minority class rule to majority class power by parliamentary means. On the right, Popular Unity faced a hostile opposition, alarmed by its Marxist ideology and determined to defend middle-class interests and to overcome the disunity (between Nationalist and Christian Democratic parties), which they deemed responsible for their loss of the 1970 election.
Popular unity enjoyed something like a honeymoon period during its first year of office. Banks, copper and other industries were nationalised; land reform was introduced, with large estates broken up and redistributed; wages were tied to an index of prices; and a system of economic planning was initiated. Such success was not long-lived, however. By 1972, the government faced a host of formidable problems. Chile’s economy depended heavily on income from the export of copper, the international prices of which had fallen drastically. The national debt (on which interest had to be paid) consequently rose sharply, inflation sky-rocketed, and bread-and-butter conditions worsened, including food shortages.
In these conditions, an intense battle for public opinion ensued, looking forward especially to parliamentary elections due to be held in March 1973. Clamorously and repeatedly attacking the government’s threats to middle-class interests and its presumed responsibility for worsening economic conditions, the opposition organised a series of pots and pans demonstrations plus on one occasion an attempted general strike. In its eyes, the Chilean working class ‘had to be awakened from its dream world’ (interviewed editor of El Mercurio). For the leaders of Popular Unity, effective communication could be vital. Working-class consciousness had to be sustained and strengthened, while elements of the middle class had to be persuaded that they would benefit from the elimination of monopoly capitalism.
Yet, in this battle, there was a power imbalance favouring the opposition. In organisation, outlook and effort, it was more united than were Popular Unity’s often internally debated and less coordinated efforts. Official figures showed that by 1972, 10 newspapers supported the government, while 45 positioned themselves on the side of the opposition (Mattelart, 2005). The opposition also controlled three main nation-wide radio networks, two of them owned by powerful industry trade groups. The Popular Unity parties could do little to right this imbalance, other than by acquiring three city radio stations and the purchase of a lesser newspaper (Ultima Hora) by the Socialist Party.
Their propaganda efforts may also have been hamstrung by Popular Unity’s civil liberties commitments, including freedom of the press. A government-supporting editor told us that Allende had never tried to censor his newspaper’s output. Debray (1971) concluded that, ‘day in, day out . . . the dynamics of communication were firmly in bourgeois hands’ (p. 51), headed by Mercurio as the biggest and most prestigious Chilean newspaper. When, he asked, ‘did a ruling class last give up power?’ (p. 16).
The heightened role of communication
With Allende’s election as President, September 1970 marked a sharp turning point in how political communication was organised in Chile and the kinds of messages produced. With so much perceived by the prime political actors to be at stake, the political temperature hotted up, sometimes expressed even in apocalyptic terms. For some Popular Unity interviewees, opposition forces were ‘the enemy’. The station manager of opposition-supporting Radio Agricultura told us that a government victory in the 1973 parliamentary elections would be ‘the end of Chile as we have known it’.
Big changes in the media’s political content resulted. More political material, both absolutely and relatively, was transmitted. The accompanying Graph 1 shows an increase in the proportion of political items in the two analysed newspapers, Clarin and El Mercurio between 1970 and 1973.
Change in Topics Covered by a Left-wing and a Right-wing Newspaper.
In both newspapers, the amount of space allocated to political content increases substantially. Whereas Clarin devoted 21% of its pages to politics in 1970, in 1973 it was 29%; for El Mercurio, 6% provision of political pages in 1970 had jumped to 16% in 1973. There were also increases in the amount of political advertising paid to appear in the two newspapers by political parties, trade and business groups, trade unions and other political actors. In Clarin, this increased from 0.4% in 1970 to 9.3% in 1973; for El Mercurio the share grew from 0.8% to 3.9%.
Media polarisation was thus in full flood! Editorially and journalistically, media organisations became more determinedly partisan organs. A number of radio stations converted from record-playing and rip-and-read newscasters to political conscientising mouthpieces. More access and more favourable access was granted to the side the media outlet supported than was formerly the case. These could take the form of presenting lengthy statements from allied politicians (which could run to 5 minutes in television news). Broadcast interviewers did not hesitate to counter and contradict points made by opposing interviewees. That said, television was to some extent the Chilean system’s ‘odd-medium-out’, since it was under a statutory obligation to be pluralistic and its three university-owned channels were ostensibly supervised by diversely composed Boards. In practice, however, the pluralism was more token than substantial, implemented mainly by the allocation of party political broadcasts. Channel directors and heads of news departments were party appointees, who ensured party-sympathetic coverage of political events and advocacy. The predominant political complexions of the staffs of TV news departments were known to all.
The partisanship graduated down from commentaries and op-eds to news agendas and stories. News of events, such as interim election results or economic performance indicators, were spun selectively, as were events to do with Chile’s relations to other countries and international institutions. This went hand in hand with a politicisation of other previously more separate categories of news content. In 1970, in both the analysed newspapers politics concerned the activities of political parties and leaders and the administration of government. By 1973, the situation was considerably different. Clarin, a tabloid which used to focus on distinct stories about crime, sports and night life, by 1973 had blurred these boundaries. Now, there were headlines emphasising the political identities of criminals. For Clarin, ‘Fascists tried to blow up a packed train in Concepcion’; for El Mercurio, ‘Marxists kill a police sergeant’. In Mercurio, news of growing inflation and shortages of essential products were typically covered as due to Popular Unity maladministration. Political advertising changed similarly. Whereas in 1970, most advertisements simply supported the candidacies and leaders of the competing parties, in 1973, political parties and bodies supporting the government utilised Clarin’s pages to spread messages calling for direct action to stop any attempted coup. In El Mercurio, advertisements included attacks on the proposed nationalisation of the main Chilean pulp and paper company and needs for defence against what were presented as government threats to freedom of the press.
Journalists whom we interviewed continually conveyed a feeling of being bound up in the political struggle. None gave voice to a principle of media autonomy from political pressure – for which journalists should stand above political conflict, independently reporting and commenting on it. Instead the Chilean media predominantly served as cheer-leaders, including functions of display, giving a lead and of mobilisation. With journalists’ sources being highly party-aligned, and their cross-party contacts having been reduced to near-zero, they could not be a force for societal consensus or integration. Even specimens of what are nowadays called ‘fake news’ occasionally appeared in the press. In his conversation with Debray (1971), Allende complained about Mercurio’s ‘shameful, implacable and never-ending distortions of the truths and the facts’ (p. 88), including the false allegation that he was a drunkard!
This is not to maintain that Chile’s political communication system was utterly homogeneous. Amid its numerous polarising features, it was peppered with tensions and conflicting tendencies. For some Popular Unity activists, constitutionalism tended to put blocks on the road to socialism. (Inimical forces were discerned at work in the courts, the public prosecutor’s office and the police, for example). Nor did their media allies always speak with exactly the same voice. Each had its own journalistic traditions to respect, and each could have its own take on the ideas and issues to put forward. Not all journalists, especially those with a prestigious past, could be counted on to fall into communication line, although they were ever under pressure to do so.
The degree to which the structure of Chile’s party-divided system corresponded to the structure of her audience was also a source of uncertainty and associated tensions. Interviewees provided two different understandings of this: (1) that the audience was segmented in blocs close to their party counterparts, or (2) that many in the audience might recoil from excessive politicisation. For journalists with the latter concern, striking the right balance between disseminating political messages and catering for other mass interests could be a problem. To some extent, it could be eased by coverage of sports and on television the screening of entertainment series and novellas (such as the popular American import, Dark Shadows). But for broadcast news programmes, finding the right balance could be elusive. An interviewed editor wistfully regretted the fact that on the previous night, he had been unable to fit an item about a beauty contest into his politically stacked bulletin!
Correspondence between elite and audience levels turned of course on the extent of selective exposure among readers, viewers and listeners. The emerging system could be presumed to have increased this, encouraging more people than previously to attend to messages from their own side, while avoiding or discounting opposing ones. Such a tendency could have been mirrored at the interpersonal level with a decreasing frequency of communications between people of different political persuasions – in tandem with a stratification system that limited contact across social class boundaries. Quite unknown, however, due to a shortage of empirical audience research, was the extent of this process and whether there was a sizable third part of the electorate, other than staunch government and opposition adherents, who did not give unconditional support to either partisan group and did not sift available messages accordingly.
Other complications arose from certain long-standing ingredients of Chile’s political culture. This included a degree of respect for the office of the President, which conferred a degree of exemption on its incumbent from partisan attack. At least his proclamations and initiatives had to be reported, even if more pejoratively than had been the case under Allende’s Christian Democratic predecessor as President, Edwardo Frei. Also involved was civic pride in how Chile had built a framework of democratic institutions and practices stronger than elsewhere in South America and resilient enough to bounce back from periods of authoritarian rule.
Despite these ambiguities, political and media polarisation were systemically dominant forces in early 1970s Chile. Chicken-and-egg-like in their inter-relations, political polarisation was a prime mover of media polarisation, inducing a further downwards spiral on both fronts.
Warnings for us
Against the possible challenge that the Chilean case was too extreme for contemporary relevance, a sobering parallel may be mentioned. Just as Chile’s Commander in Chief (General Rene Schneider) was assassinated soon after Allende’s Presidential election by a far-right activist, so too was UK Member of Parliament (MP) Jo Cox killed in June 2016 by a far-right assassin. In fact, two features of the Chilean experience stand out as disturbingly noteworthy for political communication in present-day liberal democracies.
Political and media polarisation
During their conversations, Allende told Regis Debray (1971) that ‘Confrontation is an everyday fact of life in Chile’ (p. 100). It is true that conflict is inherent in politics. But nowadays conflict has been transformed in many societies from one of competing interests (‘who gets what, when and how’, ala Lasswell, 1936), having become more tribally entrenched, less bridgeable, more fiercely antagonistic, more simplistic, and centred more on opposed values, social identity demands and notions of democracy itself.
The baneful consequences of polarisation – varying in incidence and severity in different democracies but potentially operative in all – may be enumerated at length:
Proliferation of uncivil political discourse, including algorithms on online platforms that privilege outrage over nuance;
Replacement of a principle of mutual respect and courtesy across partisan divides by the demonisation of adversaries (as ‘enemies’, ‘betrayers’ of a cause, and ‘traitors’);
Simple and unqualified assertions at a premium – at odds with the inherent complexity of today’s real-world problems;
Some loss of social cohesion, reducing the chances of building consensus through discussion and deliberation;
Weakening of ethical restraints on the fashioning of communication strategies by political actors and their advisors;
A further crumbling of political trust;
The dominance of emotion over deliberation, giving degree of emotional expression a value as an indicator of ‘held truth’;
Entry into a ‘post-truth’ era (a term accepted by the Oxford English Dictionary), in which empirical truth-seeking is downgraded in favour of indisputable realities, ‘alternative facts’ and denial of expert authority;
The fates of the unaligned, who inhabit a less solid world, being ones of silence, switching off or depictions in short vox pop quotes;
The increased fragility of democratic institutions themselves.
Three crucial points emerge. The first can be signalled by the wording of a headline on a recent edition of the Spectator magazine: ‘The Age of Extremism’. A more accurate version would have read: ‘The Age of Vocal Extremism’. After all, our communication systems are now closely geared to highlighting and giving attention in the media to extremists’ views. That may leave other citizens feeling detached, lacking voice and politically disaffected.
Second, at some point, polarisation can end badly – in Chile’s case with a Republic-destroying coup. To get a grip on the deteriorating situation, Allende had brought generals into his cabinet in his last year of office, which nevertheless failed to prevent Pinochet’s coup. Short of a military takeover, constitutional checks and balances on power may be deliberately undermined, as in the Turkish and American cases. Fears are currently even being expressed that Donald Trump might not accept electoral defeat in 2020, crying foul through rigging, should the result be close.
Third, polarisation, especially when it is not confined to the political realm, but becomes cultural and pervades civic discourse more broadly, seems to be a vehicle with no reverse gear! As with Chile, it is difficult to find an example of a country where once polarisation has taken hold, it has gone into reverse. Such tenacity urgently demands thought. Are any remedial steps conceivable? Although a wealth of imaginative ways of ‘Doing Democracy Better’ have recently been advanced in a report by University College of London’s Constitutional Unit (2019), its proposals have not been noticed in political circles and have been ignored by the UK media.
A potentially helpful way forward might exploit one of the tensions evident in modern democracies, the existence of policy and strategy divisions inside the ranks of major political parties. Kreiss (2015) suggests that intra-party dialogue over factional differences could soften polarisation blows. And whereas commercially run media systems may fuel polarisation (because coverage of norm-busting outrageousness should attract audience attention and boost ratings), public service journalism could have a counterbalancing role, in broadcasting, for example, by arranging dialogues and debates (not to- and fro-combat) among spokespersons of different outlooks.
Unprecedented challenges to conventional journalistic norms
Due to changes in its culture, Chilean journalism could not mitigate the ills of polarisation. One of the summarising papers the first author wrote in 1972 opened with the statement that ‘Chile is in a state of transition so far as the media of communication are concerned’. That applied particularly to the quasi-professionalised practice of journalism which had previously conformed to some extent to traditional norms of political coverage, such as objectivity and impartiality. After 1970, however, the professional ethic of journalists was increasingly subordinated to the political ethos of the organs that employed them. There was ‘no ethic of neutrality’, we were told more than once. The prevailing norms were those of commitment and loyalty rather than objectivity. Although there was some acknowledgement of the norm of pluralism, it typically served as a fall-back position for those who felt momentarily threatened in some way.
Similar issues have latterly arisen for journalists in Western liberal democracies. A new spirit of anxious soul-searching has come to the fore. Although in the past, journalists could readily accept that their attempts to be objective sometimes fell short that norm was itself regarded as professionally valid. Nowadays, however, that assumption is being questioned. According to Carlson (2016), the campaign and election of Donald Trump exposed ‘the dilemma of journalists trapped in a system that prides neutrality’. In Krugman’s (2016) view, slavish adherence to impartiality had presented ‘false equivalences’ between arguments and stances unequal in empirical and normative weight. According to Jon Snow (McTaggart Lecture, 2017), due to the journalistic fraternity’s incessantly even-handed coverage of leading politicians’ activities, it had failed to understand and report the experiences, problems and concerns of ordinary people. Others worry that attempts to expose bigots have just played into their hands, giving them prominent publicity and affording them passages to respectability. Mark Damazer (2019), one-time deputy head of BBC News, has reported concerns among a number of practitioners in the Corporation that ‘the trusty “opinion from over here, opinion from over there, hard information from over here” formula can’t be relied on to work’; that the ‘vanilla journalism’ of even-handedly reporting facts ‘is dead, overdone, over-used and boring’; and that the old formula has become a recipe for ‘anaemic journalism’. According to Marty Baron (2018), executive editor of the Washington Post, today’s journalists are ‘forced to face fundamental questions . . . to which the old rules of journalism no longer apply’. In his view, ‘these arise from the treatment of political communication as showmanship, the frequent muddling of fact and fiction, and attacks on the press, capitalising on lack of public trust in it’. Yet, in the end, Baron proposed no new rule, concluding instead that ‘Journalists [should] do our job. Do it honestly, seriously, fairly, accurately and also unflinchingly’.
Solutions to these problems are not readily discernable. Abandonment of traditional journalistic norms might only add fuel to the polarisation flames. Attempts by journalists to avoid false equivalences could expose them to charges of bias. What they could do, however, would be to apply more often, more stringently and more vocally the norm of ‘accuracy’ to advocates’ assertions. Every now and then, they should be willing to discuss among themselves and with others – in academe and civil society – what the scale of legitimate debate is on the big issues of the day. The status of the conventional norms in their work should also be reconsidered. These should be treated less as ends and more as means to the ends of facilitating and enhancing citizen understanding and engagement. At first glance, the BBC’s emphasis on ‘due impartiality’ might seem to go some way towards recognising such a need. Still lacking, however, are standards to guide its application. Those could be derived by specifying certain conditions when journalists should strive to be impartial:
To clarify the lineaments of an issue, for example, for and against austerity policies;
To analyse the sources of a problem, for example, high levels of inequality;
To represent fairly different sides of an argument, for example, between pro-life and pro-choice abortion policies;
To ensure that marginalised voices and points of view can be adequately heard, for example, of racial and ethnic minorities.
But not as a matter of routine, such as presenting a side’s rebuffing statement that does not give added substance to a debate, or aggressively challenging a protagonist in an interview just because his or her opponent’s weaknesses had been vigorously exposed in other coverage.
Finally, journalists could do more to prevent critical discourse from degenerating into bile. To the complement of professional roles which they have espoused in surveys (Hanitzsch, 2007, lists those of watchdog, change agent, populist disseminator, and opportunist facilitator) should now be added that of safeguarding the integrity and promoting the quality of civic communication.
Conclusion
The preservation of democracy in a meaningful sense may be at stake in how political communication develops in future. Whether the problems of polarisation, normative confusion and the binding of politicians and journalists in a dysfunctional communication culture (Pfetsch, 2014) can be overcome remain an open question. The chances of doing so are not helped by the thoroughgoing professionalisation of politicians’ sorties in the public sphere or by many journalists’ self-images as superior consummate professionals. Preoccupied with the numerous pragmatic challenges they face in rapidly changing and highly competitive conditions, they may fail to pay sufficient attention to the tasks of reconsidering, revitalising and prioritising their civic roles. Among those must be a determination to provide incentives for citizens to learn, choose and become involved rather than merely to follow and kibbitz over the political process.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We are most grateful for useful discussions about the issues raised in this article with Chris Anderson, Stephen Coleman, John Corner, Danny Pollack and Silvio Waisbord. We dedicate the article to the memory of the late Gonzalo Fernandez, who arranged and took part in our interviews but was fired from his university position after the coup and later succumbed to cancer.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.