Prime-time politics: News, parody, and fictional credibility in Chile

JENNIFER ASHLEYGeorge Mason University

Prime-time politics:News, parody, and fictional credibility in Chile

A B S T R A C TChile’s public television station, TVN, relies on aprogramming structure that places a telenovelabefore and after the national news hour. Thisprogramming model’s popularity is due to whatproducers call its “umbrella effect,” meaning thatthe ratings of one program help to protect whatcomes before and after. In the months leading up tothe 2009–10 presidential election, TVN blurred theboundaries between these two televisual genres byproducing one telenovela that parodied the innerworkings of a news station and another thatenlisted a well-known journalist to serve as itsnarrator. Drawing on fieldwork with media producersand telenovela fans, I argue that the overlapsbetween these two genres make visible the relationbetween media, political, and economicinfrastructures. Analysis of these programming flowsin the context of the electoral campaign providesinsight into the role of transitions as places ofpolitics making. [telenovela, news, parody, politicalculture, Latin America]

Halfway through the first episode, Los exitosos Pells (The Suc-cessful Pells) reaches a dramatic peak when the ruthless,ratings-hungry fictional TV news director, Francisca Andrade,pushes her star anchorman, Martın Pells, through a glass wall,knocking him into a coma. In a panic, Francisca leaves the sta-

tion and drives frantically through the rain, talking on the phone to her as-sistant about what to do next. Distracted, she hits a man walking acrossthe street. She stops the car and runs to him to see if he is OK. “You almostkilled me!” he yells at her. “Now get out of here unless you want me to callthe cops and report you for driving and talking on your cell phone!” As shestares at the man, the audience realizes that what seemed like another dis-astrous moment in her day will instead be her salvation. The man’s face,slightly hidden behind overgrown hair and a beard, is identical to that ofMartın Pells. “Please, forgive me,” she begs the stranger. “I was very impru-dent. I don’t know what I was thinking. Forgive me. I’m Francisca Andrade,owner and director of TV News.” The man responds that he couldn’t careless about her news channel, adding that “TV is the opiate of the people.”Francisca (“Franca” to her friends) smiles and convinces him to join herfor a drink to apologize for her carelessness. Her true motive, of course,is to offer the man (who she soon learns is a struggling actor) a generoussalary to impersonate Martın Pells, allowing her news station to maintainits high ratings. And in this way, the series begins its exploration of theblurry boundaries between fiction and truth telling.

When the commercial break began, my friend Katia leaned over the tableand turned to Channel 13 so that we could check out the other new Chileanteleserie, or telenovela, as such programs are called in other countries.1 Itwas March of 2009, and we were enjoying the first night of the so-called warof the teleseries from her home in Santiago.2 The ratings battle between Losexitosos Pells on Channel 7 (National Television of Chile, or TVN) and theteleserie on Channel 13 that first night of competition was so heated that,for the first time ever, both series extended into the news hour (Arevalo2009). Within a few days, however, Los Pells had become the clear winnerof the 8:00 p.m. programming slot, bringing parodic critique of televisionnews production into homes such as Katia’s every weeknight. As expected,at the end of each episode, viewers stayed with TVN to watch the nightlynews that followed.3

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 41, No. 4, pp. 757–770, ISSN 0094-0496, onlineISSN 1548-1425. C© 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/amet.12110

American Ethnologist � Volume 41 Number 4 November 2014

Starting in April, TVN’s news was followed by a teleserienocturna, or late-night serial, at 10:00 p.m. Popular late-night serials often provide stations with increased viewer-ship during the last few minutes of the news as teleseriefans tune in early in anticipation of the start of the show.The viewing peaks that successful teleseries provide at thestart and end of the news hour raise the average overall rat-ing for the news hour of the winning channel, thus allowingthat station to argue that it has the most viewed newscastand, subsequently, the most advertising-worthy program-ming. Stations have implemented this programming model,in which the nightly news is positioned between two popu-lar teleseries, repeatedly since 2007. The model’s popular-ity is due to what TVN producers call its “umbrella effect”(efecto paragua), meaning that the high ratings of one pro-gram help to protect what comes before and after it.4 Bystretching over fictional programming and the nightly news,the umbrella in this case helps to create a genre of compos-ites rather than discrete programming units.

In this article, I examine this particular umbrella effectto consider how pairing fictional modes of representationand national news might produce a political aesthetic ofcritique. The two series that anchored TVN’s nightly newsduring 2009 both contained critical appraisals of the coun-try’s market-driven news media. Although telenovelas areperhaps best known outside Latin America for their dra-matic love stories, in many countries they also have a longhistory of engaging in social and political issues.5 EstherHamburger (2000) and Antonio La Pastina (2004), for exam-ple, describe how the 1996–97 Brazilian telenovela O rei dogado (Cattle King) addressed national debate around agrar-ian reform. The telenovela produced what La Pastina callsan “intertextual narrative” through dialogue between po-litical figures and fictional characters, culminating in thedecision of two senators to appear in one of its scenes.Nelson Hippolyte Ortega (1998) and Vivian Schelling (2004)also provide examples of this blurring of “fiction” and“reality” in their analyses of the Venezuelan telenovelaPor estas calles (On These Streets), which aired just monthsafter an attempted coup in 1992. Closely paralleling thestories of the nightly news, the telenovela critiqued thecorruption and violence witnessed by residents of Caracasand became, according to its creator, a kind of “catharsis”for viewers and producers (see Ortega 1998:73). CarolinaAcosta-Alzuru (2011, 2013) describes how, during a crisis inHugo Chavez’s government ten years later, the telenovelaCosita rica (Beautiful Little Thing) again brought togetherviewers from diverse perspectives to reflect on the growingpolitical polarization in the country.

These rich ethnographic works provide convincing ev-idence for the consideration of fictional programming asa space for mediating political discussion.6 Their analyticinsights, however, do not completely explain what washappening with Chile’s teleseries during 2009. In the exam-

ples cited above, the object of critique is external. That is,the fictional representations targeted public figures, politi-cians, wealthy business owners, or institutions such as thepolice force. In the Chilean teleseries that I analyze here,the most obvious target—the neoliberal communicationsystem—was internal. Producers participated in a kind ofcritical complicity by questioning the very structures andinstitutions that allowed for the programming’s productionand circulation.7 As some of the actors made clear, thisquestioning was not limited to particular news programsor television networks but, rather, extended to Chile’s entirepolitical-economic system (Arevalo 2009).

Rather than focus primarily on the political contentexpressed in one discrete program or genre, I am inter-ested here in exploring how the programming structure it-self provided a support for that critique. The parody was atits finest, I suggest, when viewers and producers engagedthe entire programming sequence, meaning that the um-brella effect enabled the critique. However, by encouragingviewers to “stay tuned,” this effect reproduced the market-driven communication structure that it was critiquing. Inmy analysis of this programming model, I draw on Ray-mond Williams’s description of televisual “flow.” Accord-ing to Williams, his attention to flow emerged as a prod-uct of his own first disorienting experience watching U.S.television, which had significantly more commercial inter-ruptions than did British television. In Television: Technol-ogy and Cultural Form (1974), Williams advocates for ananalysis of televisual content within a series of three flows:the overall programming schedule, the transition from oneprogram to the next, and the sequence of words and im-ages transmitted to the audience. Within his descriptionof flow is an acknowledgment of the technological infras-tructure necessary to transmit the broadcast signal, the in-stitutional intents behind a particular sequence, and thereception by the viewer of this programming. This con-ceptual framework spurred numerous critiques and refor-mulations, particularly regarding the relative power of theviewer (cf. Corner 2000; White 2003). In his study of tele-vision reception, Klaus Bruhn Jensen (1994), for example,includes an analysis of “viewer flow” to acknowledge theindividualized programming sequences created by viewer-initiated channel changes (such as those of Katia duringthe teleserie). He concludes, however, by suggesting thata decade of scholarly focus on how audiences differen-tially decode media messages according to their own posi-tionalities and experiential contexts has perhaps neglectedto acknowledge what “prestructure[s] the meaning poten-tial and hence the cultural agenda that viewers encounter”(Jensen 1994:303). Following Jensen, I am attentive hereto the political-economic structures that shape TVN’s pro-gramming flow as well as viewer response.

In this article, I explore the relation between microprogramming transitions and macro political-economic

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Prime-time politics � American Ethnologist

structures by bringing the work of Jacques Ranciere andVictor Turner into conversation with Williams’s concept offlow. Ranciere suggests that political dissensus is made pos-sible through the blurring of boundaries between so-calledpolitical and nonpolitical communication, arguing that pol-itics “generally occurs ‘out of place’, in a place which wasnot supposed to be political” (2010:4). Turner’s (1974, 1979)work is particularly helpful in thinking through this place oftransition from one program to the next as a space of lim-inality. For Turner, the in-between is playful, experimentalspace “full of potency and potentiality” (1979:465). Draw-ing on the work of these theorists, I am interested in thepractices that reproduce the political-economic structuresthat extend across distinct programming genres as well asthe spaces of creativity (and, at times, critique) that emergewithin these structures. Following conversations heard inthe hallways of TVN and around Katia’s table, this analy-sis considers the overlaps between news and teleseries asplaces of politics making within a neoliberal communica-tion system. In this case, I suggest that these transitory mo-ments, marked by the peaks in ratings sought by Chileantelevision station executives, make visible the relation be-tween media, political, and economic infrastructures. At-tention to the umbrella effect, I argue, reveals how seekingmarket success enabled the production of market critique.

My analysis emerges from two ethnographic sites. Thefirst of these is the newsroom of the country’s public televi-sion station, TVN. Despite TVN’s formal autonomy from thestate, the Chileans I interviewed associate the station withthe political platform of the government in power. At thetime of this research, that government was the center-leftcoalition of the Concertacion. The programming of TVN isof interest to this discussion not only because of its com-plicated relation to the state but also because the stationwas the winner of the teleserie wars and the ratings leaderin television news programming during 2009. My secondethnographic site is among teleserie fans, such as Katia andher family, in La Victoria, a neighborhood located in Santi-ago’s Municipality of Pedro Aguirre Cerda. Founded in 1957through a land takeover organized by the Communist andSocialist parties, La Victoria was a site of political resistance(and repression) during the dictatorship years and contin-ues to be one of the most emblematic neighborhoods ofthe Left. In 2008, one of La Victoria’s longtime activists,Claudina Nunez, became mayor of Pedro Aguirre Cerda,making her the first Communist mayor in Greater Santi-ago since before the dictatorship.8 La Victoria is also hometo the country’s first community television station, whichis highly critical of neoliberal forms of governance. Myresidence in La Victoria between 2008 and 2010 offeredinsight into everyday viewing practices and political activ-ities as well as demonstrated to me that TVN was the sta-tion most frequently watched in the neighborhood duringmy research period.

Like other scholars who have responded to Williams,I emphasize the importance of the particular sociohistori-cal context of a given programming flow (cf. Caughie 1990;White 2003). Following Faye Ginsburg, I suggest that anethnographic analysis of this programming requires a con-sideration of “histories of . . . viewing, prior interpretivepractices, and problematic social relations” (1994:13). Thisanalysis thus begins with a discussion of the social, his-torical, and political life of Chilean television, exploring itstransition from a tool of social development to a space ofneoliberal enterprise. From there, I move through TVN’sprogramming flow during 2009, drawing on ethnographicanalysis of televisual production and audience receptionto examine how each component of the sequence overlapswith another. The first of these is Los exitosos Pells, which setup this structure of critique through content that parodiedeveryday news production. In the next section, I analyze therelation between TVN’s news team and the “late-night” tele-serie ¿Donde esta Elisa? (Where Is Elisa?). The ratings forthis drama, which chronicled the search of an upper-classfamily for their missing daughter, were so high in Septem-ber of 2009 that TVN elected to position the presidentialdebate immediately after its transmission to protect audi-ence ratings. I follow this analysis with discussion of an ad-ditional element added to the evening programming flowduring November of 2009: the 20-minute blocks betweenthe 8:00 p.m. teleserie and the 9:00 p.m. nightly news as-signed to the presidential campaign ads. In particular, I fo-cus on the decision of the far left candidate, Jorge Arrate, tocenter his television campaign on a fictional “presidentialteleserie.” To conclude, I explore how attention to program-ming flows provides insight into processes of political tran-sition and democratic consensus.

Chilean television as political-economic policy

Although Katia and her family watch the prime-time tele-series, they regularly critique Chilean television for be-ing “neoliberal,” meaning that it is both market-drivenand bears the mark of the country’s particular political-economic history. During the last several years, anthropol-ogists have increasingly used the adjective neoliberal to in-dex the everyday impact of changes in budgetary policiesand the introduction of market logic into many areas ofdecision making, including education, health, and pensionplans (Hoffman et al. 2006). The acknowledgment by schol-ars of the imprecision of this term and its use in seeminglydisparate contexts has produced spirited debate.9 My con-cern is to examine “actually existing neoliberalism(s)” as“sets of theories and practices . . . that are fundamentallythe products of local history and experience” (Goldstein2012:305). In the Chilean case, neoliberalism emergesethnographically as a word of everyday use, particularlyin low-income neighborhoods.10 The use of this term by

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Katia’s family as a means of critique signals their own po-litical positioning in that history.11

Early television experiments in Chilean universities oc-curred in 1957 during the government of Jorge Alessan-dri, a right-wing president who considered television a“distraction of resources” (interview with Jorge Navarrete,November 19, 2008).12 It was not until the government ofChristian Democrat Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964–70) thatdiscussion emerged regarding the creation of a nationaltelevision station. Frei Montalva wished to maintain theuniversity television system but was also interested in thedevelopment of a public television system. In 1969, thestate-sponsored public channel, TVN (Channel 7), joinedthe projects of the Universidad Catolica (Channel 13) andthe Universidad de Chile (Channel 9). In 1970, Chileanselected socialist Salvador Allende as president. Allende con-sidered television a powerful tool of political infrastructure,and early Chilean television programming reflected his gov-ernmental goals.

Three years later, a U.S.-backed military coup led byAugusto Pinochet overthrew Allende. During the 17 years ofdictatorship that followed (1973–90), Chile became a modelof neoliberal reforms, led by a group of economists trainedunder Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago. Theseso-called Chicago boys advised the military government toallow the market free reign in all sectors, including com-munications. Pinochet’s regime censored television of po-litical content as well as transformed its structure from apublic and university-owned system into an increasinglyprivatized one sustained primarily via advertising. It wasthis very emphasis on the economic sustainability of tele-vision that allowed actors and directors associated with thepolitical Left to eventually return to the screens. Each sta-tion was determined to maintain audience (and thus ad-vertiser) support as it struggled through the economic cri-sis of the 1980s. Stations did this through privileging theartists’ popular appeal over their political positioning. Ac-tors and directors took advantage of the space allowed tothem through fictional programming to introduce topics ofpublic debate that were taboo within news programming(Rojas and Rojas 2007). Like Henry Jenkins, Chilean tele-serie producers believed in fiction’s ability to provide a het-erogeneous space of discussion by drawing individuals outof their “ideological enclaves” (2006:249). While this popu-lar fictional content may have subtly critiqued the dictator-ship, its market success also served to protect the political-economic model implemented by the military regime.

With the return to democracy in 1990, the center-left governing coalition of the Concertacion transformedTVN into an “autonomous public entity headed by a boardof directors approved by the Senate” (Tironi and Sunkel2000:186). This mandate stripped the Chilean state of itsright to directly interfere in the programming or manag-ing practices of the public station. In addition, TVN lost its

access to government subsidies and, instead, entered intomarket competition with the other stations for advertisingto finance programming. As a “public station,” TVN has hadto carefully negotiate its responsibility to act autonomouslyfrom the state and maintain an editorial line that reflectsthe thinking of the majority of the Chilean public. Despitethese challenges, in just a few years TVN became a leader interms of ratings and prestige. However, the station struggledto maintain its commitment to sustaining those aspects ofits programming that were less profitable but were includedwithin its “public television” mission.13

Los Pells and internal critique

TVN’s building in the bohemian neighborhood ofBellavista houses both the station’s “dramatic area”and the “press area” and provides a spatial illustrationof the umbrella effect. Like the associated programmingmodel, each area occupies distinct physical and symbolicspaces while also enjoying spaces of overlap with the other.Although the two areas are located in different wings, theyshare the same cafeteria and use the same outdoor patiofor their breaks. The on-air personalities from the dramaticand press areas serve as symbols of the station; however, asocial distance exists between the two groups, and there isa clear difference in public perception of their respectiveroles as station representatives. Residents of La Victoriaassociated the journalists less with the farandula, or the“frivolous” world of show business. However, they also feltthat teleserie actors were less tied to the editorial line ofTVN and thus freer to express political critique. Evaluatingthese dueling characteristics, viewers shifted back and forthbetween journalists and teleserie actors when assigningcredibility.

Los exitosos Pells played with the experiential, repre-sentational, and physical proximity and distance betweenthese two areas of Chile’s national television station. Theplot centered on Martın Pells and his wife and coanchor SolCosta, who, on-screen, appeared to be the perfect, success-ful couple. Offscreen, however, they fought nonstop andhad other romantic partners. TVN bought the script for theteleserie from Argentina, and asked its in-house screenwrit-ers to adapt it to appeal to Chilean audiences. TVN createda mini–news studio—complete with dressing rooms andcafeteria—inside the dramatic area of the television stationand recruited station news anchors to coach the actors inreading news reports and delivering breaking news using animprovisational style.

My participant-observation at TVN coincided with thestart of Los Pells, and the journalistic team liked to joke thatI was not the first to “spy” on them. They reported thatthe actors of the teleserie had also carried out participant-observation in the newsroom before they had begun film-ing. Sitting in the sun of the patio that connected the two

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areas, Scarleth and Pamela described to me the actors’representations of them. “We laughed when we watchedthe show,” Scarleth told me. “A character came out and weknew that it was so-and-so. We inspired their characters. Itwas as if they had done an autopsy of us!” The actors’ in-terpretation was not met by laughter from everyone at TVN,however. During a coffee break in the cafeteria, an up-and-coming journalist said to one of the editors, “Sergio, as rep-resentative to the board of directors, maybe you could makesome comment about the way that the dramatic area talksabout journalism and the news.” The news editor nodded inreply, adding, “I have.” The young journalist continued, “It’sfine that Los Pells is a comedy and everything, but some-times it gets to be a bit much. And on Elisa [the late-nightteleserie] they’re always criticizing journalists. They shouldat least make it more realistic. The actors pass a week, amonth in the pressroom and they think they know how itworks,” he complained. The editor corrected him, “Theyweren’t there to learn how the news worked; they were thereto work on their character.” The journalist insisted, “Theycould at least be a bit more realistic in their portrayals.”

In their media interviews, the actors featured in LosPells suggested that they used humor to signal their crit-ical complicity with the political-economic model thatstructured the media system. During a promotion for theteleserie that appeared on TVN’s primetime news, LuzValdivieso, the actress who interpreted the fictional newsanchor, Sol Costa, stated, “The most entertaining part isthat it shows television from within. That is to say, there isalso a critique” (YouTube 2009). In an article published bythe state-sponsored newspaper La Nacion, which readersalso commonly associated with the political platform of theConcertacion government, some of the actors stated moreexplicitly that the show “critiqued” the way that marketlogic pervaded everyday life. One member of the cast, JoseSoza, was quoted as saying that the actors were not “un-aware of the feeling of ‘distress’ that affects many Chileansliving in an order as ‘atrocious and without pity’ as theneoliberal system.” Soza went on to explain that althoughhis vocation is theater, he has to work in commerciallydriven television to support his family (Arevalo 2009). De-spite the teleserie’s critique of television and televisionnews, in particular, the actors cited in the article rejected thenotion that TVN journalists should feel offended by theirportrayals, stating that audiences recognized the show asfiction.

A noteworthy instance of the teleserie’s parody ofmarket-driven news production occurred in April of 2009.By then, Los Pells had won the prime-time battle, and mostof Chile was familiar with the tricks that character FrancaAndrade used to maintain the high ratings of her station.About halfway through episode 35, the fictional news sta-tion dedicated a segment to an apology from Martın Pellsto his wife and coanchor, privileging the couple’s romantic

drama over hard-hitting news. Following this segment, thescene cut to Martın’s assistant, Charly, and the station’s ex-ecutive producer, Lily:

Charly: After this, are we going to the scandal in thecourts?

Lily: No, no, because Franca wants the story about Soland Martın on their honeymoon.

C: Honeymoon?! But the first or the second? Becausethe [images from the] second don’t belong to us, and—pardon me for saying it—but for a news program to beshowing the fight of the Pells like this seems to me . . .(His voice trailed off and he shook his head.)

L: Charly, you want Franca to pay attention to what wesay now that the ratings are going through the ceiling?Try to understand me. Do you know how Franca is rightnow? She’s superoxygenated because people are call-ing, asking if they are going to get back together. Youwant to do serious journalism? Why don’t you go workfor a radio or a community channel?

Chilean viewers found this exchange humorous be-cause they saw it as a blatant critique of TVN’s role as publicadvocate. Charly argues that the station should be pushingfor state accountability by examining irregularities in thecourts. Lily’s response is that his request is naive and thathe should know that journalism that interrogates state gov-ernance practices emerges from more left-leaning (and lessmarket-driven) sources, such as the radio or communitychannels (which are associated with neighborhoods such asLa Victoria).14

This critique becomes more significant when consid-ered within the televisual flow. Los Pells highlighted howeconomic interests drive news programming in a fictive sta-tion with a name strikingly similar to TVN, and it appearedimmediately before the station’s nightly news.15 The stationused the final minutes of the teleserie as an umbrella to pro-tect viewership for the news and blurred the boundariesof the “fictional hour” and the “news hour” by occasion-ally allowing the teleserie to extend several minutes intothe scheduled programming slot of the news. The previousrigidity of the programming schedule was made flexible toallow the umbrella effect to work its magic. Although televi-sion news executives were happy with the ratings that thisprogramming flow provided, journalists like Pamela ques-tioned how it affected the reception of their work. As sheexplained, “Let’s face it, that’s sending a contradictory mes-sage. If you think about it, doing that is critiquing the workthat you do as a television station.” She continued, “It’s juststrange because you are questioning your product, makinga fictional work inspired by journalists who are trying everyday to do work as close to the truth as possible.”

Scarleth, however, suggested that the critique in LosPells mirrored some of her own questioning of the press

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area’s everyday practices. In addition to critiquing theediting used to create a more attractive product for pub-lic consumption, she pointed to the ways that journalistsregularly participated in what she called “political specta-cle.” As an example of her own critical complicity, she be-gan to describe a political rally she had covered in which thecandidate had a more apathetic public than his opponent.To aid in the production of news images that would sug-gest more energetic public support, the candidate’s team re-quested permission from the city to close a street for a rallyand carefully distributed flags and banners to those present.The campaign team only gave permission to news camerasto take shots from the very end of the street so that the can-didate was seen at a distance, giving the impression of mas-sive public support. “If someone would have done a moredetailed analysis of what was really happening that day ofthe rally,” Scarleth explained, “they would have realized thatall of the flags were the same, all of the signs written with thesame handwriting, all of the actors the same. They set it allup ahead of time. Nothing about it was spontaneous. Didthe people come out to receive him? No, they were broughtin on buses.” This political rally, she argued, was as care-fully staged as a fictional program. “And why weren’t wejournalists capable of reflecting all that?” she asked. “That,half an hour before, ten buses had arrived from the cam-paign headquarters full of people with the same shirt on?Why weren’t we capable of reflecting the ‘making of’?” Scar-leth looked at Pamela and said, “So then, are we makingnews a spectacle? In many senses, yes.” Pamela nodded inagreement.

For media producers like Scarleth and Pamela, thecontent of the teleserie was an invitation to consider howtheir everyday practices helped create a communicationstructure that privileged media spectacle over rational crit-ical debate. In her study of satirical melodrama in Syria,Lisa Wedeen (1999) suggests that analyzing critique thatemerges from fictional content through the lens of either a“safety valve” or “resistance” perspective fails to acknowl-edge the deeply ambiguous nature of the media practicesof producers and viewers. For Wedeen (1999:90), the po-litical potency of these fictional programs centers on theirrole as texts around which a public may gather and, intheir shared laughter, feel united rather than isolated. Inthis case, TVN media producers formed part of that pub-lic. TVN’s premiere position in Chile’s communication hier-archy drew the country’s top journalists and actors, manyof whom were attracted to the station’s public mission. Theprogramming structure, which relied on the temporal over-lap between the fiction hour and the news hour, signaledto the journalists their critical complicity with the political-economic policies that structured their work lives. Popu-larly associated as the station was with the state, the critiquethat emerged from TVN’s content and programming struc-ture of the Concertacion’s neoliberal model could be inter-

preted as a self-critique or an attempt at solidarity with theviewing (and disgruntled voting) public.

Questioning regimes of truth

By choosing the national news as their subject matter, theproducers of Los Pells invited audiences to reflect on offi-cial accounts of truth provided both by TVN and the center-left governing coalition of the Concertacion. Although themajority of viewers in La Victoria do not have Scarleth andPamela’s firsthand experience with news production, myexperience moderating group discussions and informallywatching television with residents over the years leads meto believe that they are, in the main, critical media con-sumers. Communication scholar Valerio Fuenzalida arguesthat 17 years of military dictatorship contributed to a ten-dency toward distrust within Chilean society. That, coupledwith the regime’s regular manipulation of media represen-tations, meant that those Chileans who opposed the dicta-torship, like the residents of La Victoria, learned to trust onlyinformation consonant with their social circles (conversa-tion with author, September 21, 2009). Despite the returnto democracy, Fuenzalida argues, this tendency to second-guess televisual representations remains ingrained in view-ing practices.

My neighbors in La Victoria exemplified this practiceof questioning the political underpinnings of both fictionaland news programming when they talked about Los Pells.Over tea in their home, Raul and Angelica suggested that theteleserie promoted a discussion of political accountability.

“Well,” Raul said. “In Los Pells they threw in the politicalside. Right away, they made it political.”

“How?” I asked.“When they gave the news they said, ‘Mayors of these

places, start concerning yourself more with the people!”He threw his arms up into the air in imitation of the fic-tional news anchor. “They were showing places that wereflooded,” he explained.

They showed things that were happening here, thingsthat happen in Chile, it was the news of the moment.Every winter the same thing happens. There are floods,houses are swept away by the rivers, and the peopleare waiting there with their arms crossed. And what arethe mayors doing? They get dressed to go and see whathappened and they write a report, and that’s that. Theydisappear.

Raul was referencing the second episode of Los Pells, inwhich Gonzalo, the character impersonating Martın Pells,deviates from his anchorman script to argue that the de-struction to the homes of low-income residents was notcaused by a natural disaster but, rather, a lack of politicalwill.

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“And you think real journalists don’t see that? Theydon’t make those kinds of declarations?” I asked.

“No,” Angelica said quickly.Raul paused and said,

Well, almost never, let’s say. They don’t do it until ev-erything is over and done with. What the real journal-ists do is interview everyone but they never help . . .They show how helicopters go and take things to the af-fected areas, but not an account of how they distributethe things and to whom they distribute them. Who is incharge of that? No one. Everyone says, “No, nobody hashelped me.” “No, me neither.” I don’t know where thehelp goes really . . .

Angelica interjected, “Sometimes they show that thingsarrive . . . ”

“But other times,” Raul interrupted, “the people say, ‘Ihaven’t received anything.’”

Angelica added, “Looking from the outside, you say toyourself, geez, where do the things go? And you start todoubt whether or not they really deliver the things.”

“So then,” I asked, “You liked that the journalist on LosPells had spoken up for the people? That he said what we allwish journalists would say but don’t?”

“Exactly,” Raul responded. Angelica and Raul thenlaunched into a discussion of urban infrastructure prob-lems in their own neighborhood, such as how well or notgovernment contractors had repaired the main thorough-fare bordering their house.

As the actors from Los Pells had argued, Chilean audi-ence members had no trouble distinguishing fact from fic-tion. Their attention was not directed at evaluating the ac-curacy of the representation of TVN’s journalistic project.Rather, they found the teleserie compelling because it al-lowed for discussion of issues of public concern and thecommunication of these issues to the public. When I askedthem directly whether they wished that the television jour-nalists would act more like their fictional counterparts, theyhad responded that they would. However, their own fram-ing focused on state actors rather than journalists. Raul be-gan our conversation by arguing that Los Pells was “politi-cal.” He and Angelica then transitioned from discussion ofthe teleserie to a questioning of the government’s responseto emergencies, such as the flooding of low-income hous-ing. As pobladores, or residents of a neighborhood formedby a land takeover, they were attentive to the uneasy rela-tionship between low-income citizens and the state. Criti-cal of the center-left government’s neoliberal policies, theysaw the teleserie narrative as an invitation to question thestate’s political efficacy and official accounts of that efficacy.Their analysis of Chilean journalists focused on whetherthey were credible advocates of public interest.

A voice credible enough for fiction

Just as the last few minutes of Los Pells shuttled audiencemembers from the fictional parody to the nightly news, thestation’s late-night serial, ¿Donde esta Elisa? drew teleseriefans to the news anchors’ closing words. Though not set ina newsroom like Los Pells, Elisa also assigned a central roleto the figure of the journalist. During their preparation ofthe teleserie, TVN producers decided to play with the um-brella effect’s creation of a genre of composites by using thevoice of one of the station’s journalists to serve as a narra-tive bridge between the nightly news and the late-night tele-serie. The key for this to work, however, was finding a credi-ble journalist to provide this narrative voice.

When I asked Scarleth and Pamela what made a jour-nalist credible, Scarleth responded,

Press work is complicated. You can spend 364 days ayear doing wonders, and you are great. And one singleday, you screw up, you make a mistake, and the nextday, you don’t exist. And look, you can make a mistakewith a poblador—and this I find really unjust—you canmake a mistake with a poblador, change his name orstigmatize him or accuse him of a crime he didn’t com-mit, and this can cost you nothing. But if you make thatmistake with a politician, or a public figure, or a politi-cal authority, you lose your job.

“Exactly,” Pamela added.“So,” Scarleth continued, “I learned in more than ten

years as a journalist to walk on eggshells every day . . . Theonly thing that saves my day is a connection to what’s goingon in the street.” She described her experience working as apolitical journalist as “the dark days,” explaining, “I wantedto be a journalist . . . ”

Pamela added, “And you ended up an actress!” We alllaughed.

Scarleth responded in a more serious tone, “I wanted tobe a journalist, and I ended up a kind of machine.”

In 2010, Scarleth received a call from the producers ofElisa asking her to participate in the teleserie. She was toldthat the teleserie “big shots” had met and said, “Well, thisis a police series and it needs a news thread to serve as itsoverarching narrative. So, we need a voice . . . it should bea voice people trust, a voice that is well-known and credi-ble.” Scarleth was from a small town in the north and hadworked for several years at TVN. She frequently visited pub-lic schools to talk about studying journalism, and I had of-ten heard her say that she spent much of her childhood inlow-income neighborhoods. Her voice was familiar to reg-ular TVN viewers. While flattered that her voice was con-sidered “trustworthy,” Scarleth was hesitant to participatein the series, thinking that it would put into question thecredibility she had worked to achieve. When she posed thisquestion to her superiors, she reported that she was told,

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“We have to support the cause, we’re from the same station,we’re pushing the cart in the same direction.” The next dayshe was filming scenes for the teleserie.

In the series, Scarleth never appears on screen. “I’m justa voice, “she explained, “I’m a voice that informs and that’sit.” Scarleth also helped to provide journalistic authority tothe script of the teleserie. “It was funny,” she explained,

because they were filming a scene and, all of a sud-den, they stopped and said to me, “This scene isn’t fin-ished. Look, this is our idea. It’s a body that appearsthrown in this place in a canal. It has to be written up.”And I sat down to write, since I’m used to writing thesekinds of news stories. So then, I read what I had written.“Excellent!” they told me. “That’s the idea. Now read itplease!” So, I invented some of the script for the scenes.I wrote, for example, “The secretary Juanita Ovalle ap-peared in the apartment . . . ” and they said, “Oooh! It’sjust like the news!” So then, they were playing at doingthe news, and I was playing at being an actress.16

In Elisa, Scarleth’s voice gives authority to the narra-tive and contributes to making the transition between thenews and the late-night teleserie seamless. This aestheticeffect suggests that the fictional discussion goes beyondpure entertainment. In a media interview, the teleserie’swriter, Pablo Illanes, echoed this sentiment, stating that hedrew on “Chile’s political context” (meaning the dictator-ship) to explore the psyche of individuals who were dealingwith the loss of “family members who from one day to thenext disappear from home.”17

As Scarleth participated in the teleserie, she becameincreasingly concerned with the way her voice served tostring together this programming flow. “In many scenes ofElisa they reviled the journalists,” Scarleth explained. “Theyturned off the television and said, ‘those journalists talkpure nonsense. How long do we have to put up with thesejerks waiting for us like vultures?’” These scenes causedScarleth to talk to her superiors in the newsroom againabout her participation. “I said to them, ‘we are doing twoteleseries—one that ridicules the journalists, saying that weare all competitive, backstabbing each other to be famous;and then, at night, we are saying that journalists talk non-sense and are vultures. And you say that we are pushing thecart in the same direction?’” Scarleth continued,

Fortunately, I never lent my voice for that sort ofthing. They didn’t use me for that. They used me forkey scenes, for example, when Commissioner Rivasis watching television or reading something, but pay-ing attention to the screen and the screen is saying:“Raimundo Domınguez is a family man, he loved hisdaughters very much. He is known for being a highlyprofessional, hard-working man.” So then, that leadsthe commissioner to think, “And what if Domınguezdidn’t murder his daughter?” And in that moment he

stops and starts to look for certain clues that guide hisinvestigation. You see? It was like the voice . . .

Pamela interrupted, “It was the voice of truth.”“Right,” Scarleth agreed. “That’s why they needed a

well-known, credible voice. But those parts when they said,‘These people talk pure nonsense,’ and bah (she makesa gesture of turning off the television)—those were otherpeople.” Scarleth continued, “I took care to read the entireepisode before filming. I read the scenes that appeared be-fore and after my part, and I realized that my participationwas as they had sold it to me. That is to say, they needed acredible voice because it was . . . ”

Pamela interjected, “It was serious.”The producers of Elisa had perceived in Scarleth’s voice

versimilitude and wished to use it to differentiate what Scar-leth and Pamela called “the voice of truth” from the rest ofthe journalists “who were talking nonsense.” One readingof the receptive impact of this decision would be in supportof the news programming of TVN. Scarleth, a voice repre-senting TVN, also represents truth, and therefore, TVN newsequals truth. An alternative reading would be to considerScarleth’s voice within the broader programming flow. Hervoice forms part of the umbrella that guides viewers fromthe nightly news to the teleserie and, in the process, invitesthe audience to interpret news production and its fictionalcritique as one shared narrative. Within this reading, TVNproduces a genre of composites, suggesting that it is the sta-tion’s fictional programming viewed in conjunction with thenews that produces truth.

The presidential teleserie

As audiences eagerly followed Elisa through its final dra-matic turns, the press area of TVN prepared for anotherstar-studded event: the presidential election. In Septem-ber of 2009, TVN hosted its first-ever presidential debate,electing to broadcast it after Elisa (at 11:00 p.m.) to boostaudience numbers (see Figure 1). Although then-presidentMichelle Bachelet enjoyed high approval ratings, Chileanlaw does not allow presidents to serve consecutive terms.Voters had to instead decide among four other candidates:Eduardo Frei (Concertacion), Sebastian Pinera (of the right-wing alliance), Marco Enrıquez Ominami (independent),and Jorge Arrate (representing the extraparliamentary Left).Even though the Concertacion had governed Chile sincethe return to democracy in 1990, political pundits ques-tioned whether Bachelet’s popularity would transfer to Frei,who had already served as the country’s president dur-ing 1994–2000. While Frei urged voters to remain loyal tothe Concertacion’s political programming, the other candi-dates suggested that it was finally the moment to make achange.

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Figure 1. A political cartoon that appeared in the Chilean newspaper La Nacion on September 24, 2009. One of TVN’s news anchors at that time, AlejandroGuillier, appears, saying, “Well, Where Is Elisa? is over, but we have more fights, more accusations, more doublespeak . . . coming up, the PresidentialDebate!” Artist: Jose Gai.

Two months later (and nine days after Elisa’s record-breaking finale), the presidential campaign ads had theirtelevisual debut, becoming a new addition to the eveningprogramming flow. The electoral process allowed eachof the four candidates two daily blocks of five minutesduring the month leading up to the election to promotetheir candidacies. Following the logic of the umbrella effect,the primetime block of the campaign ads began at 8:40 p.m.,protected by the transition from the prime-time teleserie tothe nightly news. Supporting my argument that these tran-sitory moments can be places of politics making, the left-wing candidate Jorge Arrate used his designated block toproduce a rupture in the traditional political campaign aes-thetic. Arrate had not received much media attention untilthe presidential debate. Although he was not a favorite inthe election, his thoughtful, eloquent commentary had, formany, marked him as the winner of the debate. Recogniz-ing that he suddenly had the attention of the public, Arrateturned to theater director Alejandro Goic for help in devel-oping a creative campaign two weeks before the deadline tosubmit his television ads.

“Alejandro had the idea of creating campaign ads thatwould appeal to the mentality of the Chilean consumer of

teleseries,” the presidential candidate explained to me at acafe in the middle-class neighborhood of Nunoa, where helived.

Active in the Socialist party as a youth, Alejandro hadconsidered himself part of the political coalition of the Con-certacion during its early years. Now in his forties, he hadbecome increasingly critical of the center-left coalition’sneoliberal policies and was eager to contribute to a newkind of political project. Seeking to broaden the traditional5 percent that voted for the extraparliamentary Left, Ale-jandro decided on two target publics: the “UDI popular,”or low-income sectors that voted for the Far Right, and theyoung progressive professionals who were supporting in-dependent candidate Marco Enrıquez-Ominami. Key, forAlejandro, was to move away from the Left’s traditional po-litical aesthetic. “I have this ritual, and this is true,” he toldme during a break from rehearsal for a new play.

Every time I’m close to the Plaza de la Constitucionwhere Chicho [Salvador Allende] is, I go over and kissthe concrete pedestal of his statue.18 I told them, “Ihave this ritual, but in Jorge’s television campaign noicon and no tomb of the fucking Left is going to ap-pear.” If Chicho appeared with a hammer or a flag, it

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was all over. That wouldn’t get us where we needed togo. Besides, most young people are not part of that vi-sual rhetoric.

“So we started,” Alejandro continued, “and I thought:‘What do I have to work with?’” His response was that hehad an “exceptional candidate” who spoke succinctly, lit-tle time, and even less money. His challenge was to captureaudience attention and represent the various perspectivesof the Chilean voting public using those limited resources.Alejandro decided to mold the ads around monologues inwhich Arrate spoke directly to the public from his house.Taking advantage of the candidate’s superior elocutionaryabilities, Alejandro was adamant that these monologues becontinuous shots. The lack of editing would index credi-bility. He would complement these monologues with videotestimonies from citizens. As he talked this out with Arrate,an idea occurred to him.

“I’ve spent a lot of time in popular [low-income] sec-tors, like you,” he explained, leaning forward at the ta-ble. “My old man lived in La Cisterna. And what I knowabout, above all, is the right-wing popular class, the psy-chology, and the desire to be better than the neighbors. It’sa way of getting out. But in the end, they are workers livingamong workers. So I told Jorge that our discourse had to beparabolic. Parables, just like our Lord Jesus Christ, exactlylike that.” The two men sat down and sketched out some ofthe themes that needed to appear in the series. Their goalwas to highlight values related to issues of social dignityand use humorous material that would appeal to the low-income housewife who voted for right-wing politicians. “Iwanted to draw on her ideas of common sense, speak to theissues that explained her political world vision and some-how transmit to her, ‘No, senora, that’s not it. Those assholeslook down on you socially. They humiliate you. They exploityou. You create the wealth. Capital does not create it. Hu-man labor creates it. That was the challenge.” He pausedand took a sip of his drink. “So that’s when it occurred to meto do a teleserie. What did I need? I needed the charactersI’m talking about to exist, so I invented this teleserie wherethey existed, but not as caricatures. There had to be somekind of defense of their positions within popular discourse.”

Alejandro’s presidential teleserie was entitled La largaangosta faja (The Long, Narrow Strip), referring to Chile’sparticular territorial shape. Each “episode” was limited to afew minutes and featured a small group of actors who sup-ported Arrate, allowing them to keep production costs low.The scenes took place in a restaurant owned by a woman inher fifties who supported Pinera. Her customers included acivil servant who supported Frei and a young professionalwho supported Enrıquez-Ominami. The teleserie also fea-tured a waitress who expressed no interest in the elections,and a leftist cook who supported Arrate. As Alejandro ex-plained, “That is to say, it had all of Chilean society in it.

From their point of view, we could see all the issues, andwe could elucidate what was behind each of those dis-courses.” Through their humorous conversations over thelunch counter, these characters tackled serious issues suchas reproductive rights, poverty, and fair working conditions.The character of the cook modeled deliberative democraticdiscussion. He was thoughtful, observant, and—after listen-ing to the points presented by the other characters—gentlysuggested the errors in their thinking. Alejandro’s creativeefforts received overwhelmingly positive feedback from thepublic. The Concertacion, which hoped to win over Arrate’svoters in the second round of the election once the left-wingcandidate had been eliminated, also praised the campaign.

When I asked Alejandro what the cost was in using fic-tion for political communication, he pointed out the errorin my thinking. “What I did was use fiction to put the re-ality of Chilean society on the table,” he explained to me.“They, on the other hand, showed these supposed reali-ties of the candidates going into poblaciones (low-incomeneighborhoods), talking to children and kissing babies. Itwas all a lie! It was fiction despite the fact that they werein the poblacion. The kids in the poblacion were a fic-tion.” Whereas Alejandro’s characters were explicit repre-sentations of particular political perspectives, the othercandidates showed low-income residents as if they werenot hand-selected by the campaign staff and responding tothe director’s requests. It was this insincere appeal to “thereal” that Alejandro felt discredited the other candidates.Arrate’s campaign, in contrast, positioned the working classas actors rather than background props and modeled theconversations of the teleserie’s characters on those Alejan-dro imagined audience members might have with theirneighbors.

Alejandro knew that Arrate had little chance of pass-ing to the second round of the election. Instead, his goalwas to use the left-wing candidate’s campaign to poke fun atthe character of discussion of the political elite and to raisethe level of debate around key issues of public concern.Alejandro had hoped that members of the Concertacionwould watch the presidential teleserie and engage inself-critique, just as Scarleth had done when she viewedLos Pells. When Arrate announced his support for Frei inthe second round, Alejandro proposed to the Concertacionthat the party continue the teleserie as a sign of its commit-ment to working with the left-wing candidate’s voting base.“It seemed symbolic to me, to incorporate the teleserie inFrei’s second-round campaign,” Alejandro explained. “Theythought it was creative, great, magnificent, but no.” Al-though the Concertacion had approved of the rupture inthe traditional campaign aesthetic, it was not willing toassume the changes in political structure that the cam-paign had proposed. When the election results were an-nounced, the Concertacion watched, along with the rest ofthe country, as candidate Sebastian Pinera became the first

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democratically elected right-wing president to govern Chilein 50 years.

Politics after parody

In this article, I have paired discussion of the umbrella ef-fect with that of the presidential election to argue that tran-sitional spaces—even those seemingly trivial—can be sitesfor the emergence of new political actors and practices. Atendency to focus on what comes before or after a transi-tion can allow us to skip too quickly over what is createdin the in-between. With Turner’s (1974) teachings in mind,my intent here is to think through liminal space as creativespace. Like the television network executives that Williamsdescribes, TVN producers (and the Concertacion campaignteam) attempted to make the transitions between programsfluid enough that Chileans would “move along” through theintended sequence without abandoning the flow. In so do-ing, however, they blurred the distinction between the “fic-tional” and the “political” and created peaks at the momentof transition, transforming these ephemeral stopovers intocritical sites for the gathering of a public.

To express surprise that the fictional critique of TVN’sprogramming and Arrate’s campaign ads did not translateinto easily decipherable election results is perhaps to missthe point. As Ranciere writes, “There is no straight path fromthe viewing of a spectacle to an understanding of the stateof the world, and none from intellectual awareness to po-litical action” (2010:143). Instead, he argues, “What comesto pass is a rupture in the specific configuration that al-lows us to stay in ‘our’ assigned places in a given state ofthings” (2010:143). While analyses that focus primarily onprogramming content might reveal more pointed critiqueof particular political figures or institutions, I have arguedhere that a focus on liminal spaces such as transitions al-lows for reflection on the deeper political-economic struc-ture and our place within it. Liminality, as Turner remindsus, is a state best expressed by the subjunctive rather thanthe indicative mood. It is, he argues, a “time of enchantmentwhen anything might, even should happen” (1979:465). Itspower lies in opening spaces of possibility and experimentrather than indicating linear cause and effect. During lim-inal time, structures can be—momentarily—undone, or atleast pulled apart for examination. The boundary blurringthat occurs in the in-between allows us to come into con-tact with worlds that we might not otherwise know, pro-ducing a kind of dislocation that can make both the struc-tures and our complicity with those structures, more visible.The challenge becomes using these moments of ruptureto reexamine our positionalities and to experiment withnew forms rather than re-create the structures previously inplace.

What, then, is the “effect” of the umbrella effect? Fromthe perspective of TVN, the effect is good ratings and the

subsequent construction and maintenance of a high levelof influence and prestige; that is to say, the umbrella effectis a successful producer of flow. Like others who have re-sponded to Williams, however, I find “flow” too broad a con-cept to be helpful in conveying the experiential dimensionof this programming sequence.19 Instead, I have argued thatthe significance of the umbrella effect lies in its creation of agenre of composites. By bringing fiction and political newsmaking into one narrative frame, it enables what Rancierehas called the “staging of a dissensus” (2009:11) or the dis-ruption of consensus.20 Conceiving of democracy as sym-bolic and material space, Ranciere describes consensus asthe distribution within this space of what is perceptible, orthe boundaries of the properly political. To disrupt thesesymbolic and discursive hierarchies, he advocates a blur-ring of boundaries to “question the self-evidence of the visi-ble; to rupture given relations between things and meaningsand, inversely, to invent novel relationships between thingsand meanings that were previously unrelated” (2010:141).Seen in this light, the role of the fictional critique leadingup to the election was not to consolidate support for a par-ticular candidate but, rather, to signal a crisis in democraticconsensus and to invite a period of critical reflexivity. Theumbrella effect suggests that a politics of parody allows forthe suspension of the normal order of things to make visiblea shared sense of disorientation. Finding freedom in thesespaces to engage with the unexpected may be a first step inimagining new forms of politics making.

Notes

Acknowledgments. My heartfelt thanks to the residents of LaVictoria for their generous support as well as to everyone at TVNwho made this research possible. I am grateful to Kathleen Millar,Harris Solomon, Matthew Gutmann, Catherine Lutz, Kay Warren,Faye Ginsburg, Mohan Ambikaipaker, and Ana Servigna for theirinsightful comments at various stages of the research and writ-ing process. I would also like to thank the anonymous AE review-ers and Angelique Haugerud for their encouragement and guid-ance. Linda Forman provided careful copyediting. Funding for thisresearch was provided by Fulbright-Hays, the National ScienceFoundation, and the Craig M. Cogut Fellowship in Latin Americanand Caribbean Studies.

1. Teleseries, or telenovelas, are soap opera–like serials that arebroadcast daily. They differ significantly from U.S. soap operas inthat they occupy prime-time slots, showcase the country’s leadingactors, and generally continue for a period of months, rather thanyears (Lopez 1995).

2. Many of the individuals who appear in this text are activists,journalists, or public figures. At their request, I use their names togive credit to their views and as a practice of accountability. Forthose who did not make this request, I use pseudonyms.

3. Although Amanda Lotz (2007) argues that the individualviewer determines television flow in the “post-network” era of U.S.television, for the vast majority of the Chileans I interviewed, theprogram lineup of the country’s primary free-access stations con-tinues to be a salient aspect of the viewing experience.

4. Personal communication with TVN editors, 2014.

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5. See Atencio 2011 and Porto 1998, 2005 for additional examplesof political discussion embedded within telenovelas in Brazil.

6. For recent ethnographic work on the role of fiction andparody in mediating political discussion, see Abu-Lughod 2004,Bernal 2013, Boyer 2013, Boyer and Yurchak 2010, Fernandes 2006,Haugerud et al. 2012, Howe 2008, Mankekar 2002, Mole 2013, andSalamandra 2011.

7. For another example of a television program critiquing thestructure that enables its circulation, see the Brazilian miniseriesCidade dos homens (City of Men; 2002–05), which points out theproblematic representation of Afro-Brazilians on the network thataired it (Globo). Thanks to Mauro Porto for alerting me to this ex-ample.

8. Nunez was reelected mayor of Pedro Aguirre Cerda in 2012.9. See the debate in the journal Social Anthropology around Loıc

Wacquant’s (2012) discussion of “actually emerging neoliberalism”and responses such as those of Stephen Collier (2012) and DanielGoldstein (2012).

10. For more evidence of the everyday use of the term neoliberalin Chile’s low-income neighborhoods, see Han 2012.

11. Katia and most of her family identified with the Communistparty. During the time of this research, the Communists did notform part of the center-left political coalition of the Concertacionbut, rather, the left-wing “Juntos Podemos” (Together We Can)coalition. In addition to the Communists, this coalition includedthe Humanist Party and the Christian Left. In the 2009–10 presi-dential election 6.21 percent of the population voted for the JuntosPodemos candidate (Centro de Estudios Publicos 2009).

12. Navarrete was the founding general manager of TVN, mem-ber of the board of directors of TVN (2000–01), and president of theNational Council on Television, CNTV (2006–10).

13. According to TVN’s website, the station’s mission is to “reflectChile in all of its diversity, contribute to strengthening its nationalidentity, and to connect Chileans in all places and at all times” [re-flejar a Chile en toda su diversidad, contribuir a fortalecer su iden-tidad nacional, y conectar a los chilenos en todo momento y lugar](TVN 2014).

14. In addition to being the first community television station inChile, Senal 3 La Victoria is among the best known, in part becauseTVN and other channels have reported on it.

15. As Angelique Haugerud notes, humor is effective when ittaps into the “deep connection between a joke and its historical-political setting” (2013:28). During 2008–09, total advertising ex-penditure in Chile had gone down significantly because of the eco-nomic crisis, making competition between television stations evenfiercer (personal communication with TVN editors, May 2009).Chileans were laughing here at the way TVN producers were mock-ing the station’s position as what Michel Foucault (1980) calls a“regime of truth,” emphasizing its increasing frivolity.

16. In Representing Reality, Bill Nichols argues that “attaching aparticular text to a traditional mode of representation and to thediscursive authority of that tradition may well strengthen its claims,lending to these claims the weight of previously established legiti-macy” (1991:34). Barry Dornfeld (1998:135) describes a similar useof voice to index discursive authority in his description of publictelevision recruitment of NPR commentators for “voice of God”narration.

17. Some left-leaning viewers interpreted the teleserie as ameans to illustrate for the political Right the suffering of thosewhose family members had disappeared during the dictatorship.See Alvarado 2009 and Saud 2009.

18. Chicho is an affectionate nickname for Salvador Allende,used by supporters of the former Socialist president.

19. For other critical reformulations of Williams’s concept, seeEllis 1982, Feuer 1983, Fiske 1987, and Newcomb and Hirsch 1994.

20. Ranciere describes this “staging of dissensus” as the placingof “two worlds—two heterogeneous logics—on the same stage, inthe same world” (2009:11).

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