Spaces, communication and politics. Reflections on the journalistic chronicles of the 2020 pandemic on Argentine television

Abstract

Abstract

During a pandemic, there are other ways of living and inhabiting space in a time that accelerates in the work of doctors and governments, and slows down in the daily life of the population in general. Societies are mediated and what happens is known through the media. The global health catastrophe is an obligatory agenda and television is its ideal medium: image, movement, sound, the faces of the pandemic are on the screens moment after moment. The routines of journalistic work make it possible to work in extreme situations and the information on the facts is given as usual. Television coverage is strange, but it is legitimized because television always reaches places that audiences cannot access. Television news responds to spectacularization to explain a dense present of confinements, masks, recommendations, decrees, claims, dismissal operations, violent speeches and different ways of inhabiting places in a harsh articulation with politics. In this work, the television agenda on the pandemic and its effects are problematized from a territorial perspective of media discursivities. And because it is a real-time investigation, it reflects on how to deal with a problem of highseverity while it is happening.