Journalism and morality an approach to the press discourse on drug trafficking in Colombia

Abstract

Colombia is a violent country: this stereotype, generalised both among Colombians and in other countries of the world, finds part of its raison d'être in the predominance of violent themes linked to drug trafficking when news about Colombia is covered in the foreign press.

In order to study this stereotype, we will take into account, first, some general considerations about the media's representation of violence, and second, the results of an analysis of the news about Colombia in the Spanish newspaper El País. This analysis was part of the research - intended as a doctoral thesis - that I recently carried out on the coverage of Colombia in the foreign press. The Spanish newspaper El País was chosen for the study, given its importance in the European context, as it is the most important Spanish-language newspaper on the continent. The sample observed corresponds to the news about Colombia that appeared in El País during 1988 and 1989, a period in which the ¿narcoterrorism¿ took place in Colombia, a confrontation between the so-called Medellín cartel and the Colombian government, which left many victims among the civilian population.