The invisible access of television news

Abstract

This article deals with what I have called the invisible access to Chilean television news. The aim of this article is to find in news reports the presence of voices located in the extra linguistic context and show their influence on the journalist and interviewee. In spite of the fact the voices are not present in an explicit way on the news texts they exert power over them. It is a kind of polyphony that may be found across the study of linguistic negations used by journalists and their information sources. These negations are the answer to statements that were made previously but not in front of the cameras because they belong to the extra linguistic context or to the original event. In this way, we can see a dialectics between the invisible voices that have access to the news and exert power over discourse and the voices present in an explicit way that exert power in discourse. This relationship between access, discourse and power on Chilean TV news are analysed using the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach through the analysis of three main television news bulletins.