La construcción de personajes: El Subcomandante Marcos y la prensa en México 1994 a 1995

Abstract

This thesis reviews and analyzes the creation of media personalities in the Mexican press, in this case, Subcomandante Marcos’ discourse derived from the information created by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (E.Z.L.N.) and published in El Financiero, the Mexican Newspaper that specializes in finance, from January 1994 to January 1995, and the sporadic turn outs that have been in the press in the last 19 years, the update is marked by the interviews that were made to the journalists who covered the event. The main objective is to identify the journalistic elements that contributed to the creation of personalities in the press based on the analysis of El Financiero, making a distinction between the local and global meaning of the texts from Subcomandante Marcos’ informative statements. We examine the journalistic genres that were used. We explain how the journalistic personality was appropriated, how Subcomandante Marcos was written about in a medium that specializes in finance, and for which the topics that the journalists used were revised, described and correlated for the characterization of this personality in a conceivable world. We find that the emotional charge with which the journalists receive the events is reflected in the texts they write, and the emotions that they perceive in reality manage to get into the text, influencing the reader in a way that favors the media personality. Four theoretical lines were explored: 1) Analysis of the social and political context. 2) Analysis of the press in Mexico, the production routines, and the journalistic genres. 3) Analysis of the discourse for the concrete review of the journalistic texts. 4) Analysis of the personalities based on literary theory with a semiotic perspective for the impassioned shaping of the personality in the press with the postulates of Algirdas J. Greimas and Jacques Fontanille. A total of 196 editions of the newspaper El Financiero were reviewed, and in 2012, 20 journalists who worked at the paper during that period of 1994 were interviewed, the presence of the personality was followed in the press to review how it appears and what is the current informative treatment given by the press. The thesis is divided into two parts. The first, “Creating personalities in the press”, consists of six chapters. The second, “The creation of personalities in the press” is made up of two chapters. In Mexico, Subcomandante Marcos is a myth or a hero from the past to the new generations. They do not relate his existence to the real world and consider him a personality which only exists in the collective imagination of society. Subcomandante Marcos is now a myth.

Date of Award	30 Oct 2013
Original language	Spanish
Supervisor	Teresa Velazquez Garcia Talavera (Director)