This article analyzes the historicity of the concept of dismal journalism, formulated by the writer Diamela Eltit, to designate a set of communicative practices that make up the ideological discourse of the Chilean liberal press. The reflections of Diamela Eltit on the actions of the media system in Chile, are inserted in a tradition of theoretical studies on communication, initiated in the late 60s, which identified the discursive strategies to build the social reality defined by the threat to

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... the social order instituted, stripping of meaning to social demands. The conceptual artefact, dismal journalism, updates the semantic field of liberal journalistic discourse in globalized modernity. It allows to cover the emergence of new journalistic genres of representation of reality in a "spectacular" key, based on the allegorical function of myth, symbolic violence and the effects of reality. The dismal journalism is a discursive operation that reproduces in the news the structural inequality of the system, and even more, fragments this inequality in binary oppositions that omit the ominous of the social context in which the news events emerge. In this way, it causes a syntactic disconnectionbetween the subject of the news, the social story that surrounds it and the predicate that nominates it.