Regimes of Truth and Journalistic Discourse: Reflections on the role of Media Representations as Producing the Regulated Effects of Power

Abstract

The media, in a kind of discursive curation, control the production and dissemination of what is true in our societies, according to Michel Foucault. This curatorship, which consists in the acceptance and rejection of speeches, is creating regimes of truth that, in turn, produce regulated effects of power. Based on this understanding, in this review, we propose to discuss the formation of these truth regimes: taking the Foucauldian theory as a starting point and establishing connection with theoretical collaborations of other authors regarding the responsibility of the media - especially the informational ones - in construction and socialization of speeches that can reach the status of truth; considering journalism as a mediating system of expert systems, a meta-system that has the authority to legitimize those who legitimize what we mean by truth; establishing as a focus of the discussions the media representations in the journalistic language due to the neutrality claimed in this activity; thinking of these regimes of truth as a kind of symbolic colonization, because knowledge is a symbolic practice and has political properties, not just scientific and intellectual ones; and understanding these representations as fuelling exclusion regimes that fetishize the truth and recreate global colonization movements. Our main understanding to be defended here is that Foucault's decentralized conception highlighted other responsibilities on the social structure, transformed our conception on regulation and the exercise of power and offered us greater clarity on the partiality of communication and its performance in representing reality.