When Satirical Magazines Confront Real Crises

It’s widely understood that one of the crucial jobs of modern news media is holding governments responsible for their actions. But what happens when news outlets ignore official misdeeds, or sideline them to focus on other things? As journalism scholar Paul Alonso writes, looking at two cases from South America, sometimes satirical media takes up the slack.

The first of the publications Alonso discusses, The Clinic, took shape in the long shadow of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. During and after Pinochet’s time in office, Chile’s largest newspaper, El Mercurio, was aligned with his regime. In 1998, he was arrested in London for crimes including the killing of 3,000 people and the torture of many more. But, even then, El Mercurio and other Chilean media downplayed his offenses and portrayed his dictatorship as a driver of a successful national economy.

The Clinic, first published as a pamphlet in 1998, was named in honor of the London Clinic, where Pinochet was held after his arrest, reflecting an effort to show the formerly fearsome dictator as an old man in decline. The magazine featured tabloid-style covers and parody stories mocking the content of El Mercurio, but it also published writing by well-known Chilean artists, poets, and novelists. Journalists from mainstream publications leaked real stories that wouldn’t fly elsewhere and sometimes wrote under pseudonyms. In 2004, a former journalist for El Mercurio published a letter in The Clinic admitting her failure to report on human rights violations and remembering colleagues who had been disappeared for their work.

Beyond confronting the legacy of the Pinochet years, The Clinic critiqued subsequent administrations of various political stripes and also ran interviews with everyday people, investigations into issues like the adulteration of street drugs, as well as cartoons and joke columns. By 2005, the publication—which got little advertising revenue and survived mainly on subscriptions, events, and merchandise sales—was the country’s highest-circulation magazine.

The second case Alonso looks at is Barcelona, founded in Argentina after that country’s massive financial crisis and popular uprising in 2001. Like other institutions, the press came under fire for contributing to the economic disaster rather than acting as a watchdog on the government.

Barcelona, created by a small group of rock-and-roll writers from Buenos Aires, approached news stories from Argentina and around the world with a smirk. While explicitly pushing for particular causes, such as the legalization of abortion, the magazine walked a line between real critiques and joke headlines and stories. This extended into interviews with other media, where Barcelona editors answered questions in character.

“The use of radical humor and fake journalistic stories testified to society’s general unrest, disappointment, and skepticism,” Alonso writes.

Co-editor Mariano Lucano told Alonso that putting the magazine out was more of a hobby than a lucrative job, but added that “I find it necessary for my psyche. Instead of going mad about issues that I found repulsive, I try to sublimate them through humor.”

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