La redacción como institución total

Abstract

This paper stablishes, in terms of strictly metaphoric purposes, a reading of Erving Goffman's Asylums applied to the media. If we look at the newsroom as a social institution which performs the permanent reeducation of some individuals in some professional (then social) rules, and if we consider that this institutions, having the form of big commercial companies, are subdued to the sharp swayings of global capitalist economy and that they transmit this instability to their workers (submitting this ensemble of rules to continuous and not always coherent transformations, and putting the journalist into a process of labour deregulation never known before), we will be able to understand a little better the difficult position of journalists in present democratic societies.