ABSTRACT
As a medium, television talks little about intercultural communication; that is, about what happens when two different cultures interact. The dominant trend when discussing phenomena involving interculturality is to represent cultural minorities as such (e.g., as immigrants): what they do, how they live, how they perceive their host country, etc., isolated from other cultural groups. Through the study upon which this chapter is based, we have detected that television as a medium shows little interest in covering the relationships forged among the different cultural minorities or between the minority and the majority. In addition to this underrepresentation of intercultural communication itself, a second factor which we shall examine in this study is the idea that when television does address intercultural interaction, it tends to do so within a framework of conflict, such that intercultural communication, encounter, and dialogue between that which is culturally different is framed as an impossible reality that is difficult to achieve. Other perspectives—possible interculturality or even unresolved interculturality—fit even less into the television discourse. This issue becomes a true social problem if we bear in mind television’s capacity to construct our knowledge of reality, and therefore reality itself (Berger & Luckmann 1967). Despite the influence and increasingly clear consolidation of digital communication, the traditional media are still powerful social institutions due to their strong symbolic capacity to construct meaning (Thompson 1998). For this reason, if the audiovisual medium does not believe that intercultural communication is possible, the discourse on intercultural conflict becomes hegemonic and further complicates the not always easy cross-cultural encounter. This ultimately promotes and constructs a more violent, exclusive, and uncommunicative world.
