ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 considers the question of what to do with mainstream media when its property is in the hands of few corporations with a pro-neoliberal agenda. The mobilisation of 2011 was faced with the mainstream media trying to optimise that relationship through a strategy aiming to be present in media spaces debating, arguing, and expressing a clear image of the ‘us’, an imagined commons with two aims. Firstly, to disarticulate the neoliberal discourse on education and market-driven education as ‘the’ only way for the Chilean education system to be; whilst also trying to tackle the idea that only institutional actors of Chilean democracy could intervene in political debates. Secondly, an articulation intended to establish that free, equal, and high-quality education was possible to achieve, and that anyone – certainly the students – would be valid actors to discuss education. At the end of this chapter, I express that students managed to signify, in simple terms, the problem of Chilean education, and they contributed to the creation of an imagined commons but were still limited by the property of mainstream media and their pro-market bias, and by the fact that conveying and deepening a social movement exceeds what is possible through mainstream media.
