Communication paradoxes and institutional insufficiency to face the "disinfodemic". The Ecuadorian government in the face of COVID-19

Abstract

COVID-19 not only questioned the world's public health systems, it gave name to a global crisis that weakened the economies of developing countries and questioned the ability of many governments to face the new challenges. These processes gave way to contradictory discourses that responded more to misinformation than to scientific studies on the subject. Due to their wide dissemination in the media and social networks, they gave rise to what Unesco called "disinfodemic",

The objective of this work was to systematize the main communication paradoxes that were disseminated in the first year of the pandemic, regarding: access to objective and relevant information; medical progress and social uncertainty; containment measures; virtual communication and action in the territory.

Although these tensions are of a general nature due to the nature of the disease, in Ecuador they took on important particularities as it is one of the Latin American countries where the virus hit the hardest and where the institutional limits to deal with disinformation made the Ecuadorian experience a benchmark for its severity in the region.

The work is descriptive and is framed within the theoretical criteria proposed by Political Communication, which combines the academic work tools developed by social and political communication, from an interdisciplinary proposal. Priority was given to the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) experience to identify the central elements of official discourse in the face of news spread by the mass media.

From the analysis it is concluded that the social crisis generated by the pandemic evolved towards a collective fear that came to question the certainties offered by science and, with it, the bases of the discourse of modernity. To face the widespread unrest, the States deployed new information strategies, where government communication became a fundamental device to justify the health policy adopted and to get the population to accept the measures imposed to control the spread of the virus. All this covered in the promise of a "new normality" that includes a rethinking of globalization and its local specificities.