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n times of infodemiathat pandemónium of unleashed signs that run faster than the verification of all information and that are often reproduced without contrasts or criticism, the presidential report becomes a semiotic event loaded with tensions, stereotypes, boredoms and doubts.
A presidential report, which should serve as a mirror of the relationship between a government and society, tests confidence in its institutions and the ability of the ruler to communicate with transparency to what is dedicated and how the money of the people is spent, without manipulative mediations. But it is also a struggle scenario where information is disputed. It is not a simple bureaucratic ritual or a mere constitutional formality, it is an act of political communication crossed by class struggles, disputes of symbolic hegemony and the struggle between the material truth of social processes and the media manipulation that seeks to disfigure them; Transparent management and tax spending.
In the semiotics of your information, the Condense presidential report, in a few hours, a gigantic operation of meaning. The government is placed in front of the people to narrate the state of the nation, figures, projects, advances, debts, but it does so under a saturated scene of filters, the mediation of the cameras, the television edition, the journalistic translation and, above all, the systematic intervention of the bourgeois ideological devices. The report does not reach the town as a direct message, but as a battlefield where each sign becomes a dispute weapon. In times of infodemiapresidential reports serve as instruments to dispute the interpretation of reality. The hegemonic media power does not rest, take advantage of the saturation of false news, rumors and manipulations to wear the credibility of the official discourse. The presidential report, then, is not addressed only to the people, also question the media machinery that will try to turn it into news merchandise, a trivial show, in disfigured cartoon of what was said.
The more verifiable data offers a president or president – employment, investment, social programs – more noise unleash bourgeois media devices that seek to hide the essentials under the logic of the scandal. The infodemia It consists precisely in this, in diluting the important with torrents of the accessory, in burying the significant under the avalanche of the irrelevant, in imposing a logic of constant distraction that erodes collective attention. Presidential reports must be understood as public truth exercises. It is not only about reading figures, but about disputing the meaning of events and calling historical memory.
The report is not a neutral inventory of facts, but a symbolic battlefield where it is decided what will be remembered as achievement and what as failure, what is inscribed in the nation’s narrative and what is invisible. In that act a collective semiosis is played or the people recognize in the report a critical orientation tool or the interpretation of the narratives of the private media power is allowed to snatch.
In the times of infodemiapresidential reports should serve – if they want to be truly useful to the people – as pedagogical and emancipatory devices. They must disarm the skein of lies, they must highlight the plot of manipulations, they must give the people not only figures, but critical key to read the present and build the future. Otherwise, they run the risk of being kidnapped by the logic of propaganda or empty rituality, and instead of illuminating, social consciousness will further obscure, and be circus of fallacies. The challenge is to transparent the presidential report as an act of popular communication; Not as a speech to convince the media, but as a tool to empower the people; Not as isolated event, but as a time within a broader process of social dialogue, where each citizen can contrast what has been said with their own daily experience. That is the only way for the report to become antidote against infodemiainstead of becoming another of his symptoms and deceptions.
It is not a “neutral” event or a simple constitutional procedure; It is a battlefield where the government word, popular expectations, private media operations and interested interpretations of power sectors are faced. In that clash, not only the image of the ruler is defined, but the way in which an entire nation perceives its present and its horizons of the future. A presidential report should be, in theory, an accountability, an exercise of transparency through which the people access the material state of their country. However, in contemporary practice, that report is immediately mediated by semiotic devices that resignify it. Television, the press, digital networks and opinion conglomerates make it a fragmented show, select phrases, edit images, emphasize contradictions, hide achievements, magnify errors.
What should be an instrument of public clarity becomes, often becomes raw material for organized confusion. Thus operates the infodemiataking a sign, multiplying it with noise, distorting it until it loses its guiding capacity. It is not enough to state data; It is necessary to build critical tools so that the people can read them, interpret them and verify them in their experience. A report that only offers isolated figures runs the risk of becoming immediate consumption material for the press; On the other hand, a report that is rooted in historical memory and that connects with the concrete processes of popular organization becomes a tool of consciousness. The difference between propaganda and pedagogy lies in the dialogic relationship that is established: propaganda is unidirectional communication, pedagogy is shared construction of meaning. Not speeches from above, but acts of shared semiotic construction; Not propaganda showcases, but collective real laboratories. Only in this way will the initial question make sense, what are the presidential reports for? They serve, if they are rescued from the infodemiato build a liberating communication horizon where the presidential word is, above all, word of the people. Everything else is the word of deception.
* PhD
