Social Supportability: Views of the Media on University Students

Abstract

This article explores how the media and government institutions present university students in Ibagué. Social supportability is a tool that helps people to get accustomed to unfavorable conditions or complex events, and to find distant discourses to cope with their particular situation. The study describes some discourses present in the media (for example, newspaper articles from Nuevo Día, and a local radio station, Echos del Combeima) in the period between June 2011 and April 2012. Government institutions constantly offer measurements that configure a particular view. The media and institutions create or reproduce views in correspondence with international or market policies, thus establishing a distance from the objective conditions of students and universities.