Media and reactionary ideology: a discursive analysis of media construction of events in Contemporary Brazil

• Grant number: 14/05628-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: May 01, 2014
• End date: April 30, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Carlos Félix Piovezani Filho
• Grantee: Bruno Ferreira de Lima
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project aims to identify and better understand the occurrence and repetition of some discursive procedures in the materialization of reactionary ideologies produced and / or disseminated by mainstream media during the appearance of key events and phenomena in contemporary Brazilian society. More precisely, the analysis will be based on the "French School of Discourse Analysis", which derives from Michel Pechêux's thoughts. Our focus will be the construction of effects of "innocuity", "jeopardy", "perversity" and "pente fatale" that define what we refer to as "reactionary rhetoric" (Hirschman, 1991; e Angenot, 2011). Said elements can be occasionally identified within the media discourse on the following subjects: government programs such as "Minha Casa, Minha Vida" and "Mais Médicos", created in March 2009 and July 2013 respectively, and the street demonstrations that took place in June 2013. Our corpus consists of texts that belong to different discursive genres, which were extracted from two sources: the Estado de São Paulo newspaper and the Veja magazine, as well as their respective web portals. The excerpts we chose to analyze range from the day the news hit the public to the last day of that same week. More specifically, the articles related to the "Minha Casa, Minha Vida" program were on circulation between March 25th and April 1st, 2009, while articles regarding the street protests range from June 2nd to June 9th, 2013 and, at last, the discussion about "Mais Médicos" is placed between July 8th and July 15th of the same year, (AU)