O acontecimento discursivo da pandemia de Covid-19 no Brasil: a circulação-confronto de sentidos na grande mídia, mídias alternativas e mídias conservadoras.

Abstract

Under the theoretical guidance of French Discourse Analysis founded by Michel Pêcheux, this thesis aims to understand how the discursive event of the COVID-19 pandemic resonated in the circulation-confrontation of formulations within three Brazilian media segments: Mainstream Media (GM), Alternative Media (MA), and Conservative Media (MC). For this, we resort to the central concepts of discursive event (Pêcheux, 2008; Orlandi, 2021); discursive memory (Pêcheux, 1999); subject-position (Pêcheux, 1995); and discursive place (Grigoletto, 2007). In a qualitative study (Gibbs, 2009) with a research corpus of archives (Courtine, 2014), we selected nine websites as objects of analysis: Folha de S.Paulo, CNN Brasil, and Jovem Pan for MM; Agência Pública, Brasil de Fato, and Brasil 247 for AM; and Brasil sem Medo, Conexão Política, and Pleno News for CM. From an archive composed of 990 articles, published between 2020 and 2023, we built a corpus of 47 publications as representative of the discourses from these outlets. We divided the analysis into three movements, focusing on discourses about the origin of the coronavirus, the efficacy of public health protocols, and responsibilities in managing the health crisis in Brazil. The study found that, from the ideologies that challenge them, in the discourse on the pandemic, a dominant part of GM and MA adhered to scientific discourse, while another part of GM and MC tended to support denialist and anti-communist discourses. We identified that this circulation-confrontation of meanings occurred through five most recurrent subject positions, which were identified with: science, the left-wing political social conception, anti-communism, common sense, and denialism. Our gesture of conclusion is that, in the journalistic coverage of the three segments investigated, because their different ideological affiliations, different versions of the pandemic were configured. In them, points of contact were presented between GM and MA, in defense of science, and between GM and MC, in favor of the anti-communist bias, but not in the same way, since each segment produces meaning from a discursive place that affects these modes of signification, resorting to science for economic or political aspects (left and right) purposes. The thesis contributes to discursive studies by demonstrating how journalistic facts are ideologically and linguistically constituted, and are therefore facts of a discursive nature that will not be published in the same way in different media segments, even if they talk about the same subject. We argue that journalistic mediation of events represents a political practice of the media, which goes beyond simple informative mediation and permeates the power relations at play in society. Our study also helps in understanding that the meanings produced in journalism are not transparent, but opaque. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of studying emerging conservative media as a distinct segment from mainstream media, given their historical and ideological differences, with MC being a segment that has been little researched, growing in the digital environment and lacking analysis. The study highlights the opacity of the discursive event of the pandemic and the game of positions in the journalistic discourse that represented the political forces symbolized there in an attempt to regularize specific meanings coming from the political, economic and scientific fields in the memory networks that gave legibility to this event.