MEDIA AS POLITICAL ACTOR OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE: A TEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF VEJA MAGAZINE ON CORRUPTION CASES

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes the relations between media and politics in texts from Veja magazine, a representative of the Brazilian mainstream media, referring to cases of political corruption in the Lula and Dilma’s governments. The objective of this article is to identify linguistic-discursive resources mobilized in the production of Veja texts reinforcing the belief that its use of language is informative and impartial or it represents the voice of the Brazilian population. In discussing the relationship between the media and the political fields from an antagonistic political perspective, we have seen that the informative nature of Veja only takes place insofar as its journalists stance it and construct it as such. Moreover, the fact the discursive representations that Veja makes in its texts converge to the identity of the political actors reveals traces of antagonism that directly affect the construction of new identities. The article also leads to the idea that the media has a stake in the political struggle, whether as an adversary or not, but always as a political actor. For this analysis, we have adopted as theoretical-methodological frameworks Jim Martin and Peter White’s System of Appraisal, and Chantal Mouffe’s social theory of the political and agonistic democracy.

Media; Political; Corruption; Appraisal; Agonism; Antagonism