“Our” daily Amazon in Brazilian television journalism

• Autor(a) principal: Torres Costa, Vânia Maria
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Intexto (Porto Alegre)
• Texto Completo: https://seer.ufrgs.br/index.php/intexto/article/view/91822
• topic: Amazon. Journalism. Television. Discourse. Region.; Amazônia; Jornalismo; Televisão; Discurso; Região

This paper examines mainstream Brazilian journalistic constructs of the Amazon rainforest region in Brazil, considered as a geographic and especially as a political space situated in the Brazilian territory. Using Michel Foucault’s notion of “discursive events”, we seek ways to analyze television image and sound, as such an analysis would show us how that “region” is enunciated and how it’s assigned different meanings. We are interested in observing in which  kinds of discourse and in which contexts it is cut and its cuts are selected to be broadcast on Brazilian national television from the Southeast of Brazil, center of television journalism production in the country.. The corpus of analysis consists of special series of news reports from Rede Globo TV journalism, from 2006 to 2016. Through the concept of polynarrative, we observe how moving image, text and sound are combined in these reports to represent the Amazon rainforest region as a kind of national property, and how it is framed into discussion as a matter of national sovereignty. Throughout the reports, the region is characterized as an object of the coloniality of national discourse, which favors a certain look towards the country’s periphery, as a land both exotic and failed, a land that must be seized, materially and symbolically, by the political, economic and cultural center of the nation, depicted as fit to “support” it in its fragilities.