Produção da notícia e movimentos sociais: processos de semiose no jornalismo

Abstract

This dissertation is designed to reflect on how the news about social movements is made. The paper analyses productive routines whose research environment are two newspapers’ newsrooms in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul: Correio do Povo and Zero Hora. Inspired by ethnography, this method consists of observing journalists in their daily practice – for seven days in each newsroom – and, based on theories applied to this matter, making inferences which lead to the understanding of the problems: how much of the complexity of social movements journalism is able to represent; and, what factors concerning political, economic and social relations affect this process. The discussion is enlightened by the General Theory of Signs, by Charles Sanders Pierce, especially in relation to the semiosis concept. Therefore, the piece of news is understood as a sign, made up of several mechanisms which feed complex semiosis processes and it is the interface between events and the public/reader. In addition to this, there is the concept of event by Louis Quéré, which is embedded with considerable hermeneutic approach, revealing problematic areas represented as a semiotic object of the sign/piece of news. A dialectical exercise of defining basic concepts followed by field work is proposed. Thus, by linking theory and practice, a reasonable synthesis is reached. The outcome has been shown revealing. Among a society marked by the ‘new liberal consensus’, a kind of journalism keeping reductionist conventions of the complexity of organizations which do not fit this perspective and the journalism treated as business in the capitalism, there are, definitely, alternative spaces for producing meaning. Through these alternative spaces, a kind of semiosis of the news is processed, building a sign which sees better and offers more in relation to the social movements needs under the condition of a problematic field as an object. The challenge is to make use of them.