The social imaginary on news media: impacts of Jair Bolsonaro denial and declaratory journalism on public opinion

Abstract

Being a centralized space of enunciations, appearance, and noticability, the media is the locus of concentration of sociopolitical phenomena, once it allows civil society to have its opinion formed from the mediation it establishes and the possibilities of appearance of distinct discourses and subjects. Considering that the formation of public opinion is deposited in the media as a sphere of meaning production, the objective of this article is to understand how the political negationism of Jair Bolsonaro and declaratory journalism impact social imaginaries about the news media, since the rise of the extreme right-wing government enabled the construction of a national political authority subversive to that which is expected from these subjects. For the analysis, six cases were listed, analyzed under the perspective of Content Analysis and Discourse Analysis, about enunciations made by the President on different dates and directed to different agents. As results, it was possible to perceive how the construction of the outsider figure subverts the political ethos and how the renunciation of speeches or attempts to resignify them causes a 'parallel reality' among his supporters, as well as the persuasion of those who experience an identification.