Efeitos de sentido no Jornal Nacional: o discurso sobre Jair Bolsonaro na pandemia de Covid-19

Abstract

The present work aims to analyze the effects of meaning produced by the speech of the President of the Republic of Brazil, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, about the Covid-19 pandemic, which affected the whole world and how it is broadcast to society, through the television news program. Jornal Nacional, from TV Globo, producing meanings. The reference period for the analysis is the first two months of the pandemic, March and April 2020. In addition, we analyzed the president's speeches during press conferences and official pronouncements for open TV and radio networks. As for Jornal Nacional, we selected the escalations – news headlines that will be presented throughout that day's edition – and the openings of reports, both featuring the news anchors William Bonner and Renata Vasconcellos. Throughout this analysis, we sought to understand the functioning of the construction of hate speech and the trivialization of life, as well as the speech about, in this case, Bolsonaro's speech about the pandemic, within the television news. We understand that journalistic discourse is primarily based on the logic of defending the ideological and financial interests of communication groups, which are camouflaged through certain techniques to turn journalistic discourse into a product that convinces the public that what is being presented is the truth about that fact. It uses as theoretical foundation the studies of communication that debate these market interests in the media and the methodology of Discourse Analysis of Pecheutian affiliation (AD).