Independent media in Brazil and in Belgium: positioning and occupation of public sphere
(2021) 8th European Communication Conference, Communication and Trust — Location: Online (6.September.2021)
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- This paper seeks to understand how Brazilian and Belgium independent digital media represent the journalism practice. We assume that the proliferation of these so called « independent » (alternative, engaged, militant) media in these two countries is the result of a double movement. On the one hand, they collaborate to reconfigure the strategies deployed by the political movements to occupy the public sphere, insofar they are used as an instrument for political engagement. On the other hand, they propose, through their discourse, an alternative model to conceive the media and the journalism. The practice of an alternative journalism is not an original nor a recent phenomenon (Ferron, 2012), neither in Brésil (Kucinsky, 1998) nor in Europe (Bastin, 2003). What called our attention is how a discourse enunciated by these independent media, actors placed on the boarders of journalism practices, stresses out the definition of journalism itself. In this sense, they can be seen as a mechanism that simultaneously promotes the changes and permanence of journalism identity, notably in tis relation within political field. The analysis is inspired by the work of Gee (2014) and more particularly the concept of “social goods” which we believe apprehends in a relevant way how independent media both fit into the public space but offer an alternative discourse to traditional media. Indeed, for Gee (2014: 8), the speeches make it possible to bring to light an idea, a set of ideas, values, etc., which are valued and redistributed in a political way by actors within the society or a social group: "politics (…) is about how to distribute social goods in a society: who gets what in terms of money, status, power, and acceptance on a variety of different terms, all social goods". Through this notion, the author offers a reflective tool for taking into account power and legitimacy in the sense that these "social goods" can be attributed or taken back to value something often to the detriment of something else. We will study four independent sites (two on the right wing and two on the left wing of the political spectrum) in these two countries. For the Belgian case, we selected the sites revuepolitique.be and lepeuple.be. In Brazil, we choose the following sites: Socialista Morena and O Antagonista. In this sense, our corpus consists on: 1.Their editorial manifests in order to understand how they discursively define and place themselves in the public sphere, but also what kind of journalism project they hold. 2. A sample of stories where the subject “media and journalism” is addressed. The aim is to examine how these independent sites place themselves with respect to the “traditional” journalism practice. 3. The first article of the years 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 they published to see whether some recurrences can be found in their aim to conceive an alternative model of journalism. Through a qualitative-discursive analysis of this corpus, we look to accomplish an ideological (left-right) and transnational (Belgium-Brazil) comparison. This approach will allow us to set up these “alternative” journalism models and the evolution of political and media contexts in Belgium and Brazil.
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Tant, C., & Pereira, F. (2021). Independent media in Brazil and in Belgium: positioning and occupation of public sphere. 8th European Communication Conference, Communication and Trust, Online. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/167201