Jornal Nacional’s Breaking News as a response to Bolsonaro’s supporters silencing

a discursive analysis

Abstract

Inserted in the studies of Franco-Brazilian discourse analysis, hereinafter AD, this article has as its objects the facts that led to the broadcasting of the TV news Plantão do Jornal Nacional on June 5^th, 2020, to report the number of cases of Covid-19 and of deaths as a result of this disease, and the journalistic bulletin itself, broadcasted in prime time after the interruption of the television network programming. The breaking news was a response to the decision of the federal government, through the Ministry of Health, to delay the disclosure of these numbers, and to the statement given by President Jair Bolsonaro, on the same date, saying that the measure would end the articles on the topic published in the news. The analysis starts from the hypothesis that there was censorship – from the point of view of AD – to the Brazilian press and, in particular, to the JN. For this, the study is based on Orlandi (2007a, 1987), to verify if there had been a policy of silence; that is to say: a process of silencing that would limit the subjects in the course of their senses and would reach precisely the most vulnerable citizens. Concepts such as the effects of meaning and discursive memory (PÊCHEUX, 2014a) are also fundamental to this study, which aims to add to the research field that deals with the coverage of the pandemic by the media. In the end, it is concluded that Bolsonaro gives rise to a discursive memory that is typical of authoritarian regimes – in this case, of the extreme right – but his strategy was supplanted by means of the effects of meaning arising from the breaking news, which ended up giving more emphasis to the censored data.