Jornalismo e informação em telas: poderes, diálogo e disputa por legitimidade

Abstract

The objective of this research is to map and understand how the power relations between society, the digital environment and citizens/users are established through Communication actions, observing the great cultural, social, political, economic and regional diversity that permeates Brazil. This is justified by the growing expansion of the digital environment as an alternative space that opens possibilities for the increase of voices and representations of Brazilians, since any user can produce, co-produce and reproduce content, as well as interact with materials. With the growth of internet access, present in 90% of Brazilian households (IBGE, 2021), it is observed that more digital social actors find space and are able to communicate effectively, which results in new discourses and new disputes for power and legitimacy. And it is with these approximations and clashes in mind that we took as the object of preliminary empirical research the publications carried out in 2022 on the Twitter profile of Jornal Nacional, in order to identify issues related to the power relations between journalism and citizens/users. To this end, we resorted to the methods of Document Analysis (Fonseca, 2002; Gil, 2008), used in the stage of collecting materials and defining research excerpts and the Analysis of Audiovisual Materiality, proposed by Coutinho (2016; 2018) and which seeks to investigate audiovisual content as a unit composed of text and paratext. In addition, we also conducted an online questionnaire with 103 journalists that aims to bring results about their perceptions about the legitimacy disputes that are established between the fourth power and a possible "power" that emerges in the digital environment and would be linked to citizens/users. To this extent, we used the Snowball technique as a recruitment strategy (Vinuto, 2014), of a non-probabilistic character and which aims to offer results of questionnaires sent online from the author's network of contacts, dissipating and gaining new answers as the questionnaire is passed on. Thus, both the empirical analysis of materials published on the Twitter of the Jornal Nacional, which aims to detect the circulation, capacity for interaction and engagement and traces of power of these contents, as well as the results of the questionnaires, show us different forms of action of users in relation to journalism and perception of journalism in relation to users. After this path, the results point to the existence of an active symbolic power that assumes different faces and aspects in the Brazilian scenario, although with questions and with variables to be better evaluated and delimited. In this sense, we propose the existence of a fifth power as an intermediate theory of communication (Braga, 2016; 2020), which is evidenced through the possibilities of manifestation of users as a "power" that interacts; collects and supervises journalistic content and journalists; produces and reproduces content - including misinformative content; competes with the media; and also suffers interference from algorithms and large digital conglomerates, as well as members of the other branches - Executive, Legislative and Judiciary. Such perceptions offer us enough elements so that the discussion can be expanded in the future in new contours and interfaces, contributing to future studies on the relationship between media and social processes.