Definitional statements and the dispute in the media arena: alternative digital journalistic discourse as resistance

Abstract

this article analyzes, based on materialist discourse analysis, the defining statements present in the institutional presentation of two newspapers—Estadão and Intercept Brasil—with the aim of understanding the ways in which these media outlets engage in the symbolic dispute for legitimacy in the media field. In the case of the newspaper Estado de São Paulo (Estadão), we observe the mobilization of a stabilized political memory that projects effects of transparency and neutrality, erasing the marks of its own enunciative position. Intercept Brasil, on the other hand, assumes a position of enunciation marked by the memory of confrontation and by production conditions that favor the circulation of meanings prohibited by traditional media. The work proposes that defining statements, by saying what a newspaper “is,” “does,” or “defends,” participate in a process of fixing meanings and delimiting what can and cannot be said in the public space. Contrary to the gesture of clarification that they appear to be, these statements operate as gestures of symbolic regulation that inscribe ideological disputes in the forms of expression of contemporary journalism.