A COVID-19 na mídia: a construção da representação social da doença na pandemia

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze the social representations of COVID-19 constructed during the pandemic in the journalistic media. This is a documental, exploratory, descriptive research, with a quali-quantitative methodological approach, based on the Theory of Social Representations. With regard to the method, the newspaper O Globo was chosen as the scenario. The selection of articles for the sample complied with the following criteria: one Sunday and one day of the week drawn each month, generating a total of 421 articles for analysis. The time period of data collection was from March 11, 2020 to June 2021. The data were subjected to the following analyses: 1) COVID-19 timeline analysis; 2) statistical analysis of the following variables: month, year, research period, section, space it occupies on the page, visualization zone, article size, newspaper cover, journalistic genres and genres of Moscovici's communication systems; 3) lexical analysis of the corpus constituted by the set of selected subjects. The results of the statistical analysis were: a greater number of articles published in the 1st half of 2021 (39.7%), which, seen together with the timeline, show a significant growth in the number of deaths, initiation of COVID vaccination -19 in Brazil, crisis in Manaus and CPI of COVID-19. Regarding location on the page, there was a higher prevalence in complete top (30.2%), as for the viewing area, 52% appeared in the main area. As for the size of the article, 57.5% were classified as medium, showing that the newspaper highlighted stories related to the pandemic. Regarding journalistic genres, 60.8% were found to be informative and Moscovici's communication genres, Diffusion stood out with 62.9%. In the results of the analysis of the textual material, six lexicais classes were observed that were discussed from three contexts: a) the social and economic dimensions of COVID-19. The macroeconomic crisis and the mortality rate were interconnected and the newspaper's economic bias became evident, blaming the emergency aid for the public account deficit; b) the constituent factors of coping with COVID-19. The population's perceptions about the pandemic increased, the fear of death on the part of the actors involved with the hospital environment, whose hospitalization referred to the expectation of aggravation and death. Coping with the changes generated by the pandemic and its consequences for everyday routines and the financial crisis experienced by the population. In this sense, it was observed that the ways of dealing with the pandemic were different, since the country was inserted in a framework of enormous social inequality. And finally, the vaccine that was approached by the biomedical vision, with a silencing of the newspaper in relation to public health and c) politics and their representatives in the COVID-19 pandemic that encompassed the political moment in Brazil, in which evidence of negligence on the part of political representatives was highlighted. It is concluded that the social representations conveyed by the newspaper carried its neoliberais economic bias, obscuring social inequality, as well as public health, through silencing the National Immunization Program and the Unified Health System.