Verdades possíveis: o jornalismo brasileiro e as narrativas sobre a ditadura durante o funcionamento da Comissão Nacional da Verdade

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation investigates the process by which Brazil s military dictatorship (1964-1985) became a subject of media and public attention after the establishment of the country s first National Truth Commission (CNV, in Portuguese). As part of the transitional justice process in Brazil, the CNV was signed into law in 2011 and established in May 2012, almost 30 years after the democratic transition. The intention of this commission was to investigate serious cases of human rights violations that occurred between 1946 and 1988, with a focus on the period of the military dictatorship, which lasted 21 years. The commission completed its activities on December 2014. During its term, the commission stimulated debate in the media about authoritarian rule. How did Brazilian news media cover dictatorship issues during the CNV operation? Trying to answer this question, the purpose of this dissertation is to monitor CNV s work in the period between June 2012 and December 2014 through interviews with commission members and journalists, observation of its routine operations and analysis of stories published by the news media. Using the contents of the daily news clipping produced by the CNV s communications department, a database with 8,422 stories was created. This research uses a combination of content analysis and framing analysis to assess how news stories about the commission created new narratives about the dictatorship. Monitoring allows us to verify how the news coverage occurred, which were the most prominent periods of coverage and which were the privileged frames and sources. The main hypotheses are: (1) news coverage about human rights violations during the dictatorship will increase, but an episodic frame that focuses on CNV s own agenda and activities will dominate much of this coverage; (2) the journalists acted less like "watchdogs" and more reactively, guided by the agenda of the commission; (3) the journalists resort mainly to the official sources, which is also exercised by the truth commission members