Hell de Janeiro: A imagem da cidade construída na mídia através dos folhetins urbanos

Abstract

The major question in this research is the impression that the amount of bad news published about the city of São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro is significant. The first impression is that the news services would prefer to show up the blemishes, the problems. Thus, considering the need of a deeper investigation about this subject, we decided to undertake the present study, which has as goal, through the analysis of the printed newspapers, to verify what types of social representations are beeing created about the São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro city. The major goal is to identify, in the news about the city, the existence of what many authors had named as Culture of Fear , Industry of Fear and Discourse of Fear . The research study is based on previously empirical findings by other researchers besides the official statistics, aiming principally the demonstration that the city has an overexposure of its problems and conflicts, which at the end, contribute to a distorced image in the popular imaginary. Utilizing many editions of four printed vehicles of high circulation rates published in the carioca capital in a long period of time (alternated editions in 2007, 2008 and 2009), we pursued to verify, through the quantitative and qualitative analysis, what was published about the city