Mídia e meio ambiente: A representação de atores sociais em notícias sobre as tragédias de Mariana e Brumadinho

Abstract

Almost four years later the tragedy in Mariana (Minas Gerais, Brazil) at 2015, the mining company Vale was, once again, the protagonist at a tragic episode occurred in Brumadinho (Minas Gerais, Brazil), at 2019. Such event has been reported as the major environmental disaster in terms of loss of human life. The press has a central role in giving voice to those affected by the tragedies due its power to influence public opinion. Bearing this in mind, the present paper aims to reveal which actors have space on the news to talk about the tragedies of Mariana and Brumadinho and how the authorial voice represents its’ main social and institutional actors. In order to frame the analysis corpus, news articles published at the date, one week later and one year later each of those tragic events were collected from the most important journalism websites in Brazil, chosen on basis the Media Ownership Monitor Brasil report (2017). The press website considered were, in national scope, the websites of Portal G1 and Folha de São Paulo, and in the international scale, BBC and The New York Times websites. The data analysis process applied the sociodiscoursive categories from Critical discourse analysis assisted, in the treatment and coding data, by webQDA. The analysis has showed that the media recognizes the government and companies as responsible for the tragedies. But it questionable if the media’s influence can be used to change social structures that could have crucial importance in a context in which the leniency and irresponsibility of the actors, especially governments and large companies, have been generating serious environmental, political and social costs for Brazil.