Carla Rizzotto Universidade Federal do NO BIG DEAL: the depoliticization in the Paraná multimodal framework of ’s Kelly Prudencio coverage Universidade Federal do Paraná

Rafael Sampaio Universidade Federal do Paraná

C&S – São Bernardo do Campo, v. 39, n. 3, p. 111-129, set./dez. 2017 111 Submissão: 22-10-2014 Decisão editorial: 15-08-2017

112 C&S – São Bernardo do Campo, v. 39, n. 3, p. 111-129, set./dez. 2017 1. Introduction

Strip by André Dahmer, Sep. 22, 2016

On December 2, 2016, the then Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies in , , accepted the petition demanding the start of impeachment proceedings against Dilma Rousseff. The petition charged the president with committing the so-called “fiscal pedaling”1, which was interpreted as a crime of responsibility. The vote took place on April 17 (a Sunday), when deputies granted the petition with 367 to 137 votes, during a session that was broadcasted live by almost all television channels, radio stations, and on the Internet. In the Senate, the petition admissibility was voted on May 12, and passed with 55 favorable votes to 22 votes against it. Dilma was suspended for 180 days, and Vice-president became President of the Republic in an interim basis. In the final impeachment vote, which happened in the afternoon of August 31, Dilma was definitively removed from office, with 59 favorable votes to 21 against the petition. During this period, the behavior of the press was questioned by people who were either for or against the impeachment. The slants of journalistic coverage were exhaustively accused of being measures to steer the interpretation of events towards one side or the other. In the Brazilian case, since the 1989 elections, researchers in the Political Communication field have been analyzing the informative coverage of the political scene. There is a special research line that points to a more negative coverage against the Workers Party (PT) and its candidates (AZEVEDO, 2009; MIGUEL, COUTINHO, 2007; FERES JUNIOR e SASSARA, 2016).

1 Deliberate delay in reimbursing banks (both public and private ones) and autonomous entities controlled by the government. C&S – São Bernardo do Campo, v. 39, n. 3, p. 111-129, set./dez. 2017 113 Carla Rizzotto; Kelly Prudencio; Rafael Sampaio

This paper particularly aims to investigate the political informative coverage through the analysis of news frames. As it is widely known, mediagenic agents “choose who gains access to or becomes ‘sources’ of their broadcasts; they edit and give different emphasis to social actors’ voices; they hierarchize discourses in their texts, and thus, they frame me- anings” (MAIA, 2009, p. 304). Informative framing studies endeavor precisely to show how some elements gain prominence in a news story to the detriment of others, thus producing this effect of meaning (ENTMAN, 1993; GAMSON, 1995; VIMIEIRO, MAIA, 2011; MENDONÇA, SIMÕES, 2012; PRUDENCIO, RIZZOTTO, SILVA, 2016). For Entman, “the frame offers a path to describe the power of the communicational text, as well as its influence on human awareness, which is exerted by the information con- veyance [...] through a declaration, an expression, or a news story” (ENTMAN, 1993, p.51-52, our translation). According to that author, there is usually a homogenization of the approach to news stories, because approaching them differently from the other vehicles could mean losing credibility or turning against elites. Therefore, mediagenic or informative frames could be seen as persistent patterns of presentation, selection, emphasis and exclusion of organiza- tion in verbal or visual discourse, which allows journalists and media professionals to process, quickly and routinely, high levels of information for their public (CAMPOS, 2014; PORTO, 2007; VIMIEIRO, DANTAS, 2009). In Brazilian research, the theoretical-methodological scaffolding of framing has been already applied to many political topics, such as the antitobacco debate and the firearm referendum in Brazil (MAIA, 2009); the controversy about racial affirmative actions in the press (CAMPOS, 2014); the framing route on the topic of disability (VIMIEIRO, MAIA, 2011); the me- diagenic position regarding political mobilizations, such as “Marcha das Vadias” [Whores’ March] (PRUDENCIO, RIZZOTTO, SILVA, 2016); besides conceptual (MAIA, 2009; MENDONÇA, SIMÕES, 2012; VIMIEIRO, DANTAS, 2009) and methodological discussions (RIZZOTTO, ANTONELLI, FERRACIOLI, 2016; VIMEIRO, MAIA, 2011), among others. In the specific instance of Dilma’s impeachment, Becker, César, Gallas and Weber (2016) analyzed the front page frames of newspapers in four different episodes during that period. Those authors found out a polarization between PT/Lula and the judiciary, as well as the praise of pro-impeachment acts and the decrease of demonstrations supporting Dilma’s govern- ment. Rizzotto, Antonelli and Ferracioli (2016) noticed that Folha de S. Paulo approached the topic as a conflict of partisan politics, presenting the event episodically, i.e., as a series of non-contextualized conflicts. Our concern right now is to improve the methodological approach to news framing. The classical perspective is confined to textual analysis. In such an approach, the impeach- ment coverage would be liable to offer another interpretation that, by showing only one of the various processes of building a news story, might lean toward one side or the other. As we all know, Brazilian journalistic model was heavily based on the American model of “indepen- dent journalism”. Therefore, news stories generally attempt to be informative and objective, without admitting of more vehement interpretations and/or positions on the part of journalists, which tends to be exclusive to columns and editorials. Thus, it is deemed necessary to carry out an analysis that also takes into account the visual and storytelling elements. Hence, we turned to the multimodal framing analysis developed by Wosniak et al (2014). This paper first brings an analysis of part of a corpus from an ongoing research project. That research project applies the multimodal framing analysis in three levels – visual, storytelling, and framing – to news stories published by O Globo, Folha de S. Paulo (FSP), and O Estado de S. Paulo, between December 2, 2015, when the then Speaker of the Chamber of Depu- ties, Eduardo Cunha, accepted the impeachment petition, and May 13, 2016, the day after

114 C&S – São Bernardo do Campo, v. 39, n. 3, p. 111-129, set./dez. 2017 TUDO NORMAL: a despolitização no enquadramento multimodal da cobertura do impeachment de Dilma Rousseff the Senate vote that authorized the start of the impeachment process, thereby suspending president Dilma Rousseff. Initially, an automatic gathering of news stories from newspapers’ collections was carried out, and the keyword used for that was “impeachment”. Only texts from the political section or equivalent (e.g. “Power”) were gathered. The next step was a manual sifting, which dismissed opinion articles and interviews, as well as news stories that did not contain any images. Thus, the final corpus comprised 597 news stories from O Globo, 476 news stories from FSP, and 396 news stories from O Estado de S. Paulo, the total number being 1,469 news stories. The codified extract analyzed here includes news stories published by the O Globo and FSP newspapers in December 2015, when the charge against the president was accep- ted, and in May 2016, when her ousting took place, after the first Senate vote. There are 318 news stories, 187 from O Globo, and 131 from FSP. We will present the elements of the multimodal framing analysis next, and then ap- proach methodological procedures and discuss the results attained. We emphasize that, in this first analytical effort, our main purpose is to improve the methodological device rather than to draw conclusions from its contents (although this is also done).

2. Multimodal framing Wozniak et al (2014) maintain that only a systematic analysis of the three different communicative modes can get the researcher closer to the general image built by the news and the public’s experience of multimodal reception at once. Despite the recognition that an attempt to standardize the storytelling and visual analysis results in some interpretive loss, those authors insist in the standardization because they see in the procedure the possibility of studying the relationships between pictures, stories and images from a higher number of objects. The standardization of the analysis also enables a comparative analysis of the diffe- rent vehicles. Finally, dismissing subjective procedures increases the reliability of research on mediagenic representation of topics of great circulation (WOZNIAK et al, 2014). Thus, multimodal analysis encompasses the visual and textual representation of infor- mation, as well as the two possible communicative building processes of news, namely, the frame and the narrative, as illustrated in Figure 1 below.

FIGURE 1 – Multimodal Analysis SOURCE – RIZZOTTO and PRUDENCIO, 2016. C&S – São Bernardo do Campo, v. 39, n. 3, p. 111-129, set./dez. 2017 115 Carla Rizzotto; Kelly Prudencio; Rafael Sampaio

The image analysis is carried out in four levels: denotative, semiotic-stylistic, conno- tative, and ideological. The connotative and ideological levels seek to answer respectively what social meanings are inserted in symbols, and how images are built so as to shape the public’s perception. However, they are not encoded, for these levels can only be answered interpretively. The narrative analysis is informed by the degree of narrativity, the narrative gender and the roles associated to the actors present in a news story, “features such as dra- matization and the use of emotional expressions define the degree of general narrativity in an article; indications of gender can tell us the narrative gender an article corresponds to; and the actors may be identified as performing specific narrative roles [...]” (WOZNIAK et al, 2014, p. 7, our translation). The framing analysis is based on the conceptualization by Robert Entman (1997), who explains that media pictures comprise the problem definition, diagnosis of the problem causes, moral judgments, and suggestion of solutions2.

3. Results We present the discussion of results below – first, the findings from each level of analysis are interpreted separately, and then, they are interconnected.

3.1 Image Analysis The visual framing analysis is based on the proposal by Rodriguez and Dimitrova (2011). According to those authors, visual elements are good framing devices because images open channels to discursive possibilities that legitimate and facilitate the reasons why some interpretations are favored and others are hampered. Therefore, ascertaining such frames is a challenging effort, for methods are numerous and conflicting. (RODRI- GUEZ; DIMITROVA, 2011, p.51). Those authors offer a four-level analysis of media frames. The first level is the denotative, in which frames are identified by a survey of characters, objects, and other elements existing on the scene. At this point, the analyst’s task is to answer who and/or what is being represented in the image. The second level has to do with the identification of stylistic and technical ele- ments, and it describes the camera plane and angle; a close-up, for instance, means intimacy, while an open plane enables the context to be visualized. The connotative level (that which attempts to understand the ideas and concepts present in images) and the ideological level (which tells what interests are being represented) will not be analyzed in this paper. Out of all possible images in news stories, only photographs and photomontages were encoded. Thus, infographics, drawings, and caricatures, in a total of 256 images, were eli- minated. The variables that build visual frames in the descriptive level identify the people rep- resented in the photograph, the action they are taking in the image, and the scene. Cunha, Temer, and their allies were represented in 35.5% of the corpus; Dilma, Lula and their allies in 30.4%. Comparing the two vehicles, FSP showed a greater difference between the two groups of represented person, with 29 (27.8%) showing Dilma and allies, and 39 (37.5%) show- ing Temer and allies. In O Globo, this difference is only 2% (34.2% to 32.2%) (Graph 1).

2 The corpus was encoded according to the book of codes written by Grupo de Pesquisa Comunicação e Participação Política (COMPA) of Universidade Federal do Paraná, available at: http://www.inf.ufpr.br/carla/ Livro_de_codigos_impeachment.pdf. Access on Sep. 29, 2017. Reliability tests were carried out after the training of nine encoders by using Krippendorff’s alpha and Brennan & Prediger’s free kappa coefficients. We chose to use the latter in rarer appearance categories, since Krippendorff’s alpha is very sensitive to disagreement in such cases, which are frequent, especially in narrative and framing analyses.

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GRAPH 1 – Represented person SOURCE – COMPA/UFPR

The scene was not identified in 58.59% of the photographs, and 25% of them show people inside. As to the variable action taken, the most recurrent situation is that of people in a passive attitude, when they are not doing anything (32%), or during everyday activities (22%), followed by presentation or speech giving (13.28%). On this first level, coefficients show that two newspapers presented the impeachment as an ordinary political occurrence, which is confined to holders of public positions in both groups who remain in a passive condition or perform routine activities. This may be associated with a view of cabinet politics confined to a dispute between the two groups, with slightly higher visibility of the pro-impeachment group. For Rodriguez and Dimitrova (2011, p. 54-5), the semiotic-stylistic level takes into ac- count the stylistic conventions present in the representation, which implies knowing how con- ventions acquire social meaning – i.e., how a close-up comes to mean intimacy; a middle plane means a personal relationship, and an open plane means context. The variables angle and plane show that most images were created in normal angle (81.25%) and middle plane (47.26%), indicating no physical proximity, insofar as the observer is not face to face with the subjects. For Kress & van Leeuwen (1996), actions and poses por- trayed in the frames create interactions between the observer and the portrayed people, which is called “image acts”. They have to do with how an image elicits “offers” or “demands” from those who see it. Accordingly, the photographs show the creation of interactions be-

C&S – São Bernardo do Campo, v. 39, n. 3, p. 111-129, set./dez. 2017 117 Carla Rizzotto; Kelly Prudencio; Rafael Sampaio tween the personages of both political groups, with little visibility of any other actors, thus indicating that politics is far from society. While the middle plane places the portrayed person at eye level, it does not awaken empathy, but, on the contrary, aversion toward politicians, insofar as the dominant aspect, or focal point, is not the observer, but the surrounding political environment. Therefore, while photographs seem protocolary and merely illustrative, it is already possible to perceive in this level the meaning effect caused by visual frames. The image below (Figure 2) shows the coverage pattern: personages from the two conflicting groups, portrayed in normal angle and middle plane, in an unidentified scene, in a passive attitude or during everyday activities.

FIGURE 2 – Pattern I coverage SOURCE – O Globo, Dec. 13, 2015.

3.2 Narrative analysis According to Wozniak et al (2014), even a piece of bad news that is built according to the hierarchical order of importance (inverted pyramid) can show narrative elements. Hence,

118 C&S – São Bernardo do Campo, v. 39, n. 3, p. 111-129, set./dez. 2017 TUDO NORMAL: a despolitização no enquadramento multimodal da cobertura do impeachment de Dilma Rousseff this research systematized the journalistic narrative analysis in two main groups of elements: narrative level and assignment of roles. The measuring of the narrative level is based on dramatization, emotion, personalization, and stylistic ornamentation. Dramatization was encoded as present in cases where the news story provided a story told in sequential order, with beginning, middle, and end, rather than in the format of inverted pyramid. Emotion, in turn, has to do with the people in the news story. Whenever the emotional states of one or more subjects have been described, the variable was considered existing. Personalization shows stories told with a focus on subjects and their actions. Finally, stylistic ornamentation appears when the journalist uses literary or poetic style, going beyond the mere description of events. Dramatization was present n 29.2% of the cases that were analyzed. The following segment of a news story published by FSP illustrates this variable, showing that the use of storytelling by journalists is not uncommon, and it might include the addition of fictional elements that get the journalist discourse closer to literary.

PMDB Michel Temer’s telephone rang around 7.30 a.m. It was the information that STF (Federal Supreme Court) had decided to suspend the term of office of the Speaker of the Chamber, Edu- ardo Cunha (PMDB-RJ). […] Temer almost immediately created a problematic equation: if Cunha was not the Speaker of the Chamber anymore, then who was it? Would the substitute bring about complications to him? Would it be necessary to intermediate a new election for de command of the house?3

Emotion, which is usually identified in the speculative description of per- sonages’ moods, appears even more often (36.7%). Still on Eduardo Cunha’s suspension, FSP used off-camera sources to describe why the minister Teori Zavas- cki had decided to suspend him. “‘He felt shrugged off, disrespected’, says the minister, explaining the reasons that would have led him to decide, by himself, to suspend Cunha4.” Almost half (47.4%) of the news stories analyzed contained personification, indicating a kind of journalism that focuses on personages rather than facts. In this sense, the news story published by O Globo on the occasion of Waldir Maranhão’s inauguration as Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies did not approach the consequences of the event in the political scene, but only described the politician’s background, curriculum, and even habits: “Maranhão, whose activity is inexpressive, even changed his habits after Cunha’s situation got worse. He has been frequenting the coffee break of the plenary sessions [...]5.” The last level in the narrative level analysis, stylistic ornamentation, appeared the least often (18.23%). However, the seemly low number of news stories containing sections whose purpose departs from the journalistic goal – for they entertain, but do not inform – is significant when it is seen as a feature of a journalistic attitude that takes over objectivity as a central value (RIBEIRO, 2002; BIROLI, 2007), even by adopting standardized proceedings, as pointed out by Tuchman (1972) in her classical study of the journalistic objectivity rituals. On May 4, 2016, O Globo approached the composition of the then vice-president Michel Temer’s po-

3 Equipe de Temer reage com alívio e cautela. [Temer’s Team reacts with relief and caution.] FSP, May 6, 2016. 4 Ministro antecipou voto porque se sentiu “atropelado”. [The Minister anticipated his vote because he felt “run over”.] FSP, May 6, 2016. 5 Presidente interino surgiu no baixo clero, com atuação inexpressiva. Até ontem. [Acting Speaker emerged from the lower clergy, with inexpressive activity. Until yesterday.] O Globo, May 10, 2016. C&S – São Bernardo do Campo, v. 39, n. 3, p. 111-129, set./dez. 2017 119 Carla Rizzotto; Kelly Prudencio; Rafael Sampaio tential interim government, and the section below used poetical resources to humanize the personage:

A red-eyed Temer (he went to sleep at 3 a.m. on Tuesday morning) welcomed them in his office, having an official picture of Dilma Rousseff hung to his left, and on the meeting table in front of him, a copy of the Bible and a copy of the Constitution6. Besides the significant numbers in the four levels of analysis, it is noticeable that there is a considerable difference between the narrative levels of the two newspapers in the rese- arch corpus, as shown in Graph 2 below.

GRAPH 2 – Narrative level by vehicle SOURCE – COMPA/UFPR

Aside from the personalization variable, which shows similar results for the two newspa- pers, the other variables reveal differences that even exceeds 15%. The carioca newspaper may then be considered as having a more narrative style than the paulista one. However, this finding requires future confirmation, when the entire research corpus is analyzed. The encoded roles were those of the victim, the villain, and the hero, which are the most common ones in narratives involving a conflict as the core of the story. Characters were only encoded as such when they played a paramount role in the narrative. Each unit of analysis could have a single character in each role, and the same character could not be encoded as playing more than one role at once7. Roles were assigned to characters in 38.3% of the

6 ‘Cortarei no máximo uns três ministérios.’ [‘I will cut no more than three ministries.’] O Globo, May 4, 2016. 7 This does not mean to crystallize roles; therefore, the same character can be the hero in a news story only to be portrayed as the villain in the next one, which is common in similar narratives.

120 C&S – São Bernardo do Campo, v. 39, n. 3, p. 111-129, set./dez. 2017 TUDO NORMAL: a despolitização no enquadramento multimodal da cobertura do impeachment de Dilma Rousseff analyzed news stories. The victim appeared in 13.8% of them; the villain in 22.6%; and the hero in 10.6%. O Globo shows Dilma Rousseff as the victim, and Eduardo Cunha as the villain, in the news story that approaches Rousseff’s participation in the solemn event where she made a speech in favor of her term of office: “The president repeated what she had said in her pronoun- cement on Wednesday – she does not have a bank account in Switzerland, she has committed no crimes, and there is ‘no act of individual use of public money’ in her biography8.” The same newspaper inverted roles on the same day, presenting Dilma as the villain and PSDB and PMDB members as heroes when approaching the potential participation of parties in a transitional government: “Aécio repeated the discourse he has been giving to his party […]: now, the priority is to rescue Brazil from the crisis.”9 Most astonishingly from the data gathered is precisely the fact that Dilma Rousseff is shown both as victim and villain, having appeared as a hero only once. In FSP, Dilma appe- ared 15 times as a victim, and other 4 times as a villain; in O Globo, she appeared 17 times as the victim, and 11 as the villain. Common villains were also Eduardo Cunha, appearing 7 times in FSP and 15 in O Globo, and Michel Temer, 4 times in FSP and six in Globo. Performing the role of the hero, the most common characters were anti-Dilma groups, such as MBL and other protesters, which were mentioned 4 times by FSP, and Michel Temer, seen as a hero in three different moments by O Globo, such as when it approached the composition of a possible Temer government, highlighting the praise deputies gave to Temer’s attitude; ac- cording to them, he was “a lord”, “gentle”, and “pleasant”10.

3.3 Informative framing The last part of the multimodal framing analysis is the analysis of frames through the me- thod suggested by Entman (1993). The first variable that we checked was the preponderant element in the frame. We had thought this element would not always be explicitly related to the impeachment, but that it would approach objects related to it, as shown in Graph 3. Because of the way we gathered material for this research, most of the news stories (71.7%) naturally had an explicit focus on the impeachment, but what draws our attention is that other correlated subjects, such as corruption, economic crisis and parties’ movements, were scarcely approached, being even less present than “Cunha’s ousting”, which evidences how the conflict “Cunha X Dilma” was prominent in the coverage. For reasons mentioned before, we had believed that former president Lula could have been a topic of its own, which did not happen. Afterwards, as suggested by Entman (1993), we present the actors that had more space to speak in the news stories (Graph 4).

8 Dilma: ‘temos que defender nossa democracia contra o golpe’. [Dilma: ‘we have to protect our democracy against the coup’.] O Globo, Dec. 5, 2015. 9 Oposição afina discurso para eventual governo de transição [Opposition refines discourse for a potential transitional government]. O Globo, Dec. 5, 2015. 10 Ao pé do ouvido [Whispering in one’s ear]. O Globo. Dec. 13, 2015. C&S – São Bernardo do Campo, v. 39, n. 3, p. 111-129, set./dez. 2017 121 Carla Rizzotto; Kelly Prudencio; Rafael Sampaio

GRAPH 3 – Framed component SOURCE – COMPA/UFPR

GRAPH 4 – Actors SOURCE – COMPA/UFPR

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The political field11 is the main actor in the conflict, being the protagonist in more than 60% of the news stories, followed by civil society (14.4%)12 and the judiciary field (20.6%)13. Despite the possible economic arguments for the President Dilma’s ousting, the economic field14 was almost absent in the coverage (1.8%)15. Moreover, despite the small difference, it should be highlighted that oppositional actors (34.9%) had more space than actors defending the government (29.2%). We also wanted to check what subtopic or subject was shown as having more relevance in the news stories analyzed (Graph 5).

GRAPH 5 – Subtopic SOURCE – COMPA/UFPR

The political conflict was certainly the centerpiece on the news (28.3%), which focused on reporting the myriad of battles for votes between the government and its opponents,

11 We chose to consider the political field in a reduced dimension, including only political agents inserted in the formal political system, such as political parties, voting blocs, members of the Parliament, and politicians. 12 “Civil society” includes all kinds of civil associations, such as social movements, NGOs, collectives, labor unions, activistic groups, cultural and religious groups or organizations, etc. 13 We took into account several spheres related to the judiciary field, including speeches by prosecutors, members of the Attorney-General’s Office, ministers of the Federal Supreme Court, and even judges from other courts in general. 14 In turn, the economic field focused especially on financial, industrial (e.g. FIESP), and banking institutions, as well as on businesspeople and agents or specialists in the financial market. 15 We admit that these are simplifying views of different fields. Usually, different actors may even present antagonistic views in a same field or struggle over the protagonism in a political process. Our goal was to create variables that were simple enough to be reliably encoded and could give us an overview, albeit reduced, of the protagonism of agents from different fields in the impeachment process. C&S – São Bernardo do Campo, v. 39, n. 3, p. 111-129, set./dez. 2017 123 Carla Rizzotto; Kelly Prudencio; Rafael Sampaio their judicial disputes, and several actions within the political game. Directly related to this topic, there are news stories with details of the impeachment process (20.7%), others that endeavor to reveal its procedure and explain its rules, followed by stories about a potential post-impeachment future (18.2%), including both Temer’s and allies’ position in conjunctions associated with a possible future government and Dilma’s and allies’ assessments of a more apocalyptic future in case the impeachment is approved. Although there are some news stories that show the effects of the impeachment on the population and/or whose focus is on demonstrations pro and against the impeachment, this topic was not among the most visited ones (9.75%). The three last framing elements were the most complex to apprehend in news stories because of the nature of Brazilian journalism, which shows itself as more informative, less opinion-giving, and allegedly objective. The training sought to investigate only those which were more explicit in the text, but we took into account that the selections of sources and the space given to them would be considered as analytical criteria. First, the causes of the problem (Graph 6) are indications given by the journalist as to the causes of the problem at issue.

GRAPH 6 – Causes of the problem SOURCE – COMPA/UFPR

The main cause was the very political or ideological dispute in the impeachment process (44.9%). Right after it, part of the news stories tended to identify the problem as the very issue of Legality/legitimacy of the impeachment process (14.4%) and the excessive interference of the Judiciary (13.5%), which shows that doubts about the process itself and the conflicts between authorities were reported.

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Besides, the framing usually involves some kind of moral judgment (Graph 7). According to the pattern followed by Brazilian informative press journalism, we had expected this code to be almost absent, and, as we said previously, we found out that such a judgment also occurred through the selection of sources and quotations.

GRAPH 7 – Moral judgments SOURCE – COMPA/UFPR

Results expectedly show that most of the news stories did not contain any kind of moral judgment (66%). In fact, a good deal of news stories were either descriptive or they reported a specific event or happening without giving voice to judgmental opinions. On the other hand, among the news stories that contained some judgment, almost 15% of them blamed Dilma and her allies. Next, there were references again to a moral judgment of the political disputes and quarrels (8.1%), followed by questions/judgments concerning how the impea- chment served as an instrument of vengeance (7.5%). The judgment on the impeachment legality and its procedures was almost absent (3.7%). Finally, Entman asserts that frames usually point to some kind of treatment recommen- dation or solution as well (Graph 8). Our goal was to see whether, as a whole, the impeach- ment was presented as a solution or not.

C&S – São Bernardo do Campo, v. 39, n. 3, p. 111-129, set./dez. 2017 125 Carla Rizzotto; Kelly Prudencio; Rafael Sampaio

GRAPH 8 – Treatment recommendation SOURCE – COMPA/UFPR

Results indicate that there were no recommendations in almost 70% of the corpus. Ho- wever, about 20% of the news stories indicated that the impeachment is (was or would be) the best solution for the framed problem, while only almost 10% of them indicated that the impeachment would not be the best solution.

4. Discussion and Conclusion

The multimodal analysis showed its capability of shedding light on details and comple- xities of the political coverage that could have been obscured in a more classical framing analysis. For example, an exclusive look at the informative framing section reveals only a slight pro-impeachment tendency in the coverage (which is reinforced by the higher number of oppositionists’ images), the difference being so small when it comes to the weight given to the actors involved that it could have been easily ascribed to a major protagonism in the events created by that group. However, such a picture changes when we notice that the journalistic storytelling did not allow president Dilma to be seen as a hero who resists contrary forces, but only as the villain to blame for the political crises and/or a victim attacked by opposing groups16.

16 We admit that political actors may strategically choose to assume different roles in different contexts. For example, our code tends to identify the villain as a usually negative role, but, depending on the situation, being seen as a villain can be an advantage for one’s public image.

126 C&S – São Bernardo do Campo, v. 39, n. 3, p. 111-129, set./dez. 2017 TUDO NORMAL: a despolitização no enquadramento multimodal da cobertura do impeachment de Dilma Rousseff

In other cases, the multimodal analysis gives us more evidence of how certain events were portrayed. For instance, a good deal of news stories considered political dispute to be either the cause (44.97%) or the problem itself (28.3%) that needed to be analyzed. On the other hand, the narrative analysis showed that half the news stories contained some kind of personalization, and about a third had traces of emotion (36.7%) and dramatization (29.2%). When these two levels are compared, it becomes clear that the journalistic storytelling focused on the conflict between Dilma and her opponents; that, in certain news stories, it assumed a more epic nature, with villains, victims, drama, and emotion, but without going beyond the generally standard political game. Analyses of the political, economic, and social repercussions of the impeachment, as well as questions about its legitimacy, were far from the center of interest. When we consider the comparison between framing and visual analysis, the coverage seems to have been warmer. Although there were some eye-catching, even dramatic images, the images as a whole had a more stern quality, showing politicians in trivial, everyday activi- ties (22%). Aside from a small number of images that represent demonstrations for and against the impeachment, the images draw little attention, preferring the normal angle (81.25%) and the middle plane (47.26%). In practice, they do not differ from the images usually seen in everyday political coverage. Given the different interests at play and the many protestations regarding the impeachment process, it would have been easy to present shocking, even sensationalist news stories. When the three levels are considered, this conclusion seems to be the first to catch the eye. The impeachment process was a unique political moment; it was subject to vehe- ment claims, such as the weakness of its legal grounds, and it being led by a deputy accu- sed before the STF; it was even seen as a coup d’etat or a “parliamentary coup” by several sectors of society (and here there is a fierce semantic debate upon whether such a process can be considered as a coup), and yet, the journalistic storytelling about the impeachment was simply politics as usual. It was noticeable that the coverage by the two newspapers in our corpus privileged a frame that showed the impeachment process as an ordinary fact in national politics, a merely political dispute between rival groups. In our opinion, it was a “depoliticized” coverage, mostly focused on the episodic actors and conflicts occurred throughout the process, heavily marked by the absence of “judg- ments” or “solutions”, that is, the absence of discussions about the causes and consequences of such an important event. According to Vimieiro and Maia (2017, p. 16), two examples of depoliticization indicated in the literature happened in this case: “the removal or erasure of an important political issue from the media informative cycle” and/or the “systematic framing of a specific political option as ‘common sense’ (such as the notion of fiscal austerity, which usually appears in moments of crisis in capitalism)”. The impeachment coverage seems to fit these depoliticization examples very well. In summary, it was neither interested in investiga- ting the controversies and interests involved in the event, nor willing to highlight the fact that the situation was a disruptive, questionable political event, with serious impact on Brazilian institutions and citizens’ lives. As it has already been acknowledged in the literature about framing, the non-cove- rage and/or the non-political coverage can actually privilege certain actors when there is not enough space for specific agenda, facts, analyses, and hence for concurrent frames. In a nutshell, the erasure of the disputes, controversies and significant issues involved in the impeachment process, along with the indications that those newspapers showed a pro- -impeachment position in their editorials (GUAZINA et al, 2017; MARQUES et al, 2017), allow C&S – São Bernardo do Campo, v. 39, n. 3, p. 111-129, set./dez. 2017 127 Carla Rizzotto; Kelly Prudencio; Rafael Sampaio us to conclude that it was a coverage that truly legitimized the process. In other words, a “normal” coverage of this political-mediagenic event can be, in itself, a strategy to legitimize this process, making it normal.

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