Engaged Journalism

Freie Universität Berlin Fachbereich Politik- und Sozialwissenschaften Institut für Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft Engaged Journalism Contesting Objectivity through Media Practices during the Alternative Coverage of Brazil’s June Journeys Débora Maria Moura Medeiros A thesis presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 31 October 2019 Débora Maria Moura Medeiros Engaged Journalism: Contesting Objectivity through Media Practices during the Alternative Coverage of Brazil’s June Journeys Date of defense: 31 October 2019 Erstgutachterin: Prof. Dr. Margreth Lünenborg Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Christoph Raetzsch Freie Universität Berlin Institut für Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft Fachbereich Politik- und Sozialwissenschaften Dedication To my mother 3 Declaration Hiermit versichere ich, dass ich diese Dissertation selbständig und lediglich unter Benutzung der angegebenen Quellen und Hilfsmittel verfasst habe. Ich versichere außerdem, dass dievor- liegende Arbeit keinem anderen Prüfungsverfahren zugrunde gelegen hat. Berlin, 31.10.2019 Débora Maria Moura Medeiros 4 Acknowledgments Over the years that I dedicated to this PhD thesis, I had the luck of encountering many inspir- ing people along the way. This endeavor would not have been possible without their generous support. Good mentorship is one of the greatest gifts a young scholar could possibly get. In this sense, I thank my supervisor, Margreth Lünenborg, for believing in me and helping me grow as an academic. Our meetings always ended with me leaving much more motivated to take on new challenges than when I arrived. I would also like to thank my second supervisor, Christoph Raetzsch, for his invaluable feedback, especially in the last phases of my work. By kindly offering to read some of my initial drafts, he helped me bring out what was really distinctive aboutmy thesis and think about the big picture in terms of scholarship. I would also like to thank Renata Campos Motta, Saskia Sell and Ulrike Klinger for kindly agreeing to participate in my defense as part of the evaluating commission. It was a remarkable experience for me to be able to discuss my work in depth with five excellent scholars from the fields my research touched upon. Thank you for your engaging questions and remarks. For taking the time to share with me their experiences during the protests in 2013 and 2014, I thank the members of Nigéria and Na Rua, as well as their contributors. I hope this thesis brings some helpful insights to the very important work they have been doing throughout the years. Mariella Bastian was among the very first friends I made in Germany, and our friendship has not only enriched my life, but has also been incredibly important in my academic journey. An excellent communication scholar and Brazil expert herself, Mariella has given me unique feedback every step of the way. I would like to thank her whole family as well, for always welcoming me in their home. I really appreciated having the chance to regularly meet my fellow PhD students at our colloquium at the institute. Through our in-depth discussions of each other’s work, Ifeelwe learned a lot, not only about our respective research objects, but also about supporting each other in this sometimes seemingly never-ending journey. I would like to thank all participants throughout the years, in particular Claudia Töpper, Eva Salomon, Irina Kharuk, María Martínez, Saskia Sell and Shari Adlung, for their helpful comments throughout the development of this project. For being a great colleague and helping me learn so much about the work as a post- doc, I would like to thank Laura Sūna. For her friendly and competent support with the many bureaucratic aspects around being an international student in Germany, I would like to say a big thank you to Claudia Hübner. I would like to thank the students who attended the seminars Journalism and Activism and 5 6 Media Activism and Social Movements for sharing with me their perspectives on the interaction between media and activism during our many interesting discussions in class. A big thank you to my co-lecturer María Martínez for the fruitful work on our seminar Media Activism and Social Movements. The scholars at MediaClimate welcomed me with open arms into their lively, productive research group many years ago, for which I am very thankful. It has been an incredible experience to get to know and work with researchers from all over the world in such a friendly atmosphere. In the past years, I had the opportunity of attending various interesting conferences that helped me further develop my work. In particular, I would like to thank the organizers and participants of the workshop “Acting on Media”, which took place in Bremen in 2016, especially my respondent Hilde Stephansen for her thoughtful feedback. I would also like to thank the organizers and participants of the summer school “Media in Political Participation and Mobi- lization” for the very productive week in Florence in 2017, in which I could exchange insights with other researchers focusing on the interaction between media and social movements. I am particularly thankful to Anne Kaun, Jack Bratich and Finn Brunton for helping me brainstorm creative solutions to some of my research dilemmas during the summer school. A big thank you goes to Jayson Harsin and his students at the American University of Paris for the invitation to present my work at their class and for the very interesting questions that followed. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS) for financially supporting my academic work. A special thank you goes to Berthold Gees andNils Abraham for being the friendly bridges between me as a scholarship holder and the foundation as an institution. Thank you to my dear friend Laura Nascimento for the many times she corrected my scholarship reports to the foundation. I made great friends during my time at the KAS and would like to thank Eduardo Gresse, Mariana Matos, Olga Debryanskaya and Sina Meissgeier for sticking around and sharing with me their paths as young scholars over the years. I would also like to thank Herbert Voß for his patient support with my many LaTeX-related questions after I attended one of his courses at theFU. I would like to thank Agostinho Gósson (in memoriam), Gilmar de Carvalho, Henrique Bel- trão, Inês Vitorino, Márcia Vidal, Nonato Lima, Riverson Rios and Ronaldo Salgado, my pro- fessors at the Federal University of Ceará, for their thoughtful support and encouragement as I discovered my passion for teaching and researching as a BA student. Vielen Dank also to Rogéria Pereira, my very first German teacher at the university’s language course who always sharedher experience as a student in Germany herself and encouraged me to apply for scholarships. Thank you to the many dear friends that have been with me since my time at the Federal University of Ceará (some of them even way before then!) and who have stayed in my life and kept in touch despite geographical distance. A huge thank you to my families in Brazil and in Germany, for their love and endless support. Finally, thank you to my partner Wilma for joyfully reminding me that there is more to life than work, yet doing overtime with me to improve the design of this thesis’ graphics. Abstract In this study, I propose the concept of engaged journalism, focusing on a specific kind of alternative media: unlike some types of community or alternative journalism, engaged journalism is often done predominantly by media professionals. However, these practitioners pursue other goals than their colleagues working at commercial or state media outlets and are motivated by a strong media criticism. Based on Shove, Pantzar, and Watson’s (2012) analysis of how practices link elements en- compassing material, meaning and competence, I regard engaged journalists as possessing the necessary materials and competences to perform professional journalism while, at the same time, attributing a different meaning to their practices. Engaged journalists seek to offer an alternative to the objectivity standard that marks traditional journalism and to actively counter traditional journalism’s shortcomings, such as elite-based source selection. They also see their coverage as a forum for various social movements, constituting a specific form of counter public sphere. I developed this concept as part of the answer to my two research questions. For research question (RQ 1), I ask: How do actors involved in the alternative coverage of protests adapt media practices to changes in the sociopolitical context? I answered RQ 1 by drawing from grounded theory’s methodological resources, in particular expert interviews, in order to make patterns and processes in my specific case visible through my analysis, generating a model that can thenbe applied to similar cases. In the current study, I applied this approach to the case of the protests that took place in the city of Fortaleza, Brazil, during 2013 and 2014. They were part of a broader, national context of protests against excessive government spending in the buildup for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Two media collectives, Nigéria and Na Rua, were the main actors responsible for the alternative coverage of the protests in Fortaleza. Their members and the network around them were my interview partners. Complementing this data, I performed a qualitative content analysis of the alternative coverage both collectives published online, guided by the following research question (RQ2): How do shifts in actors’ media production during the alternative coverage of protests relate tothe adaptation of media practices in a changing sociopolitical context? The multi-layered qualitative content analysis resulted in a model of categories that describes the material in terms of formats used, recurring elements of representation and argumentation. At the intersection between challenges to journalism and media activism, engaged journalism makes a contribution to the field by conceptualizing the activities of alternative journalists that put their professional knowledge and skills at the service of social movements.

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