Carla Rizzotto Universidade Federal do NO BIG DEAL: the depoliticization in the Paraná multimodal framework of Dilma Rousseff’s Kelly Prudencio impeachment 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 Brazil, Eduardo Cunha, 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 Michel Temer 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