Mudanças climáticas sob o prisma da esfera pública : a mediação jornalística como fator de legitimação democrática no caso da COP-15

Abstract

This thesis explores, by investigating the coverage of the 15th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP-15), the role of journalistic mediation as an element of democratic legitimation to the governance processes marked by high levels of social complexity. To this end, this study compared - through an interpretative and content analysis - how the utterances made by the representatives speaking on behalf of Brazil in the formal sessions of the COP-15 (n = 441) were mediated by the news pieces of Jornal Nacional (n = 21) and Folha de São Paulo (n = 65). Such analysis was made possible by the operationalization of the following five assignments of journalistic mediation to the deliberative system: a) translation of the specialized language lying on the social systems to the ordinary language; b) selection of themes and issues in accordance with the cognitive interests of audiences; c) provision of media outlets that work as credibility references via the delivery of accurate information; d) provision of additional informational inputs that help citizens to understand complex social phenomena; e) watching actively and critically the centers of power in order to augment the scope of public visibility on political representatives and administrative institutions. These normative assignments were analyzed in light of three normative principles of deliberative democracy, namely, the principles of publicity, intelligibility and truth (Wahrheit). The results and analyzes produced indicated that each media outlet fulfilled these normative principles in different ways. Thus whereas the JN satisfied with greater intensity the principles of intelligibility and truth, FSP fulfilled the publicity principle with a higher standard. These results and analyses gave support to the theoretical framework that this work proposes. This framework argues that journalistic practices offer a preliminary mediation of social complexity likewise a prism of the public sphere. Thus, the discursive inputs produced by formal arenas are broken up by this prism, which transforms such inputs into the outputs of the media system organizing them in different communicative strata. These strata, in their turn, correspond to different subsets of audiences. For broader audiences, this prism offers communicative strata closer to the ordinary language; and for those recipients holding a higher level of expertise, one tends to find strata with more information, but under a more specialized treatment, i.e. less intelligible for broader audiences.