O acontecimento George Floyd transformado em palavras, narrativa e discurso pelo jornal Em Pauta da Globo News

Abstract

Thiswork aimed to observe three editions of Em Pauta that aired on May 29, June 2, and June 3, 2020. At that time, the program reported on the murder of George Floyd, a Black American man who had his neck pressed against the asphalt by a white police officer in Mineapolis. In the first coverage of the murder, the Em Pauta, broadcast by Globo News, allocated just under 30 minutes to analyze what was happening in the United States at that moment. In the following edition, there was a special and comprehensive coverage of the case.

However, after the program aired, a message on X, formerly Twitter, disrupted what we will call in this work the initial situation of the Em Pauta narrative. The provocation of the message drew attention to the program for the fact that the panel of commentators consisted solely of white men and women discussing racism. The presenters were Jorge Pontual, Demétrio Magnoli, Andreia Sadi, Gerson Camarotti, Mônica Waldvogel, and Sandra Coutinho. In response, the next program covered the case once again, but analyzed only by Black individuals: Heraldo Pereira, Maria Júlia Coutinho, Zileide Silva, Aline Midlej, Flávia Oliveira, and Lilian Ribeiro. Given this overview, the work presented below did not specifically observe the murder of George Floyd, nor the message shared on X. Instead, it focused on the transformations that the narrative produced from what destabilized its discursive speech games.

We started with the following inquiries: how was George Floyd's experience narrativized in the journalistic thread, and once the victim's experience was narrativized, how did the processes of signification configure the then-transformed experience into an object event, and what meanings could be perceived in those acts of articulating what happened? To answer the question that guided this work, we looked beyond what was presented on the surface of the Em Pauta narrative. From the construction of a theoretical axis and an analytical interpretation axis that guided our analysis and our process of transcribing and interpreting the speech acts of the editions, we were able to perceive certain ideological affiliations demarcated as the program articulated the event.

Guided by this theoretical-methodological framework, we observed that the Em Pauta narrative not only transformed from what provoked its initial situation, but also revealed certain ideological traits in its discourse that point to a way of reconfiguration and re-stabilization of a larger process that we named in this work as racializing. Finally, we can understand that Em Pauta, throughout its narrativization of the murder, discursively fills the George Floyd case with other meanings, while also revealing a way of racializing the Black individuals invited to analyze what was being narrativized.