Identifying the theme of sustainability in journalistic texts: circumstantial analysis

Abstract

Since the term sustainability was created in governmental international meetings of the twentieth century, the media has paid special attention to the issue which became current reports, mainly in the two last decades. For this reason, the aim of this paper is to analyze how the news on this topic has been presented and what the base of its approach is, identifying possible trends and/or influences present in the act of reporting. For both, it was used as a research method the evidentiary paradigm, described initially by ginzburg (1986), and that provides identification and discussion of clues, symptoms and singularities. These may show trends of the newspapers analyzed - folha de são paulo and o estado de são paulo. It was possible to realize, from the analyses, that the issue of sustainability is treated negligently by newspapers, leaving aside important context for the proper understanding of the part of the reader. There was also the identification of clues that refer to strong political-economic interests throughout the texts, prioritizing some themes over others and leading the reader to certain erroneous conclusions, which is beyond the goal of fairness in which journalism is based.