Contrast of the audiovisual journalistic coverage of the general strike of April 28th in Brazil by traditional and alternative media

Abstract

The journalistic coverage of popular protests tends to emphasize negative aspects of it, as shown by studies related to the protest paradigm. In turn, the fragmentation of the media ecosystem has allowed other narratives to dispute the representations about this type of event. This happened during the general strike held in Brazil on April 28th, 2017. In this study, I propose a multimodal analysis of audio-visual reports produced by two Brazilian news programs and four alternative media groups. The objective is to grasp the discursive strategies used by each one of them to construct the audio-visual journalistic narratives. Among the conclusions, traditional media sought to emphasize their legitimacy from the voices of ordinary people, while alternative media strengthened contra-official sources, especially trade unionists.