Online memorials to victims of Covid-19 in Brazil: sensitive narratives on others’ pain

Abstract

In the light of anglophone literature on mediating distant suffering and media witnessing, this article reflects on the narratives adopted by Brazilian journalists in relation to the victims of Covid-19, after the accelerated increase of deaths from that disease in Brazil. This article is built from the media impact caused by the creation of the website Innumerable, developed in a collaborative way, to analyze the treatment adopted by the Memorial Covid-19 of the G1 portal, created a month before it and with content produced and uploaded by journalists from the stations affiliated to Rede Globo, Brazil’s largest TV broadcaster. It is argued that both memorials result from a “moral turn” in relation to the news coverage on the pandemic, that overestimated the numbers of sick and dead, without considering their life experiences behind these events. Thus, the article comes to the conclusion that memorials replace reports based on rational indices of the pandemic by narratives sensitive to the suffering of those affected by it, guided by testimonies and the principle of proximity.