May USP rest in peace! Symbolic disputes between journalists and academics at the late 1980s

Abstract

The article analyses the contentions by legitimacy between journalists and academics at the late 1980s, in Sao Paulo. Having as a heuristic resource the case of the “list of the unproductive,” the approach focuses on the conflicts centered on symbolic production, i.e., the unique view regarding the things of the world. Emphasis is given to the creation of a doxa which opposes the State to the market by Folha de S. Paulo journalists´. The conflict reveals aspects of the disputes in the cultural and power fields during redemocratization, because the State having a negative connotation and the market positive. It realizes that journalism was successful in the production and diffusion of a doxa for having a central role in this period, both in the formation of spaces for debate and in giving voice and launching agents formerly excluded from public life. It shows that Folha to modernize, through the action of journalists new arrival at the press, delegated to itself the function to form the public opinion (the audience). Producing a new type of knowledge that emerges through confrontation, it marks the newspaper as an active actor in the contemporary cultural field.