A cor do apagamento: quem fala no dia da consciência negra na mídia hegemônica do Maranhão

Abstract

Journalistic activity is essentially anchored in the collection of information through sources, whether of the various types available — ordinary citizens, institutions, bodies, official documents, large databases and others. Just as sectors of society are aware of the importance of making themselves available in this media field as sources to be activated by the vehicles, they are also not in a position of passivity, as they create their own possibilities of communication, with the reinforcement of means independent and alternative. In this sense, the research proposed here outlined an overview of the coverage of the Dia da Consciência Negra in traditional vehicles in Maranhão and carries out a deepening of the space of the date from the analysis based on the journalistic sources present in the pages of the website Imirante.com and the former printed O Estado do Maranhão. Medina (2007) reinforces the importance of the simultaneity of voices in Journalism, Primo (2017) emphasizes the importance of putting the practice beyond the journalist as a center and Canavilhas (2017) draws attention to the need to take advantage of what the common citizen in society can add to journalistic production. In view of such directions regarding the journalistic field and connecting these issues to the importance of sources in routines, we work with two questions. The first is what you see when you look at the coverage that the two vehicles of the Maranhão hegemonic media carry out on November 20th and the second is what you see when you check the voices raised on the subject. To answer the two questions, they were configured in the two phases of research execution, which uses Content Analysis for data collection, treatment of the captured information and the analysis of the findings found. In this way, the corpus of this research includes 94 journalistic articles raised in 19 years of the time frame of the research (2002 to 2021), with half of the material being a reproduction in full of content from other vehicles. For the analysis of the sources, the work done here focused on only the articles authored by the newspapers. Therefore, at first, we have already seen that the space for the theme of the celebration in the newspaper is very small, directly reflecting the number of voices and sources used: only 69 journalistic sources were used, which does not include a diversity of sources and variety of approaches with regard to the material authored by the newspapers. Also as a finding, we emphasize the lack of depth in the matters that guide the day, as well as the configuration of the coverage is established as simplistic. The sources were seldom used for the purpose of enriching the production more firmly by the newspapers, since, for the most part, they are institutional sources with space to reverberate events, as well as the official sources also present are not put in a place of counterpoint. Finally, we conclude, among the findings of this study, that the common citizen has almost no space during almost two decades of survey of the subjects that guide the Dia da Consciência Negra, racial issues published on November 20th or that guide the date even in other days during the years of the clipping, with the celebration as a hook.