O testemunho de urgência nas coberturas de tragédia: funções autorizadas pelo telejornalismo

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation seeks to understand what the summons and the uses of testimony in the emergency reveal concerning the specifics of the coverage of tragedies in television journalism, based on three events: the Kiss nightclub fire, the Samarco Tailings Dam Failure, and the Chapecoense Football Association plane crash. Besides the tragic features and the mediatic repercussions they had in the country and in the world, the cases can also be united by the great power of affectation. Tragedies have very specific production conditions, in which the disruption caused by the event in addition to the urgency of coverage end up pressuring journalistic practices. The general objective of this research is to analyze how journalism triggers witnesses in the first 24 hours of tragedies coverage, relating them to the specifics of television coverage in extreme cases. As a theoretical framework, the contribution of different areas on the concept of witness is approached; witness in journalism from the relationship with evidence of truth and affection (CASADEI, 2014; LAGE, 2016; PERES, 2017); and in telejournalism, parting from the place of experience and recurring patterns (GUTMANN, 2014; GADRET, 2016). At last, the forms of narrative news in the coverage of tragedies are approached (QUÉRÉ, 2005; LOZANO ASCENCIO; AMARAL, 2016) from the discussions on denominations and the characteristics of journalistic work in moments of urgency (OSÓRIO, 2018). Three levels of analysis are developed based on França's (2005) systematization of the individualization of the event: 1) description of the event and coverage; 2) narrativization of the event (identification of the agents, levels of proximity and denominations, functions of the witnesses) and 3) development of a typology of functions of the witness based on the distinctions and regularities among the cases. The corpora is comprehended by the first 24 hours of coverage carried out by TV Globo, in a total of 111 witnesses, 41 in the Kiss nightclub case, 13 in the Samarco case and 56 in the Chapecoense case. The study concludes that the witnesses performed four functions in the narrative (giving credibility to the witness, characterizing the event, the victim, and expressing the emotional impact), divided into 18 subfunctions. It also indicated that the greater the disorganization of routines and the deficiencies in investigation, the greater the role given to the witness. In other words, journalism summons witnesses and allows them to exceed their usual functions only when it needs to deal with limitations, sustain live coverage or attend to the adverse production conditions provided by the specifics of the event.