O "monstro" chuva na Folha de S. Paulo: o jornalismo na cobertura do desastre no litoral norte de SP

Abstract

This academic research carries out a bibliographic review of disasters seen from different areas, a conceptualization of the role of journalism in this scenario, in order to create theoretical support to analyze the first week of journalistic coverage of the disaster that occurred on the north coast of São Paulo in 2023. To achieve this, we created an authorial protocol based on Amaral, Lozano Ascencio and Puertas Cristobal (2020) and concepts from Amaral, Loose and Girardi (2020). With it, we sought to understand how the event was mentioned and what explanations were used by Folha de São Paulo in its coverage. In the analysis, we identified that rains are still more related to disasters 70.69% of the time, while social vulnerability does not appear once. In the denominations, “tragedy” was the most cited with 19 appearances of the 34 nominations present, but often, the rain is referred to as the disaster itself. Furthermore, the amount of rainfall indices is mentioned 18 times, while the mention or citation of risk areas appears 25 times. Although more frequent, there is still no effective hope of explaining these areas or describing the affected populations (economically less favored people). The data indicate that journalistic coverage, although more attentive to the importance of the topic of climate change, needs to evolve in the search to debate and report other spheres of the topic of disasters. Disasters are increasing present on the media agenda. However, journalistic coverage still insists on presenting rain as a “monster” to be fought, a force that, although already known, seems to manifest itself like never before (Valêncio, 2017). Even though climate change and extreme events are a reality, disasters are multicausal events, among them, caused by the situation of social vulnerability of people living in risky areas and the ineffectiveness of public authorities, with effective public policies that remove them. from there. Attributing responsibility solely to rain is a “fatalistic conception”, which leads society to conformism and contributes to an inert attitude towards “natural” threats. (Monteiro; Zanella, 2019). With the expectation that the research will contribute to newsroom journalism, this work, based on theoretical analysis and assimilation with practice, presents guidelines on how to investigate and cover guidelines involving disasters.