Narrativa e fait divers: o caso do voo 370 da Malaysia Airlines no portal online da Folha de São Paulo

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the narrative of the coverage of the case of the disappearance of the Boeing 777 that carried out the 370 flight of Malaysia Airlines in March 2014, in order to identify what features of fait divers can be found in it. The discussion is based theoretically and methodologically in the studies on narrative, taking as main reference the work of Motta (2013). Based on this and other authors, we understand journalism as a narrative, that is, a process of ordering and production of meanings. For the discussion of fait divers, we are based on the definition of Barthes (1964). Articulating our theoretical and methodological contribution, we conducted our empirical study based on a corpus of 28 news items, collected from the online portal of the Folha de São Paulo newspaper, chosen as a reference journal. The analysis of the news allowed us to reconstruct the intrigue and identify the turning points of the narrative. At the final moment of the analysis, we apply the definitions of Barthes (1964), finding characteristics of fait divers (mainly of causality) in the narrative as a whole, but not in the news alone.