Jornalismo e política externa: a imagem pública projetada do Brasil nos discursos diplomáticos e jornalísticos (1988-2022)

Abstract

The main purpose of the research is to identify the projected public image of Brazil in diplomatic discourses, within the scope of the United Nations General Assembly, and in journalistic discourses the printed publications of the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. We found that little research addresses the relationship between communication and diplomacy or national foreign policy, especially in the area of Communication. Based on this and other perceptions and taking into account the importance of this relationship for the construction of a nation's public image before the international community, we propose to analyze journalistic discourses about Brazilian foreign policy (PEB) and Brazil's diplomatic discourses. The research hypothesis is that journalistic discourse is constructed in opposition to the conduct of national foreign policy and, as a result, projects a public image antagonistic to that expected by diplomacy. We believe that journalistic positioning acts towards “media-broker diplomacy” (Gilboa, 2001). To perform the analyses, we adopted discursive argumentation as a theoreticalmethodological perspective (AMOSSY, 2018), based on an analysis protocol composed of six argumentative strategies, which are proposed by Amossy (2018a; 2018b), also finding reference in Perelman (2005) and Pozobon (2019). The corpus of research analysis is the entirety of Brazil's diplomatic discourses at the UN General Assembly and reports, opinion articles and editorials from Folha de S. Paulo, which deal with the annual UN meeting, in the period extending from 1988 until 2022. 18 diplomatic discourses and 36 printed editions of the newspaper were analyzed. Based on the analysis of argumentative strategies, one of the aspects identified is that peace is used in Brazilian discourses as a supreme value. Issues linked to the guidelines for conducting foreign policy, such as cooperation, multilateralism and regional integration, are also recurring themes in Brazilian discourses. In turn, the analysis of journalistic discourses allowed us to identify that there has been a significant change in the way news is constructed over the years. In some periods, journalistic construction opposes the federal government and the conduct of foreign policy, as in the governments of Lula, Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro. In this sense, there are periods in which the public image of Brazil in journalistic discourses opposes the image that diplomacy wants to project.