PROCEDIMENTOS RETÓRICO-NARRATIVOS DE CONSTRUÇÃO DE PERSONAGENS JORNALÍSTICAS: O CASO DO JORNAL EXPRESSO DURANTE O VERÃO DE 2013

Abstract

One of the Portuguese authors that discusses the contribution of Narrative Studies to the understanding of the performance of the journalistic character is Mário Mesquita. In his article “Personagem Jornalística: da Narratologia à Deontologia”, the author crosses concepts of narratology with examples from the media, and argues that the study of the construction of the journalist character should intersect with professional ethics principles.

In a more recent text, H. Heidbrink (Heidbrink, 2010:67-110) lays the foundations for the relevance of the study of character without taking into account the literary context that for decades has delimited and shaped it. The author makes a comprehensive review of the state of the art on the issue, focusing mainly on aspects that I am interested in exploring in this paper: the relationship between persona and character; the shifting boundaries between real and fictional; and the fact that ‘character’ is after all a semiotic construction, a cluster of complex and materially detectable signs, a product of specific rhetorical procedures.

Thus, based on an in-depth reading of these two texts, this paper aims to understand the rhetorical and narrative devices used by the press in creating media figures whose public knowledge is limited precisely to what is conveyed by the media. This discussion is illustrated with a non-exhaustive analysis of a series of issues of the Portuguese weekly Expresso published during the summer of 2013.