The struggle for information control in Rio's newsrooms (1975-1981). Political openning and power strategies in the field of journalism
jornalists; information control; military dictatoryship
This thesis’ goal is to analyze the strategies of journalists in the struggle for information control, during the political opening of the military dictatorship. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of field and habitus, this research investigates the field of journalism in order to identify its agents’ strategies in the struggle for power against government censorship. With this goal, we analyzed reports by the newspapers O Globo and Jornal do Brasil on the Riocentro bombs (1981) that revealed selection criteria specific to the journalistic procedures tailoring the public narratives about the episode. Through oral sources and newspaper pages records, this work describes the structure and procedures of news production, the journalists’ working conditions and the relations between reporters, columnists, editors and newspaper directors with state power instances. The interdependence between the fields of journalism and politics is then revealed, not as a deviation from the press institution's function, but as part of the rules that constitute and are constituted by both fields. In this sense, censorship may be seen as a state strategy that breaks the power game rules by invading the journalistic field. The invaded field agents react by unifying the field to confront the invader. The field of journalism’s strategies of information control are then hidden by a narrative that overestimated the action of censorship and the principle of resistance as a belonging condition to the field of journalism.