Conflict as a structuring category of the political narrative: the case of the Jornal Nacional

Abstract

This article explores the hypothesis that the meta-category “conflict” centralizes and structures newscasts based on a bipolar framing. Characters from the political scene are placed successively against each other, interweaving the narrative texture. Conflict is taken as a pre-category preceding that which will become news, from which other subcategories (protagonist, antagonist, enemy) derive. Thus, news coverage not only represents political reality, but delimits and institutes it as well. The empirical analysis presented in the article focuses on the coverage of a recent political scandal by the Jornal Nacional, the main television newscast in Brazil.