Foreign Perspectives of Brazil: A textual Analysis of American Newspaper coverage

Abstract

Journalists´ perceptions of objectivity and news judgment may be infl uenced by extraneous factors such as audience, companies, and national politics, as well as personal cultures. Foreign correspondents have additional factors infl uencing these perceptions. This study analyzes the narrative of texts from three mainstream American newspapers written by their foreign correspondents in Brazil during the weeks prior to the 2004 American presidential election, looking at how the ideology of both foreign correspondents and newspapers were involved in the coverage of Brazil’s human and political reality. Although it is not possible to say that all the themes of the stories presented were based on American ideology or the writer’s ideological discourse, some of the issues reported on followed an American political framework. The little importance given to Brazilian sources and the presence of almost exclusively political and diplomatic sources may indicate a limited interaction between those correspondents and people from Brazil.