Imaginários em midiatização: o mito do complô na circulação de sentidos sobre fraude eleitora

Abstract

This work investigates the circulation of meanings about electoral fraud in Brazil, from April 2021 to January 2023, focusing on the mediatization of social processes and the crossing of political imaginaries and mythologies in the construction of fraud narratives. Using the discursive circulation analysis method and the evidentiary paradigm, the strategies and tactics of political, social and institutional actors to manage circulation, reconfigure fraud narratives, amplify them, as well as attempts to contain these statements are examined. by professional journalism. Furthermore, the case study method is adopted to build an analytical device that allows the investigation of mediatized interactions and the communication circuits through which interacting subjects attribute value to electronic voting machines and the electoral system as a whole. When analyzing the circuits together, we arrived at a common denominator: the mythology of the plot. In the imaginary of fraud, shared by the Bolsonaro bubble, the plot is the central piece that gives meaning to Bolsonaro's (PL) defeat. At the level of inferences, voter fraud is a mental and discursive product that, at the same time, feeds and is fed by an imaginary that permeates media and political processes. From the episodes studied, it was possible to observe that fraud takes on different meanings, depending on the environment in which it circulates. These disputed meanings highlight the space of circulation, that is, the process of lag between the discursive poles of production and recognition, even though, in advanced stage mediatization, there is an uninterrupted exchange between those who produce and those who receive the statements. Thus, the study reveals the situation of mediatization that reconfigures the electoral process, in which political actors act as active agents in the formation of communities of belief and in the dissemination of fraud narratives. Finally, this thesis contributes to communication studies by elucidating the role of mediatization in reconfiguring the sphere of public visibility and contemporary political debates. There is a change in the concept of social communication. Facts no longer depend on mass media to gain public visibility, which reinforces our premise that mediatization studies emerge as a new paradigm for communication studies.