O estudo “Identidades religiosas em Portugal”: a mediação jornalística

This text analyses the articles that appeared in Portuguese newspapers in relation to the presentation of the study Religious Identities in Portugal by the Portuguese Bishops’ Conference in April 2012. Of the fifteen articles published, almost half were reports, in which journalists obtained information from the Catholic institution that was behind the study and sought statements and opinions from specialists in religion and those responsible for other religious faiths in order to establish other perspectives, complementary but not antagonistic. Many of the texts are signed by journalists, who carried out a very rigorous portrait of the results of the study. From the same analysis it may be concluded that other journalistic texts on the Catholic Church, publicising other activities and other leaders, also contributed to the ‘news bubble’: the intersection of events, results and social agents in the news, as if these constituted the only possible narrative.