Política mediatizada: diálogos explícitos, influências implícitas

In May 2011, the Portuguese government signed a memorandum of understanding with the troika formed by the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission. The agreement formalized an external financing program that included a set of policies aimed at reducing state spending over the following three years. This would be a prominent theme on television, with daily coverage on the three main prime-time television news reports (RTP1, SIC and TVI). The research presented here involves the analysis of the different discourses in prime time about the external financing program, in four different periods. The first period corresponds to January 2011, when an external financing program was debated only as a possibility; the second, in May of the same year, when the agreement was formalized; during the third period of analysis, in January 2014, the debate focused on a set of policies put forward by the government to fulfill the program’s objectives but which were declared as unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court. In May 2014, the last period of analysis corresponds to the end of the program. The analysis accentuates an intertextual perspective of discourse, taking it as the result of editing processes and practices through which different discourses are merged – not only those of journalists, but also those of other actors – and rearticulated for the specific context of prime-time newscasts. The objective was to identify the main discursive structures with relative permanency used to legitimize or to justify political proposals for action put forward for the achievement of the program’s goals. Political discourse is thus mainly understood as argumentative – and as intermediaries, media organizations are seen as political actors responsible for the construction of a particular version of events.