O papel da imprensa na mediatização de André Ventura nas eleições legislativas de 2019 e nas Presidenciais de 2021

Abstract

All over the world, Populism has become one of the most discussed topics in the analysis of political communication. Until 2019, Portugal was classified as “an exceptional case”, with no evidence of the presence of this type of discourse in national politics.However, André Ventura’s election to Parliament that year transformed political rhetoric and, consequently, the way the media looked at political events.With mediatization of Ventura’s discourse as the central theme of this investigation,the theoretical chapters focus on (1) the various definitions of the concept “Populism” and the various communication strategies associated with it, and (2) the theme of political communication and the various forms of media coverage, especially those that apply to political matters, including the digital one. To understand the evolution of André Ventura’s media coverage and his populist discourse, the present investigation uses the quantitative method of content analysis, which was used to analyse all journalistic pieces published by six portuguese newspapers and magazines during two electoral campaigns: the 2019 Legislative election and the 2021 Presidential election. Therefore, we notice that there is an evolution of his media coverage between elections, mainly due to the significant increase in news related to the Member of Parliament, as well as the amount of texts that place him as the main topic of the news. This evolution can be justified by the change in the candidate’s speech that, in a first phase did not present such a high level of populism - as was the case in the 2019 Legislative Elections, when he obtained less media coverage - and, in a more advanced period of his career - in his candidacy for the Presidency of the Republic, in 2021 -, in which he started to place a
populist rhetoric at the centre of his campaign actions.

Date of Award	10 Feb 2023
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Rita Figueiras (Supervisor)