The (de)construction representational party workers in Veja magazine

Abstract

In this article we reflect about the role of media in construction/deconstruction of social representations. Based on French Discourse Analysis, our purpose is to understand discursively how the media creates, recreates and legitimizes, as effects of meaning, a social representation of Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), starting from the corruption crisis during the government of President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva in 2005. We selected as material of analysis - a thematic file of cover stories from Veja magazine about PT – Abril Publishing House, 1923rd edition, Sept. 21, 2005. We pointed diagnoses of discursivity in linguistic, imagetic and socio-historical materialities and from intradiscursive and interdiscursive axes, we detected a heterogeneity of voices and a discursive memory networks where old and crystallized speech about PT was reused in order to re-signify in face of a particular socio-historical and ideological context. By the end of the analytical process, the conflicting, dissonant and heterogeneous voices associated with an old representation of the party were then found in process of removal, denial and comparison nourishing a new social representation of PT, potentially able to erase, transform, promote and strengthen the relationships of the party with society’s plot.