A construção discursiva do impeachment de Dilma Rousseff no portal g1 (2014-2016) e seus impactos na consciência social brasileira

Abstract

The general objective of this research is to analyze how the g1 website, from the Globo Group, discursively constructed a pro-impeachment narrative regarding President Dilma Rousseff between 2014 and 2016, identifying its implications for the construction of social and critical consciousness in Brazil. In light of this, five specific objectives were delineated: i) to understand how the discourses of the g1 website, within the context of Dilma Rousseff's impeachment, contributed to shaping public opinion and reinforcing power relations within Brazilian society; ii) to analyze the president's impeachment as an expression of the crisis of Brazilian democracy, highlighting its structural foundations, the role of elites and institutions, and its insertion into the neoliberal context; iii) to describe the g1 portal as the central setting of the investigation, understanding how its coverage of the impeachment constructed public narratives that influenced Brazilian social consciousness, and to map the journalistic frames adopted between 2014 and 2016; iv) to analyze how the g1 website, in its impeachment coverage, constructs a hegemonic narrative and influences the formation of public opinion; and, finally, v) to identify how the coverage of Dilma Rousseff's impeachment on the g1 website evidenced discursive strategies that construct a narrative of inevitability and legitimation of the process. The theoretical framework supporting the study includes authors such as Foucault (1996), Pierre Bourdieu (1989), Jürgen Habermas (1984), Teun van Dijk (2008, 2016), Walter Lippmann (2008), and Fernanda Dantas (2019). The methodological approach of this research is qualitative, with an interpretive, descriptive, and critical orientation. The primary methodological procedure adopted was content analysis, operationalized through discourse analysis. The research began with the selection of 50 news reports from the g1 website regarding the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, published between 2014 and 2016, subsequently delimiting a final corpus composed of 6 central texts. The method proposed by Bardin (2016) was applied to this dataset, based on the definition of categories such as Power, Naturalization, Opinion Formation, Control of Groups over Minds, Public Spectacle, and Victim of Opinion. The results evidenced the articulated action of three discursive macro-strategies in g1's coverage, responsible for constructing the narrative of inevitability and legitimation of the impeachment. The first macro strategies sustained the idea of a foregone conclusion by intensifying, from 2014 to 2016, frames such as ungovernability, loss of support, and collapse. The second depoliticized the crisis by translating the conflict into a technical-legal grammar, reinforced by experts and a discourse of neutrality. The third personalized the State by shifting the explanation of the crisis to traits attributed to the president, resignifying characteristics and producing a symbolic delegitimation that was consolidated through lexical repetition and narrative synchronization. Therefore, the study concluded that g1's coverage of Dilma Rousseff's impeachment contributed to naturalizing the institutional rupture, presenting her removal as an inevitable and technically justified solution. Furthermore, it demonstrated that the narrative constructed by the portal depoliticized the crisis, personalized the State in the figure of the president, and reinforced forms of symbolic violence, influencing public perception regarding the legitimacy of the process.