2020 has been one of the most challenging years for many aspects of life. When considering how journalism is coping with the current health crisis, we may find a historical record; and not a good one.
Violence against journalists raises awareness amid the coronavirus pandemic due to growing cases of arrests or threats to journalists and restricted press freedom reported in many countries. Acknowledging the Brazilian case, organizations such as the National Federation of Journalists (FENAJ), the Brazilian Press Association (ABI) and the Brazilian Investigative Journalism Association (Abraji) also recently reported the rise of violence against journalists in the country.
Along with this particular growth, accelerated with the coronavirus pandemic, we must consider the political and polarized context. As a sign of contemporary times, social platforms are environments prioritized by populist governments. In an era of disintermediation between sources and the public, it is common for political figures to back down or deny information provided to journalists, especially when it leads to a negative public reaction. With this pattern, they reinforce the idea of an unreliable behavior of the press and place themselves as a source of the “truth” about the facts. The phenomenon of disintermediation of sources is more visible when public figures appropriate virtual spaces, becoming a direct channel of dissemination in contact with the same journalism audience.
As spaces for exchanging information without actually journalistic mediation, YouTube lays as an essential platform for publishing videos online. The president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, represents one striking example on the global spectrum of how journalists and the media are being treated by some political figures.
It is not possible to point out a direct relation between how politics refer to the media and violence against journalists, but this context is definitely intertwined. Recently published at the Brazilian Association of Journalism Researchers (SBPJor), the paper “Attacks on the press on Jair Bolsonaro’s YouTube channel — a study in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic” (in Portuguese) analyses what kind of content is published on the Brazilian president’s Youtube channel. The time frame covers the first hundred days of the crisis — from February 26 to June 4, 2020. Written in collaboration with Dr Janara Nicoletti*, the focus of the research remains on identifying the frequency and types of attacks on the media present in the content published on Jair Bolsonaro's YouTube channel. It is also important to understand how the engagement shows in relation to different analysis categories. The paper is also part of the project "Violência contra jornalistas brasileiros em tempos de crise sanitária e política — um estudo dos perfis de Jair Bolsonaro no Instagram, Facebook, Twitter e YouTube" integrated at PPGJOR (UFSC), objETHOS and Nephi-Jor.
Combining Content Analysis and Digital Methods
To complete the study on Bolsonaro’s Youtube channel, it was designed a hybrid methodology combining Content Analysis and Digital Methods. In order to study the content disseminated on a social platform, it is important to understand these environments from their own concepts. Digital methods, for example, offer an approach to understanding how metrics and native digital objects can be used simultaneously as a case and a research tool. An important notion is the grammatization of Social Media that corresponds to all the traceable actions and collective forms of activity imposed and rearranged by these environments. Likes, comments, dislikes, shares, views are all part of the specificity of the platform, which joins the culture of use. It is also important to understand beyond the technical specificity, to which digital methods are often reduced. In this sense, our interest is not only centered on the development of technical functions and native objects but also aware of how these elements are appropriated to standard behaviors on social platforms.
For this, data extraction was performed through YouTube Data Tools — software that collects data via YouTube API (V3). With the Channel Info module, basic information of a channel is provided through the identifier code (id). The Video list module was also applied for extracting the listing of all videos published on the channel and includes data such as video URL, title, description, date and time of publication, duration, view count, likes, dislikes, favorites, comments, among others. The output files are in .tab, editable in Excel or Google Sheets.
The inquiry of the published content was based on an exploratory analysis of the videos, in which the titles and descriptions of the posts were observed. During this process, it was also possible to catalog the main themes proposed by the president’s Youtube channel. Then, the initial classification process was carried out, in which the origin (source), theme, and type of press mention were verified.
It was possible to better elaborate the type of mention about the press, in which different variations were observed: from criticism and discrediting to verbal attacks and incitement to physical aggression. With that, it was possible to finalize the content analysis protocol.
With the final content analysis protocol, the posts were classified according to the source of the content, the subject of the publication, whether there was mention of the press and what tone of reference was made in the videos.
After categorizing all 257 videos, percentages were calculated and different spreadsheets were organized in order to process the data to be applied in the web-based visualization tool Raw Graphs.
Main results
The perceptions of connection between the scenario of violence against media professionals and the study of the specificities of the content published on Jair Bolsonaro’s YouTube channel become more evident. The purpose of this study was to identify the patterns and how regularly the politician mentions the press. Beyond that: to understand the tone of the official content via YouTube — a priority environment in the government’s communication strategy.
It shows that of the total topics announced by the profile on the social platform, 36% refers to the press and, among these, 40% represent direct criticism. With that, it is possible to identify a consistent and regularly reiterated narrative. In an environment without journalistic mediation, most of the videos released bring a version of facts to be deconstructed, a farce of journalism to be denied or persecution of the Bolsonaro family to be denounced.
The approach in relation to the press, mostly spoken in the President’s own words, was classified into ten categories: eight of them negative, one neutral, and one positive. Threat (1%), Physical Aggression (1%), Disregard (5%), Harassment (5%), Compliment (5%) and Neutral (8%) were identified in a smaller number, but still relevant considering a public figure of national leadership.
While Critical (40%), Verbal Attack (28%) and Disbelief (26%) lead the ranking of press mentions.
The purpose of reading the engagement of the videos based on the themes presented — 50% focused on the COVID-19 pandemic, it is also clear which type of tone suggests to be better accepted by the YouTube audience. The audiovisual content that explicitly criticizes, attacks, or discredits the press produces more engagement.
This result reinforces reports that claim that Bolsonaro’s loyal supporters understand that the difficulty in governing is attributed to what they perceive as media boycotts. Another interesting point is the proof that the videos that criticize the press in a general way, as an abstract institution but the enemy of the president and his government, add up to the highest numbers of interaction.
As already mentioned, it is unreliable to affirm that this positioning pattern is responsible for the increasing violence against journalists; but it is possible to prove that the politician through his YouTube channel has a consistent strategy of deauthorizing journalists and media organizations. Based on the higher interaction and engagement on these specific content that discredits media we can imply that this may develop an environment that empowers the public, especially government and Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters, to do the same.
Main References
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*Dr Janara Nicoletti holds a Master’s and PhD degree in Journalism from the Graduate Program in Journalism at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (PPGJOR / UFSC), with a period as a visiting researcher during a sandwich doctorate at Technische Universität Ilmenau (Germany). Winner of the Adelmo Genro Filho 2020 Award in the doctorate category, she works as a researcher associated with the Journalistic Ethics Observatory (objETHOS/UFSC). Develops studies related to job insecurity, journalistic quality, exposure to risks and violence against media professionals. She has also investigated issues related to freedom of expression and the conflict between the public and private dimensions in the use of social networks by journalists.
