Images of nature in the Folha de S. Paulo and O Estado de S. Paulo newspapers

Abstract

In the field of the production and circulation of meanings by the media and in the approach of the journalistic phenomenon from studies of the imaginary, the article takes as object of analysis the images of nature in printed journalistic texts. As methodologies, the adapted combination of Gilbert Durand's two methods, mitochristic and mitoanalysis, was adopted from the epistemological perspective. In the operational perspective, the printed editions of two national daily newspapers, Folha de S. Paulo (1995 -2012) and O Estado de S. Paulo (1995-2012), were taken as an empirical object. No distinction was made between sections of the editorials or journalistic genres, observing images of nature present in the most diverse news situations, whether in economics or tourism, short story, signed article or editorial. In total, 915 news units were worked qualitatively and quantitatively. The research aimed to visualize sets of images in the Brazilian press that have been orienting or expressing, in the last three decades, the Brazilian society's thinking about nature, about the natural world.