This thesis aims to analyze the social conditions of the position-taking on the right-wing or left-wing of media intellectuals in contemporary Brazil. The proposal is to make their political positions sociologically intelligible, especially regarding two recent moments of crisis: the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and the election of Jair Bolsonaro. Taking these media intellectuals as the object of study, I analyze the borderline area, between university and journalism, but also the interrelationships with the political, economic and literary fields – this area, within this thesis, is called the “opinion market”. To answer the main question of the thesis, I established three main lines of analysis and, consequently, three specific objectives that are analytically interconnected: 1) the investigation of the trajectories, positions and position-taking of the agents studied; 2) the analysis of the relationships established among these intellectuals as well as between themselves and their presumed audiences, based on the forms of identification, the disputes and the types of symbolic production; 3) the indication of the panorama of contemporary transformations in the opinion market in Brazil. The thesis that I try to defend here is that there is a correlation between the position-taking by the media intellectuals and the positions they occupy in this space – which are the result of the trajectories traced, the accumulated capitals and their incorporated dispositions -, with the opinion market structured at the same time in hierarchies and poles: specialists, academics, mainstream journalists, journalist-bloggers, polemicists and activists. This opinion market, moreover, is marked by the economic logic to the detriment of the intellectual logic.

Author: Allana Meirelles Vieira
Source: https://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8132/tde-03122021-221308/en.php