Interesse público em mídias legislativas: um estudo da produção noticiosa da Agência Câmara Notícias

Abstract

This research aims to evaluate the public interest present in the news production of the House of Representatives’ News Agency. The Editorial Handbook of the Communications Department of the Brazilian House of Representatives points out the public interest as the main criterion of newsworthiness of its vehicles. The focus on the public interest is the main argument in the defense that these legislative media carry out public communication. It represents, therefore, a crucial element in the justification of the very existence of such vehicles before society and its credibility, both as a source for the press, but mainly as a means of information for the citizen. It is also known that journalism itself is considered a space of public interest, although this perspective is often adopted as a discourse rather than an effective practice. Despite the ambiguity surrounding the nature of the vehicle we analyze, between institutional or public communication, but considering the editorial proposal of the Communication of the House of Representatives, we use as theoretical basis the studies of the public interest in Journalism. Given the complexity of the proposed objective, as a consequence of the indeterminacy around the concept of public interest, we proceeded to an empirical analysis in three stages, which represent different levels or dimensions of achievement of the public interest, applied in a corpus of 211 news produced by House of Representatives’ News Agency. In the first stage, we separate the topics by subject and look for aspects related to the public interest: Relevance/significance, Notoriety, Impact, Transparency, Consequences and Principles/values (SILVA, 2002; WOLF, 1999; MOREIRA, 2006; CHAPARRO, 2012). In the second, we seek to visualize the public interest in the type of fact reported, according to the classification of Gomis (1991, 2002) in Results (events that present fait accompli), Explosions (unexpected events with drastic consequences), Displacements (steps or phases of an event) and Apparitions (events characterized by oral manifestation); Finally, we try to understand the public interest in the way the content is developed, evaluating the plurality of sources and the equilibrium (ROTHBERG, 2011; SERRANO, 2011). Another resource adopted was the realization of interviews with some professionals of the Agency, in order to better understand its production process. After the analysis, we reach the following conclusions: the Agency’s material has attributes of public interest, but it is necessary to analyze other dimensions to verify compliance with this criterion; Any kind of fact may present a public interest, but the Displacements and Appearances are more important than Results and Explosions when considering the specificity of the Agency; The plurality is quite limited or even non-existent in the Agency because the news is centered on parliamentary voices or brings voices of the society only in cases of its participation in the activities of the House of Representatives. In this way, we can say that there is a potential of public interest in the House of Representatives’ News Agency, especially for the attributes linked to its central theme. However, the prevalence of institutional criteria on values of journalism or public communication itself prevents this potential from being higher.