Guerra do Rio, Guerra do Extra ... Guerra de Quem?

Abstract

This article proposes to analyze the strategy of the Extra newspaper of Rio de Janeiro, when creating the publishing house "Guerra do Rio" to classify the news related to urban violence in the capital of Rio de Janeiro. We use as a theoretical contribution the concept of the (dis) narcotizing function of the media pointed out by Merton and Lazarsfeld (2000), a characteristic picture of popular newspapers in which politics, economics and varieties are mixed in an entertainment and information package and also in a scenario of banalization of violence, pointed out by authors like Chauí (1999) and of political transformations in the age of mass communication, indicated by Gomes (2004). We used, as a methodology, discourse analysis of the main report published in the data of the creation of the editor, as well as five covers of the newspaper with the term "guerra", four before and one after the appearance of the publishing house.