Uma análise de manchetes à luz da Teoria da Relevância, noticiabilidade e sensacionalismo

Abstract

From the perspective of the Relevance Theory, an utterance is considered “relevant” to the extent that its positive cognitive effects are large and the mental processing effort is small. Taken that news headlines may be designed to optimize relevance, as well as to promote newsworthiness and sensationalism, the central aim of this study is to analyze Brazilian news headlines in an attempt to associate some tenets of Relevance Theory to the notions of newsworthiness and sensationalism. In order to carry out the study, 56 front pages from major Brazilian newspapers, extracted from the Corpus de Manchetes Brasileiras (CMB – Brazilian News headline Corpus), were analyzed. After the main headlines were identified, a sample was formed in order to carry out the qualitative analysis. The results showed how news headlines packed information in such a way that the news items many times appeared more significant and novel than it was the case. More particularly, the study also demonstrated how the headlines analyzed typically connected the concept of newsworthiness to the principles of Relevance Theory, while also working as click-baits to attract the reader to the news story.