Entre flagrantes do cotidiano e qualidades noticiosas: o uso de imagens de câmeras de vigilância na produção telejornalística do CETV 1ª Edição

Abstract

The culture of surveillance (Lyon, 2018) permeates contemporary society. To exist in today’s world inevitably involves interacting, to some extent, with fluid practices of social monitoring that manifest in previously unimaginable ways. Video surveillance processes, as one of the structures shaping this sociotechnological landscape, extend across various contexts, surpassing the purely securitarian dimension. In journalism, the use of footage from surveillance cameras has gained prominence, fostering new dynamics in the publicization of daily events (Andrade, 2018). Amid the recognition of the recurrent media presence of surveillance footage, we seek to understand how the relevance of these images is established within the field of television journalism and what their use implies in terms of transformations in the news production routines of journalistic outlets. To address this issue, we base our analysis on the production of the CETV 1ª Edição newscast, broadcast during the months of August, September, and October in 2019, 2020, and 2022. We assume that one of the defining elements for the publicization of scenes captured by surveillance cameras and broadcast by the Ceará-based newscast lies not only in the association between the newsworthy qualities of the reported event and the footage provided but also in the surveillance image itself and its capacity to elicit engagement effects from the audience. In this regard, we centrally employ the concept of news values, understanding it as one of the existing criteria for newsworthiness (Wolf, 2008; Silva, 2014), with the aim of grounding the theoretical-analytical perspective of the thesis and, thereby, constructing a discussion that highlights continuities as well as updates within the investigated informational landscape. Methodologically, the study employs content analysis (Sampaio; Lycarião, 2021; Bardin, 2016) and in-depth interviews (Gaskell, 2008) as the main procedures guiding the analysis of the CETV 1st Edition’s news production. The findings reveal a predisposition on the part of the Ceará-based newscast to select and publicize surveillance footage depicting incidents related to violence and public security. These choices reflect the adoption of an editorial perspective and a constant concern to align the CE 1’s propositions with the viewers’ expectations, thus revealing the convergence between these two dimensions in the effort to define the relevance of daily events. Additionally, it was also possible to identify the occurrence of a dual associative process, which we refer to as amplified association and partial association. These are characterized, on the one hand, by the combination of surveillance footage with specific categories of news values and, on the other, by the mobilization of surveillance footage as a salient aspect in relation to newsworthiness criteria (news values). This outlines a pathway where the definition of relevance is anchored in the possibilities extracted from the visual content itself, as a source capable of capturing the attention and engaging the senses of viewers.