Open Lecture: Media as a securtizing agent in Brazil

Lecture

Date: Wednesday 3 May 2023

Time: 18.00 – 19.30

Location: Library of the Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies (building B, 5th floor)

Public powers can try to force the media into becoming a securitizing agent, part of a repressive security program. This open lecture will show how this happens in the case of Brazil.

Senado Federal from Brasilia, Brazil, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>
Senado Federal from Brasilia, Brazil, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

While facing the lag posed by the mediatization to journalistic activity, the conception underlying its practices is worthy of criticism when there is emphasis in repressive measures under the justification of maintaining the public order. The media as a securitizing agent is still taken as a condition to ensure an authoritarian security program. Coverages that are occupied with Guarantee of Law and Order (GLO) operations, for example, reports on waves of violence, and deeds that constitute criminality are ostensibly and exemplarily documented. Coercive and palliative actions that ignore preventive and social justice propositions define the order of the current newsworthiness in Brazil.

Speaker:
Ada Cristina Machado Silveira is a tenure professor in the Department of Communications Sciences at Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM), Brazil. She is finalizing her stay as a Senior Visiting Research Fellow CAPES-STINT in the Department of Media and Communication at Sodertorn University. She works in the Communication Program at UFSM and in the Professional Master's Degree in Communication and Creative Industry at the Federal University of Pampa, and is researcher at the National Council for Scientific Research CNPq. She works in the areas of Journalism, Media, Communication and Development.