THE MEDIA COVERAGE ABOUT BNDES IN THE FHC AND LULA GOVERNMENTS: orthodox bases in narratives on privatizations and PAC

Abstract

This study sought to analyze the relations between economy and the media, in order to demonstrate their particularities and affinities through the analysis of the treatment of the Brazilian press to the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES). The following assumptions based the research. Journalism, especially the economic one, constitutes a field of symbolic production characterized by relations of autonomy and heteronomy towards to other fields, specifically that of economists. BNDES is an important institution for training and acting in the field of economists and has had its functions changed in the governments of the former presidents of Brazil Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002) and Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010), being more aligned with the orthodox/liberal bias in the first, and heterodox/(neo)developmentalist in the second. Thus, mediaticframing analysis was performed in the articles of the economics-oriented publications about the BNDES in the newspapers Folha de São Paulo, O Estado de São Paulo and O Globo, in the years of 1996 to 1998, representing the FHC period, and of 2007 to 2009, of the Lula government. The analysis identified that the framings applied to treat the BNDES in the period were aligned with an orthodox view of the economy, as far as the incidence of framings specifically linked to one or another pole of the field of economic thought, as far as the observation of frames imbued with negative judgment in the considered (neo) developmental period of the Bank. This affinity revealed that fields of economic journalism and economists are so closely related that symbolic principles and positions of the latter are reproduced in the former.