Conversação Cívica e Deliberação entre Fronteiras: Discursos da Mídia sobre o Fórum Social Mundial no Brasil

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore the manner through which the World Social Forum gains public visibility through Brazilian news, encompassing voices of several actors and different orders of understandings, particularly expressed in O Globo, Folha de S. Paulo e Estado de Minas, during three subsequent years. In the first part of the text, more conceptual questions are assessed, such as how the WSF, in its characteristic as a meeting place for debate, can be apprehended by means of political theory formulations, in particular those derived from deliberative model of democracy. Then, we explore the perplexities that the Forum ends up imprinting upon the journalist coverage, taking into consideration the procedures of the news construction. In the second part, the representations of the WSF steaming from the journalistic coverage are analyzed - that is, i) the Forum is a fest, a carnival, be this understood as a breaking of the social order in an inconsequent manner, be it as a disclosure of potentially critical senses; ii) the Forum consists in a utopia, either as a visionary project or a new becoming; iii) the Forum is a manifestation of segments of the left, that manifestation being apprehended as something retrograde or, then, as a new form of political organization.