Abstract

BARROS, Susana. When a Left-wing Government scares the media: The formation of "geringonça" in newspapers. OBS* [online]. 2019, vol.13, n.1, pp.192-211. ISSN 1646-5954.

Faced with a growing interpretive tendency of political journalism rather than a descriptive style, the media has favoured tactics over substance. Far from being a mere observer of events, the journalist takes a leading role in the political game, contributing both to its development and to the construction of public perception of it. Focusing on the formation of the Socialist Party Government with the parliamentary support of the PCP (Portuguese Comunist Party), BE (Left Block) and PEV (Green Party) - known as "Geringonça" -, we look at the first pages of the newspapers Público, Diário de Notícias, Correio da Manhã and Observador, since the General Elections  of  October 4, 2015 until the approval of the Government's program on December 3, 2015, trying to capture the patterns about the journalistic narrative about an unprecedented post-election process in Portugal. With a corpus consisting of 356 pieces (233 newspaper covers and 123 editorials), in this article we focus in the framework given to this political process in the first pages and to the view of the journalistic elite about this period revealed in the editorials. We therefore place this work in the area of Agenda-Setting and Framing insofar as we analyze how the media presents the formation of the Government and the issues that most highlight during the political negotiations, which can not be disconnected from the way media had reported the years of austerity and Troika's presence in Portugal. The results show that, although defeated at the election, the Secretary General of PS António Costa is the main figure of a period that is presented around two central axes: Stability (associated with the PSD / CDS coalition) / Instability ( associated with PS and left). Accompanying the tendency of political journalism, it is the game and not the politics in negotiations that is highlighted by the press whose dominant discourse hit the formation of a Left Government for economic and symbolic reasons.

Keywords : Political journalism; Agenda-Setting; Framing; Left Government; Media and Democracy.

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