SIMILAR, BUT NOT THE SAME: Comparing Editorial and News Agendas in Brazilian Newspapers

ABSTRACT

Considering the criteria that newspapers use for selecting topics to be covered, this article examines if and to what extent editorials and news agendas match or diverge in two mainstream Brazilian news organizations: Folha de S. Paulo and O Estado de S. Paulo. The corpus consists of 672 front-cover stories and editorials published in both newspapers from January 2015 to December 2016. Qualitative (Content Analysis) and quantitative (frequency and correspondence analysis) methods are put in action to understand if there is inner/outer convergence regarding newspaper agendas. The results show that both FSP and OESP published a significant amount of political content in their news and editorials. Nevertheless, they follow different patterns of agenda since the set of subtopics internally selected by each publication do not precisely mirror one another. The news topics covered in FSP are similar to the editorial ones covered in OESP, just as the news topics in OESP are similar to the editorials in FSP. Even though these results contribute to assessing the performance of journalism as a political actor, they also weaken the belief that news coverage is necessarily homogeneous.

KEYWORDS:

• Newspapers
• News organizations
• Journalistic agenda
• Editorial journalism
• political communication
• Journalistic objectivity
• Production routines
• Opinionated journalism

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Giulia Fontes, João Senna Teixeira, and the referees.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Although OESP has three opinion texts per issue (while FSP has two), both newspapers highlight a single editorial per day (it is longer than the others and stands out on the page)—this was considered the main daily editorial.

2 Available at http://www.anj.org.br/maiores-jornais-do-brasil/. Access: 2 June 2018.

3 According to Hallin and Mancini (2004), quality papers are directed at elite readers; require specialized work; give more space to political news; and get most of their profits from publicity.

4 Although there were local elections in 2016, the weeks that this research addresses do not include election campaigns (which could reduce the regular coverage of other issues).

5 The confidence interval adopted for this research is 95%.

6 Due to the low occurrence of the “Political ideology” subtopic, which was absent from news of both newspapers, it was disregarded in the correspondence analysis.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Brazilian National Scientific Council (CNPq, process 309967/2017-1) and Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES, process 23038.009168/2013-81).