Mediatization, post-truth, and knowledge production about Covid-19 257 speech and ultra-conservative scientific denialism are “the most recent manifestations of this call to the body, of this affirmation of the body as a producer of meaning” (OLIVEIRA, 2020, p. 97). Finally, in the contemporary era of testimony, according to Wieviorka (1998), testimony is a true social imperative that arises as an inner need. As already observed in another work (SACRAMENTO, 2018), the testimony, as a dominant autobiographical narrative, establishes another relationship type with the truth, which is not with the evidence or the alleged objectiv- ity of scientific knowledge but based on values such as sincerity and authenticity. Or better, the evidence is the guarantee of the real existence of what is reported by the narrative of the lived experience. It is a shift from referentiality from objectivity to subjectivity. The promise of authenticity by the narrator is in the performance, in the enunciative strategies (in the atmosphere of intimacy, the search for closeness, the revelation of details from personal life, the exposure of emotions and opinions). After all, whoever says “this happened to me” puts the body in the speech, offering to the public a living proof: the proof is life itself, the lived experience per se. For the proposed analysis, I depart from the work of Ivo Dittrich (2009), who recognizes that the ethos refers to the parts in the statement that “presented arguments to say to what extent its content, that action foreseen in the sense and scope of the thesis, proved adequate from a legal and sociocultural point of view” (ibid., p. 66). Ethos also refers to the authoritative sup- port of the proponent of a thesis and its correspondence with the moral principles and values at play in a given context. In terms of operationalizing a discourse analysis, Dit- trich (2009) presents two forms of arguments. The legitimating arguments involve the “notions of an ethical nature inscribed in the propositional content of the thesis” (ibid., p. 66), whose reach would not be given only by the trust in the proponent but in the legitimacy of the proposal in relation to the moral values that it attacks or preserves. Thus, the enunciator’s concern is directed “to the values at stake, presenting arguments that seek to justi- fy why the thesis, or its acceptance, remains in line with what is dear to the society it intends to conquer” (ibid., p. 72). As for the credentialing arguments, they correspond to the “justifications
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