Mediatization, polarization, and intolerance (between environments, media, and circulation)

Ada C. Machado da Silveira 160 1. Introduction The text is dedicated to addressing the perspective of the mediatization of the professional journalistic-news universe, circumscribed by the notion of newsworthiness. The proposi- tion of analytics of mediatization and news in face of the com- munication issue of journalistic mediation allows us to study the alleged centrality of the media in the communication processes 2 . It is a process that would catalyze changes assumed both in the media environment and in communication in general, in addi- tion to interfering in culture and society (HEPP, 2014, p. 45). Addressing the phenomenon of the polarization of Bra- zilian society calls for attention to extremely critical aspects of social division, for which the media activity competition is un- derstood as centralizing the diverse, instituted, and emerging agents. By deepening the study of the disempowerment of in- stitutional public security agents in the crisis unleashed in the city of Rio de Janeiro at the beginning of 2018, I understand that there has been a strengthening of a political-police-military agenda for the coverage of the reference media and digital social media as a reaction articulated by such agents 3 . I also under- stand that the task force organized to operate military interven- tion and carry out civilian control of the city of Rio de Janeiro in early 2018 sought to count, in several ways, precisely with the power of proliferation of a culture of surveillance to carry out 2 The text integrates activities of the joint research project entitled “Mediatiza- tion: empirical, epistemological, and methodological inferences of media re- search in Brazil and Sweden”, approved in Edital no. 19/2019 CAPES/STINT Program, coordinated by UNISINOS and with the participation of UFSM. Its objective is to develop methodological and epistemological approaches for the analysis of social media processes. The perspectives developed in Sweden were present at the II International Seminar on Mediatization and Social Processes, also held by UNISINOS with the participation of UFSM, and will be at the fourth Seminar (in 2020). The interlocution, in particular the perspective of Göran Bo- lin, in the relations he develops between the mutations in the social uses of the media, narratives, and mediatization, provided the opportunity for the develop- ment of the cooperation project. 3 The city of Rio de Janeiro has already been the target of localized action by the National Force in 2007, a time when there was coverage of the return of military presence in Rio’s favelas, images of broad symbolic impact (SILVEIRA, 2008).