"The crimes that marked the country": the construction of the narrative of the Linha Direta-Justiça program about the performance and social function of the journalistic media
Journalistic narrative, Linha Direta Justice, Memory.
The media are a substantial part of contemporary daily life. Our collective and individual historical experiences are today marked by a multiplicity of media, which at the same time as conveying events also construct the narrative parameters for understanding them. In this sense, it is common for us to base our temporal references on the way the media establish relations with the past, present and even the future. The aim of this research is to uncover this practice by analyzing the narrative construction of the program Linha Direta-Justice, aired on TV Globo from 2003 to 2007 as part of the "police" program Linha Direta. To this end, we have taken as our methodological support the guidelines derived from the concept of "media operation", which seeks to equate how the journalistic narrative deals with the dimension and facts of the past (SILVA, 2011). The problematic of this work was constituted in the wake of the process known in contemporary times as the "image paradigm", an aspect that implies the imperative of the television medium for the mediation not only of the reality experienced, but also for the formulation of memories and, in effect, identities. The study aims to demonstrate how Linha Direta-Justice sought to formulate representations of the past based on two axes: the first in relation to the construction of an image/memory of Brazil characterized as violent, unjust and impunity, accompanying the exhibition of each episode that makes up our documentary corpus by means of "crimes that marked the country"; and the second axis, in contrast to the first, aimed to construct a certain "positive historical tradition" of journalistic activity throughout Brazil's history, which we call the social function of the media