Cercados, the documentary: between facts and lies, between press and discourses¹

Abstract

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, the clash and resistance of the press to the attacks and aggression by the deniers was evident. The documentary Cercados, produced by Globoplay, object of analysis of this work, portrays the challenges behind the scenes of the news coverage in the first year of pandemic in Brazil. Supported by concepts of enunciation theory and television studies, this paper aims to reflect on the effects of meaning produced by the audiovisual text and its contribution to critical reflection about the disinformation scenario, as well as the relevance of journalism as an institution of the democratic system. The results indicate that the organization of the discourse, marked by the aesthetics of self-referentiality, allows the enunciatee to enter the universe of journalistic production and identify with the thematic roles played by journalists.

Keywords
Cercados; Enunciation; Televisualities; Documentary; Journalism

Resumo

No contexto da pandemia da COVID-19 no Brasil, ficou evidente o embate e a resistência da imprensa frente aos ataques e agressões protagonizados pelos negacionistas. O documentário Cercados, produzido pela Globoplay, objeto de análise deste trabalho, retrata os desafios dos bastidores da cobertura jornalística no primeiro ano de pandemia no Brasil. Apoiados em conceitos da teoria da enunciação e estudos de televisão, objetiva-se refletir sobre os efeitos de sentido produzidos pelo texto audiovisual e sua contribuição para a reflexão crítica acerca do cenário de desinformação, bem como da relevância do jornalismo como instituição do sistema democrático. Os resultados indicam que a organização do discurso, marcada pela estética da autorreferencialidade, possibilita ao enunciatário adentrar ao universo da produção jornalística e identificar-se com os papéis temáticos desempenhados pelos jornalistas.

Palavras-chave
Cercados; Enunciação; Televisualidades; Documentário; Jornalismo

Resumen

Durante la pandemia de la COVID-19 en Brasil, se quedó evidente el embate y la resistencia de la prensa frente a los ataques y agresiones protagonizados por los negacionistas. El documentario Cercados, producido por la Globoplay, objeto de análisis de este trabajo, retrata los desafíos entre bastidores de la cobertura periodística en el primer año de la pandemia en Brasil. Respaldados por conceptos de la teoría de la enunciación y estudios de televisión, el objetivo es reflexionar sobre los efectos de sentido producidos por el texto audiovisual y su contribución para la reflexión crítica sobre el escenario de desinformación, así como de la relevancia del periodismo como institución del sistema democrático. Los resultados indican que la organización del discurso, marcada por la estética de la autorreferencialidad, posibilita al enunciador entrar en el universo de la producción periodística e identificarse con los papeles temáticos que desempeñan los periodistas.

Palabras clave
Cercados; Enunciación; Televisualidades; Documental; Periodismo

Introduction

Thinking some aspects of the relationship of the media text with sociocultural context from the analysis of an audiovisual production through a synchronous, conjunctural cut, is the scope of this paper, which operates with theoretical bases of television studies and discourse semiotics. The object of analysis is Cercados (2021), a Brazilian documentary that portrays the challenges behind the scenes of the news coverage of the first year of COVID-19 in Brazil, with emphasis on the actions of the federal government in relation to the pandemic.

Released on December 3, 2020, the documentary lasts 1 hour and 56 minutes and portrays the daily lives of professionals from the following media outlets: Folha de S.Paulo, Estado de S.Paulo, O Globo, Portal G1, Radio Bandnews FM, TV Cultura de Fortaleza, TV Globo, as well as international agencies and press collectives. The organization of the semantic universe of Cercados, while opening reading perspectives at different levels, makes a constant movement back to the notion of circumscription, point of convergence, producing a thematic isotopy related to the issue of delimited spaces, whether physical or symbolic. Fiorin (1996, p. 260, our translation²) clarifies that, in enunciation theory, studies on space privilege setting as being of the order of the semantics of spatiality, and one of the supporting conceptions is that “space is an object constructed from the introduction of a discontinuity in continuity” (FIORIN, 1996, p. 260). Such a characteristic projects, in the realm of discourse, from symmetrical and reversible spatial relations to spatial multidimensionality.

In this sense, space can be articulated in categories such as interiority versus exteriority, closure versus opening, fixity versus mobility, that is, categories that govern the analysis of space under the aegis of directionality and englobement. In Cercados, we are interested in identifying the articulations of the category englobed versus englobing and the scope of the semantic field of discourse, of its effects of meaning, from the metonymic character of an enclosure as locus of dysphoric connotation of the mode of news production.

Among the enunciative strategies present in the documentary, we highlight the relative self-referentiality of discursive making, notably television-intended, as a mechanism of persuasion in the following perspective:

To generate this effect, television itself opens to the public its technical device of enunciation: viewers can see the microphones, cameras and newsrooms. If paleotelevision intended to represent reality and tell it to its audiences with a pedagogical attitude, neotelevision replaces this didactic approach by a process of reality construction

(SCOLARI, 2009, p. 178).

Thus, in order to construct the reality on the conditions of journalistic production during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, a veridiction contract is established, that is, a sense effect of true meaning of saying, characteristic of documentary making. In this way, the effect of a sense of attention is engendered in the statement in order to promote the reflection of the communication recipients about the processes of information production in the country under the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro.

According to Fiorin (2018), the purpose of the act of communication is not only to inform, but to persuade the other to believe in what is being said. It is “a complex game of manipulation aimed at making the enunciatee believe in what is transmitted” (FIORIN, 2018, p. 75). And in this game of persuasion the enunciator uses several argumentative procedures to convince the enunciatee that the discourse is reliable, correct, and consistent with the “truth”. The effect of a sense of truth is a value on which the credibility of journalistic work is founded.

As Barros (2005) states, discursive mechanisms can create effects of truth or falsity. Greimas and Courtés (2020) state that truth can be thought of from the veridictory category of being versus appearing. Therefore, a discourse can produce an effect of the meaning of saying true when it is constituted as “a simulacrum set up to make it seem true and that it is, therefore, attached to the class of persuasive discourses” (GREIMAS; COURTÉS, 2020, p. 534). In this way, “the term veridiction or truth-telling is employed, since a discourse will be true when it is interpreted as true, when it is said to be true” (BARROS, 2005, p. 64). When producing a statement, the enunciator exercises manipulation as a persuasive act, and the enunciatee is responsible for the interpretative act. For Greimas (2014, p. 117),

the discourse is that fragile place in which is inscribed and read the truth and falsehood, lie and secret, the modes of veridiction resulting from the double contribution of the enunciator and the enunciatee; their different positions are established only in the form of a more or less stable equilibrium that comes from an implicit agreement between the two actors of the communication structure. It is this tacit agreement that is designated by the name of contract of veridiction.

The discursive strategies that construct the sense effect of truth-telling contained in Cercados as an audiovisual documentary production propose, as we will see, to denounce the difficulties of the professional exercise of journalism in covering the COVID- 19 pandemic in the year 2020 in Brazil, during Bolsonaro’s presidency.

Cercados and under tension

In the scope of the statement, the elements of the discursive level of the generative path of meaning (GREIMAS; COURTÉS, 2020), such as the projections of spatiality and the procedures of thematization of self-referentiality related to journalism, both articulated with the projections of time and person, and procedures of figurativization, result in the discursivization of a plot about the production of information in the documentary. In the spatial projections, Brazil is the encompassing space in which the backstage of journalistic work is approached in five encompassing spaces: the Brazilian capitals Manaus, Fortaleza, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, in addition to the federal district, Brasília. The latter is where the “little fence” where President Jair Bolsonaro frequently talks with popular people and, until a certain period, also included journalists, is installed, next to the Palácio da Alvorada, the official residence of the presidency of the republic in Brazil.

Organized without voice-over narration, the documentary does not use long interviews and, in its narrative, images of journalists’ experiences during the coverage of the first year of the pandemic are prioritized. In an interview for G1 Portal in December 2020, the director of Cercados, Caio Cavechini³, explained that the documentary makes a historical record of the challenges experienced by the Brazilian press, and instead of putting together a script with in-depth interviews, the team chose to make a production of immersion, showing images of the daily lives of journalists from the most varied vehicles. The testimonial character of the narrativization of the journalists’ way of acting, in which the enunciation allows producing the inseparable look effect of the enunciator and the enunciatee, operates as an important resource of convincing and identification with the press professionals.

In this way, Cercados has a narrative line based on the succession of facts in chronological order, sometimes non-sequential, producing effects of meaning that the documentary has a certain disalignment. However, an observation that considers the order of events allows us to state that the organization of the narrative is based on the chronology of events that occurred in the year 2020, with several actions at the same time, in different locations, that is, in different spatialities. The recording of the documentary began in mid-April 2020. This moment marked the beginning of the pandemic in Brazilian territory, and the first clashes resulting from the denialist posture of the president of the republic, aligned with the far-right view, towards the pandemic of COVID-19. This resulted in the misalignment of the policies to confront the spread of the virus in the country. This is because some of the state governors chose to follow the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO), as did the former Health Minister of the Bolsonaro government, Luiz Henrique Mandetta.

Denialism consists in denying a scientifically proven reality. The term was popularized by Rousso (1987), when referring to groups that denied the existence of the gas chambers that exterminated thousands of Jews during the Nazi German regime. In the specific case of the COVID-19 pandemic, President Jair Bolsonaro said he did not believe in the seriousness of the global health crisis, and consequently influenced the opinion of a large part of Brazilians, especially his supporters. As Fechine and Demuru (2022) ponder, the “rhetoric of disinformation” propagated by Bolsonaro in the face of the pandemic consisted of various discursive strategies that aimed to convince the population to adhere to his denialist and anti-scientific position, using not only the reproduction of fake news, but also fallacious arguments, which are explicit in the documentary Cercados.

During the documentary, several events are covered, such as the daily life of journalists in the “fence” of the Alvorada Palace; the clash of the press with President Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters; the experience of international news photographers in the Manaus cemetery; the drama in the São Paulo hospitals; the articulations of the press against the propagation of fake news; and the backstage of the editorial staff of Jornal Nacional.

The central problem presented in the documentary – which also gave rise to the title of the work⁴ – is the press on duty at the Palácio da Alvorada. However, the content explains that, since Jair Bolsonaro’s candidacy for the office of President of the Republic in 2018, the press began to be publicly disrespected, a fact that intensified after his inauguration. If journalists enjoyed free space to accompany the heads of state before, since Bolsonaro’s election, the Palácio da Alvorada has received bars that prevented the circulation of the press. Restricted to a “little fence” – as the bars are now called – the journalists share the space, where they receive verbal aggression, with supporters of the president.

The “little fence” is a delimited space, encompassed, evidenced as the stage of a major conflict at the very beginning of the documentary, specifically at 03’45”, when the scene in which Jair Bolsonaro arrives at Alvorada Palace is shown. Accompanied by his security guards, the president walks towards his supporters to greet them, ignoring the press present. After questions from journalists, Bolsonaro answers: “When you stop gossiping, I will talk to you”. Soon after, the president leaves the room, and one of his supporters turns to the journalists and insults them: “[...] when you are hungry, without working, without being able to leave your homes, when you start getting beaten, you will value a president that in forty decades, forty years, there has never been a president like this one [...]”. Such aggressions demarcate the placement of press professionals as opposing subjects, antagonistic to the narrative program of the president and his adjuvants, called “supporters”.

In several moments of the documentary, the conflicts in the “little fence” are shown interspersed with events in other spaces. The point of great tension can be seen at 01:24’21”, when the media outlets begin to broadcast fragments of the video of the ministerial meeting of April 22, 2020, which composed the investigative material about the interference or not of the Executive in the Federal Police. In these fragments, conversations between the president and his ministers were exposed, highlighting illegalities, lack of composure and unpreparedness to deal with the health crisis. Thus, on May 25, 2020, after offensive responses by the president against journalists in the fence, Bolsonaro’s supporters “cornered” the media by insulting them with offenses such as “you are trash”, “Globo is trash”. The aggressiveness of these supporters worried the media directors who feared physical aggression against the journalists. The fact led Grupo Globo and Folha de S.Paulo to abandon their coverage of the Alvorada Palace. During the exhibition of these scenes, the documentary shows all the discussions that led to this decision. The sense produced reflects the search to “humanize” on screen the figure of the journalist, who, in the exercise of his profession, is vulnerable to violence.

The COVID-19 drama segmented into spaces

The basic narrative program of the documentary Cercados reiterates the thematic isotopy of the obstacles faced by the press in unveiling to the public the discourse of the federal government that the pandemic and its consequences are not true. The narratives in different spatialities present in the documentary constitute a strategy to achieve this goal. The first space approached circumscribes the theme of the most serious of the consequences of COVID-19: death. In the public cemetery of Manaus, the collapse after many burials, approached through the eyes of the photographer of Agencia EFE³⁵, Raphael Lopes, who talks to gravediggers and family members, reveals the extent of the tragedy over the capital of Amazonas. The photographer’s testimony relates the sadness of families who buried loved ones in mass graves, without identification due to the high cost. Lopes also highlights the cases of denialism that he witnessed in the cemetery, such as that of a widower who had buried his wife, but who denied the disease and believed that the virus was an invention to hinder the government. In other words, the interpretative making of the subject who adheres to the negationist discourse is modalized by a not-want-to-believe act that the cause of death is COVID-19.

In addition to highlighting the severity of the pandemic, neglected by the authorities in Manaus, revealing the possibility of the terminative character of the contagion, the documentary presents the paths of subjects who experience the disease in its durability, always from the perspective of journalistic work. Cercados addresses, for example, the drama at the Vila Penteado General Hospital, in São Paulo, with overcrowded beds and overworked doctors and nurses. As it was not allowed to enter the hospitals, the documentary shows the strategies used by the journalists of Profissão Repórter to capture images of this reality during five days. The camera attached to the head of the on-duty physician allowed the team to follow the routine of the professionals fighting COVID-19 to save the lives of patients. Different significant relations in the shots figurativize emergency medical procedures, accompanied by gestures and facial expressions that produce effects of discouragement, anguish, and frustration among health professionals.

At the Tide Setubal Hospital, in São Paulo, reporter Danielle Zampollo, of Profissão Repórter, followed the drama lived outside the hospital by people who were waiting for information about their relatives’ health status. In the exteriority of this space, it is possible to deduce the passionate state of the waiting in the scenes of groups praying for hospitalized people. Seeking to obtain the identification of the enunciatee, the documentary highlights the story of Eliza Marinho and her husband, Sebastião Marinho, who was hospitalized for 44 days. At 01:15:10, the reporter accounts her involvement with the patients’ relatives: “We end up rooting for all of them. Today I’m here rooting for Sebastião”. This is a discursive mark to reiterate the sense of humanization of the journalist, a professional capable of establishing an affective relationship with the object of information.

The intercalation of the approach from physical spaces such as cemetery and hospitals to the symbolic space of social media starts at time 48:51, when another problem is addressed – the spread of fake news. The documentary shows screenshots of fake news disseminated on social networks during the peak of the pandemic in Brazil, which claimed inflation in the number of deaths from COVID-19 in the Amazon. Amidst the affliction, such fake news started to be replicated in WhatsApp groups of the Brazilian population, being boosted by the statements of the president of the republic himself, who even accused the media of spreading a sense of terror and wanting to overthrow his government, taking advantage of the pandemic. Given this scenario, the press was forced to check the posts that had content outside reality, as is the case of the fake news about the empty coffins in Manaus – false messages were broadcasted to claim that coffins were buried without bodies to increase the death toll in the city.

The counterpoint to the virtual environment of disinformation circulation occurs in the narrative segment about the creation and the daily life of an editorship called “Fato ou Fake” (Fact or Fake), belonging to the G1 Portal. The editorship is responsible for checking on a daily basis whether the content that was repercussed was real or contained decontextualized photos and videos. At 51:33, reporter Roney Domingos, from Portal G1, highlights the importance of journalistic work in combating the fake news created during the pandemic:

[...] This becomes very relevant because you feel that you are in a kind of trench. And then when you come across some speeches, some information that you see that is absolutely false, often issued by people who should be reliable, it is like being involved in a war in which if you can produce a reliable source and make it reach people, you can be saving a life.

When narrating the challenges of the “Fact or Fake” editor against the dissemination of fake news, the reporter mentions the conduct of “people who should be reliable”. We can infer that Roney Domingos is referring to the president of the republic, since soon afterwards the documentary shows that Jair Bolsonaro shared some fake news during the peak of the pandemic, exciting the conspiracy theories formulated by deniers.

This excerpt illustrates the discussion related to saying the truth and the appearing to be truth of an enunciation, as previously discussed. In the fiduciary contract socially established in communication relations, the journalistic news constitutes a discourse with the effect of a true meaning of saying, that is, credibility is a fundamental element of the persuasive act, by the enunciator, and the interpretative act, by the enunciatee. On the other hand, fake news do the same. Both have the goal of convincing the public, however, the difference lies in the production process of these statements, where the first is submitted by criteria and mechanisms of rigid checking, while the latter is based on theories formulated by personal observation, most often mistaken. From the perspective of the semantic category of veridiction, which articulates the opposition being versus seeming, the challenge is to find mechanisms to identify in the discourse the marks that contrast the effects of meaning to say the truth and seeming true.

Barros (2005) states that to deny the “truth” of a discourse there are two possibilities: a) analyzing its structure to identify if the discourse is badly constructed; b) inserting a text in the context of other texts and confront its composition to then say it is a lie or a fake. In this sense, by creating strategies to reinforce the credibility of its work, Cercados shows how the press seeks to convince the viewer about the dangers of spreading fake news.

Although the synopsis of the documentary states that the production followed the routine of several media outlets, Cercados puts in a prominent role the journalistic work of TV Globo, especially Jornal Nacional. This becomes evident halfway through the film when the documentary presents the news program as a target of attacks by Jair Bolsonaro. The exerpt 01:23:41 shows the president in a press conference in the little fence with provocations to Jornal Nacional: “[...] it’s been twelve minutes since funeral TV has been on the air, TV Globo!”. And he continues imitating the voice intonation of anchors Renata Vasconcelos and William Bonner, comparing the presenter’s expression to that of a “regretful nun”.

In another moment, at 01:35:38, again in a press conference, when asked about the decision of the Ministry of Health on the change in the time of disclosure of the numbers of deaths by COVID-19, Jair Bolsonaro again provokes, saying “The story of Jornal Nacional is over”. Then, the documentary shows how the fact had repercussions in the newsroom and shows the discussions between William Bonner and the journalists of the newsroom, who tried to report the delay of the data in the best way possible. It also reveals the decision to hold an on-duty shift at 10 pm to release the COVID- 19 data. Later, the formation of a press association to obtain and publish official data about the pandemic in Brazil is presented.

Other behind the scenes of Jornal Nacional are displayed in the course of the narrative, showing the antagonism between the subjects’ federal government and the press in the polemical relationship in search of an object-value, because while an actor seeks to highlight the severity of the impact of the absence of public policies to combat COVID-19 in Brazil, the other acts denying such impacts. In this sense, the moment when the newsroom receives the full video of the ministerial meeting of April 22, 2020 draws attention. The scene shows journalists working to get the material edited in time for the news to be aired. At this moment, the dialogue between Ricardo Villela, TV Globo’s executive director of journalism, and a newsroom colleague is highlighted. She questions him whether Jair Bolsonaro’s speech insulting Folha de S.Paulo should be covered or not by the sound feature that covers up the vulgar words uttered by the president. Afterwards, the breakdown that interrupted the transmission of the news opening on the same day is shown. The documentary film crew managed to record, by chance, the immediate astonishment of the journalists in the switcher - the camera control room.

By reporting some of the passages contained in the documentary, it is possible to verify that the semantic field of the title “Cercados” houses different layers of meaning, which can be apprehended in a fluid way, in a quick understanding of the metaphor contained in this title. From beginning to end, the documentary makes evident the scenario in which journalists find themselves during the pandemic: surrounded behind bars, surrounded by negationism, surrounded by the risk of contagion from the Coronavirus, surrounded by the obstacles imposed to the development of their activities, that is, it is the press under pressure and surrounded by all angles.

The televisuality of the documentary

Cercados was produced exclusively for Globoplay, a platform initially dedicated to the storage of Grupo Globo’s television productions, those first shown in broadcasting and later made available on the platform for on-demand consumption. In a second phase, in 2016, Globoplay becomes an environment for accessing exclusive content for the platform, such as the Supermax⁶ series. In a third moment, in 2017, Globo’s platform opted for two innovations, the transmission of its programming live (initially limited to some Brazilian capitals) and the acquisition of international series. There was also the use of Globoplay for multiplatform programming strategies of telejournalistic content (CALDAS; DO CARMO, 2020).

It is for the media environment of a digital platform like Globoplay that the documentary Cercados is produced and released with restricted access to subscribers, being available free for thirty days, between January and February 2021. However, the televisual character of this documentary is circumscribed in the notion of televisuality, as proposed by Kilpp (2020), who states that, at the same time real-time transmission is the main characteristic of television, it opens the perspective of multiple possibilities of transmission of audiovisual content by electronic means.

Cercados represents one among the many possibilities of accessing television content in socio-technical networks, where screens that house televisualities proliferate. This is because language, narratives, and formats are guided by models already consolidated by television, so that televisualities, largely determined by enunciative arrangements that shape content, are now present in different consumption practices such as those enabled by streaming. In this sense, Kilpp (2018, p. 6) points to the difficulty of defining the “thresholds of television, precisely because its limits are liquefying in the intense televisualization that haunts the multiple screens and interfaces that exist today related (or not) to TV.” One can observe, therefore, that the content available by streaming reproduces many of the television logics, as well as uses the same resources and effects of the televisual form. It is a process of accommodation of hybridisms of content circulation inserted in supports that integrate the media ecology based on digital technological convergence of media.

The structure of a streaming platform encompasses television content, as its characteristics house televisualities. In other words, there are updated television elements on platforms like Globoplay. It should be noted that Cercados was never shown on open TV. The exhibition on open TV of productions made for streaming generally meets the strategies of dissemination of on-demand content. In the case of the non-airing of Cercados on open TV, we can infer that it is more linked to a strategy of preserving Grupo Globo’s configuration to the detriment of encouraging the promotion of the Globoplay platform. In this logic, not exhibiting Cercados on broadcast programming, but making it available for free for thirty days on Globoplay, may be a means of directing the off-line TV audience to enjoy the televisual experience on online TV (KILPP, 2015). This means expanding its reach with new media and “transposing the siege” of the broadcasting system.

The televisuality in Cercados projects a text marked by self-referentiality with respect to a more televised aesthetic. This is because the very theme with which the documentary will work is news coverage, it is the institute of journalism also done by TV. In this sense, the televisual issue and television are implicated, as Scolari (2009) shows when addressing the studies on paleotelevision, as a “window to the world”, and neotelevision that “speaks of itself”, understood notably by the bias of self-referentiality in the perspective of television construction of texts. And, in fact, when the theme of a documentary addresses the issue of journalistic coverage in television media, but not only, because Cercados also shows how journalistic work occurs in other media, it creates an effect of a sense of the press.

It is also important to point out that this is not only an aesthetic self-referentiality, as a manifestation, but above all an argumentative one, demonstrating that the spreading of information implies a whole process of investigation, verification, checking, all for the construction of the sense of truth effect.

Final considerations

The media ecosystem, permeated by the concomitant action of institutionalized and corporate journalistic groups, even if in some cases with antagonistic discourses, and centers of production and propagation of the so-called fake news, through social networks, constitutes the communicational environment. This environment met the conditions to create a chapter in the Brazilian press marked by the curtailment of journalists’ performance in covering the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. The clash and resistance of the press to the attacks and aggressions carried out by the deniers in the first year of the pandemic, under President Jair Bolsonaro, made the process of news production difficult.

Cercados is the title whose semantic field is symbolically expanded beyond a small space for journalists who covered the statements of the president in front of the Palácio da Alvorada. The practice of news production found in this period, and more precisely on this theme, institutionalized obstacles, incompatible postures of the authorities facing the demand for information. Based on concepts of enunciation theory, the analyses carried out in the present work demonstrate that the spatial aspectualization denoted in the title Cercados synthesizes a thematic isotopy that can be read as the imposition of limits. The restriction of journalistic work is a reiterated theme and establishes the narrative thread observed in the discursive construction of the documentary, as the different spaces portrayed circumscribe different faces of the same tragedy.

Although produced and made available on a streaming platform, it is from the perspective of television studies that the effects of meaning produced by the audiovisual text and its contribution to critical reflection about the disinformation scenario, as well as the relevance of journalism as an institution of the democratic system were deduced. The results indicate that the discourse organization, marked by the aesthetics of television self-referentiality, allows the enunciatee to enter the universe of journalistic production and identify with the thematic roles played by journalists.

The synthesis of part of the analyzes carried out on the documentary Cercados, on the one hand, highlights aspects of a content nature and, on the other hand, of a strategic nature in relation to the modes of distribution of the documentary. However, both aspects dialogue with the constraints that surround journalistic work in an environment marked by the greatest health crisis in the history of Brazil. In this way, the more general and abstract meaning constructed by the documentary allows a critical reading of the occurrence of processes of restriction and delegitimization of the work of the press in the treatment of information by subjects who fulfill a divisive role of denial of reality and attribution of responsibility to another. The counterpoint created in the narrative sequences in places such as cemetery, hospitals and newsrooms of the press indicate to the enunciatee the inconsistency of the versions that deny facts, demonstrating the effectiveness of the discursive organization of the documentary. Ultimately, allowing the spectator to elaborate an expanded assessment of the meanings manifested symbolically beyond spatialities.

• 1
  This article is a revised and expanded version of the work presented at the DT4 – GP Estudos de Televisão e Televisualidades of the 44th INTERCOM - Congresso Brasileiro de Ciências da Comunicação, held in October 2021, in the city of Recife-PE.
• 2
  All the references written originally written in Portuguese or other language that is not English have been freely translated.
• 3
  Caio Cavechini is a journalist and documentary filmmaker. He worked as a reporter and executive editor of the program Profissão Repórter, overseeing historical coverage such as the flood in Boca do Acre (AM), in 2012. Cavechini has also directed landmark documentaries such as Carne Osso (2011), Jaci: sete pecados de uma obra Amazônica (2014), Entre os homens de bem (2016), Cartas para um ladrão de livros (2017), Marielle – o documentário (2020) and, the most recent, Cercados (2020). Unlike the other works, Marielle and Cercados are original productions developed by Globoplay, Rede Globo’s streaming platform.
• 4
  “Cercados”, in Portuguese, means “surrounded”, but can also mean the noun “fences” (N.T.).
• 5
  International news service created in 1939 in Spain. It is the fourth largest news agency in the world.
• 6
  The content of this series was first made available in its entirety on Globoplay and later shown on television programming.

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Edited by

Editor: Maria Ataide Malcher

Editorial assistant: Weverton Raiol

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  05 Dec 2022
• Date of issue
  2022

History

• Received
  02 Nov 2022
• Accepted
  02 Nov 2022