THE CONSTRUCTION OF BRAZILIAN IMAGE IN THE FACE OF COVID-19 BY VEJA MAGAZINE

Abstract

Abstract: We seek to analyze, under the light of French semiotics, based on the work of Greimas (1977), Greimas and Fontanille (1993) and Fiorin (2002), the construction of Brazilian image by Veja magazine, in relation to the fight against new coronavirus by the Brazilian government. Our corpus was composed by three covers published by the weekly publication, respectively, in issues 2676, of March 4th, 2020; 2728 of March 10, 2021; and 2743, of June 23, 2021. The covers was selected through a qualitative approach, taking into account those covers that addressed the fight against the pandemic by the Federal Government. In addition, the choice of publications respected a chronological approach: the first cover was published soon after the announcement of the first case of Covid-19 in Brazil; the publication of the second occurred approximately one year after the start of the pandemic; and the third was published precisely after the country reached the shameful mark of 500,000 deaths as a result of contagion by SARS-CoV-2. We seek to highlight the participants in these narratives; the context of publication of the covers; the main discursive strategies used by the enunciating subject; and establish the elementary opposition that underlies the verb-visual surface. After the analyses, we verified that, at the beginning of the pandemic, Veja was optimistic about the way the country would conduct the fight against the pandemic; however, this discourse was modified as the government demonstrated its inability to contain the number of infected people and, consequently, the deaths caused by Covid-19.

Keywords: Semiotics. Brazil. Veja magazine. Pandemic. Covid-19.