Mapping press’s political ideology. A content analysis of editorial articles from the most read brazilian online newspapers

Abstract

Aware of the well-studied non-neutrality of media and the challenge that represents to have mechanisms to objectively identify the ideological bias, this thesis provides a methodological proposal to assess the political ideology of newspapers. The model’s originality lies on merging the contribution from political and communication sciences, as it is built considering the core values of political ideologies. The model is qualitatively inspired by the Critical Discourse Analysis perspective, and quantitatively by the traditional Content Analysis. It allows to compare samples according to an ideological framework and classify the outlets in four categories: elitism, egalitarianism, communitarianism and individualism. The model was applied to study the one-year time frame (2018) of editorial content (n=2,195) from the eight most read online newspapers in Brazil. The results show the feasibility of the model and draw a scenario dominated by a strong elitist discourse with only one off-key Brazilian newspaper leaning towards an egalitarian worldview.