Abstract

ANTUNES, Eduardo. The Journalistic Narrative on Twitter of a (Non)Attack in Portugal. Comunicação e Sociedade [online]. 2022, vol.42, pp.293-314.  Epub Feb 25, 2023. ISSN 1645-2089.  https://doi.org/10.17231/comsoc.42(2022).4107.

Thursday, February 10, 2022, “an 18-year-old student was arrested this Thursday by the Judiciary Police suspect of the crime of terrorism, as he had been planning to attack his colleagues at the Faculty of Science of the University of Lisbon for months” (Henriques et al., 2022, para. 1). A case without parallel in Portugal, in a media context characterised by immediate consumption and the growing importance of social networks and social media, such as Twitter, even in information dissemination. We start from the perception of Twitter as a relevant platform for contemporary journalism that connects information flows between parties (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; Sadler, 2018). Some 3,577 tweets were extracted within 1 week since the occurrence from the five official Twitter accounts with the most followers of journalistic/information nature in Portugal. Of those, only 104 tweets focus on this particular case, with Correio da Manhã showing three times as many tweets as Expresso. This work uses a qualitative approach to perform a discourse analysis using word clouds, visually representing the frequency of terms. Determining the narratives, including macro and micro-narratives (Lits, 2015; Motta, 2013), serves as guidelines for identifying the macro-narrative of an attack on a faculty of the University of Lisbon. Although common in the general corpus, the terrorism narrative is not central since it is found in a non-uniform way among the five-word clouds, only identified in the word clouds of SIC Notícias, Jornal de Notícias and Correio da Manhã. The analysis seeks to help develop insights about the narratives employed to provide and construct meaning to the media coverage of this unmatched case in Portugal.

Keywords : narrative; Twitter; Portugal; terrorism; Orientalism.

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