title: Inside the ‘meat grinder’: journalistic agency, precarity, and political instrumentalisation in the de-democratisation of Brazil
Creators: name: Ribeiro Ferreira, Ricardo
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2025
Subjects: subject: De-democratisation
subject: Political Instrumentalisation
subject: Media Capture
subject: Hybrid Systems
subject: Brazil

description: A growing body of research has interrogated the role of journalism within processes of democratic decline (Dragomir, 2018; Knott, 2018; Rao and Wasserman, 2015; Selvik and Høigilt, 2023). Such work tends to use media capture theory (Schiffrin, 2021), which argues that insufficient media market liberalisation following regime transitions and collusion between business and political elites prevents journalists from performing their pro-democratic functions. However, this dominant approach seems unable to fully explain recent cases where the media has actively worked to undermine democracy in a substantially liberalised media market, and where business elites do not consistently operate in collusion with political elites (de Albuquerque, 2019). These cases suggest that important causal mechanisms may be missing in the extant literature. They also indicate that the contribution of journalists to de democratisation can include acts of commission (their active engagement in practices that harm democracy) rather than only omission (their failure to fulfil pro-democratic functions). To explore these issues and develop better theory, this thesis analyses the case of Brazil, as a prime example of a country that does not appear to ‘fit’ the model proposed by media capture theory. Brazil has witnessed the news media play an active role in de-democratisation from 2016 to 2021 (Araújo and Prior, 2020; van Dijk, 2017; Pimentel and Marques, 2021) under conditions of a fairly liberalised media landscape and relative autonomy of business elites. Using 40 semi-structured interviews with journalists working for major news outlets in Brazil and three case studies focusing on pivotal political events, I address how and why journalists’ practices and role perceptions changed during a five-year period, involving consistent decline of the quality of democracy in the country (2016-2021). My results show that the long-term capture of news organisations by business elites combined with increasing labour precarity of journalists leads to what I describe as de-democratising journalistic practices. Specifically, I argue that under these conditions, news practitioners tend to actively engage in organised practices, which primarily benefit private interests—their own and/or those of the news organisations they work for. These practices involved media managers and high-level editors instructing or influencing more junior journalists regarding topics, sources, frames and ways to edit a story. However, the increase in such practices during the period of my study also involved their normalisation in the eyes of reporters and editors, many of whom began to politicise their practices in an anticipatory fashion, seemingly on their own initiative. Finally, my analysis suggests that ownership patterns and increased precarity consolidated journalists’ instrumentalisation while allowing news organisations to further expand their actions as political agents. These results support my theoretical proposal of a cyclic model of causality, generating a raft of distinctive de-democratising practices and prompting journalists to engage in what I call ‘instrumentalised political agency’.