Political communication and NGOs: The place of journalism

Abstract

Journalism is, as we know, a social phenomenon whose characteristics derive from the society in which it exists. On the other hand, the media not only constitute the means through which the majority of citizens establish contact with the non-physically experiential reality, but it was also enabled by it that an informed public opinion developed. Knowing it necessarily implies correlating it with the social system in which it is inserted, including the economic-political landscape in which it operates. An essential dimension in the valorization of this professional class is related to its specific literacy or, in the case of this work, its environmental literacy, the result of a process of education of the attention, constitutive attributes of the relations established in a given context. To this dimension is called another, played in the importance of the sources, with which the class establishes a symbiotic relation of interdependence. Based on data from interviews conducted to the (reduced) number of Environment journalists in the main print media in Portugal, in a sample of 6 individuals, the work of the journalist is analyzed in this work, found among conditions of practice of the profession due to changes in the editorial staff and a set of interactions negotiated with sources of whose agenda they become amplifiers.