SIMILAR, BUT NOT THE SAME: Comparing Editorial and News Agendas in Brazilian Newspapers

Abstract

Considering the criteria that newspapers use for selecting topics to be covered, this article examines if and to what extent editorials and news agendas match or diverge in two mainstream Brazilian news organizations: Folha de S. Paulo and O Estado de S. Paulo. The corpus consists of 672 front-cover stories and editorials published in both newspapers from January 2015 to December 2016. Qualitative (Content Analysis) and quantitative (frequency and correspondence analysis) methods are put in action to understand if there is inner/outer convergence regarding newspaper agendas. The results show that both FSP and OESP published a significant amount of political content in their news and editorials. Nevertheless, they follow different patterns of agenda since the set of subtopics internally selected by each publication do not precisely mirror one another. The news topics covered in FSP are similar to the editorial ones covered in OESP, just as the news topics in OESP are similar to the editorials in FSP. Even though these results contribute to assessing the performance of journalism as a political actor, they also weaken the belief that news coverage is necessarily homogeneous.