Abstract

PEREIRA, Fábio Henrique  and  MAIA, Kênia. Brazilian journalists vis:à:vis the end of the mandatory dilpoma to practice the profession: rearranging the professional legitimation repertoire. Trab. soc. [online]. 2016, n.26, pp.35-50. ISSN 1514-6871.

This paper identifies and analyses how the discourse about education and professional competency among Brazilian journalists is reorganized and rearranged in order to build a professional identity. We seek to study the discursive strategies used by the journalists as a professional group to defend themselves on threat situations. It also studies the strategies of engagement of the public sphere deployed by social actors engaged in the debates that followed the Brazilian Supreme Court's (STF) decision in June 2009 to suppress the undergraduate diploma as a mandatory requirement to become a professional journalist. We analyse the texts published during June 2009 on the media criticism website Observatório da Imprensa. The corpus analysis covers the interactive processes and rhetorical models enunciated by journalists, professors, Supreme Court's justices, labor unions, scientific societies, congressmen, jurists, and website readers. These actors negotiate discursively a definition about what a journalist should be. The article concludes that such interactions seek to maintain a professional journalist identity that can be described through a tension between technical competence and an intellectual task. This tension is present even when the professional status of journalists is questioned by a "crisis" or a "threat" discourse.

Keywords : Journalism; Professional identity; Undergraduate education; Argumentative repertory; Symbolic interactionism.

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