Dialogism and spetacularization on the covers of Veja and tweets: the first month of Bolsonaro government

Abstract

This article seeks to understand the sense disputes attributed to the first thirty days of Bolsonaro government, in January 2019, on the covers of Veja magazine, one of the periodicals with the largest print run and circulation in Brazil, with approximately 556,000 weekly copies, and in the tweets from the president’s personal account, the media with the largest number of followers and the one that he has used most since his campaign. We analyzed, through a qualitative-interpretive approach, the images posted on Twitter on the same day as the Veja publication and the relations with the verbal statements that accompany them. To do so, we relied on the concepts of dialogism, voices, and centripetal discourse, by Mikhail Bakhtin (1999, 2010, 2015), and of spectacularization, by Guy Debord (1997). We concluded that while the magazine makes public the disbelief in his government, Twitter, in a dialogic relationship, builds his image, showing him as a man of action.