The article reflects on the dimension of political communication held by legislative media of Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. Tensions between journalists and parliamentarians and the dispute between those political actors by defining rules of operation of these media are essential aspects of analysis, performed from the recollection of opinions of the two groups. The testimonials of parliamentarians make explicit the prospect that the vehicles of the Chamber must contribute to parliamentary communications with their constituents. By the other side, the interviews with professionals reveal that they do not agree with the argument that the function of the vehicles is limited to perform the political communication of the representatives.

Despite the agreement that the internet transforms the relationship of individuals with political information up to a point and that it allows distinct ways of relationship between citizenship and the State, neither the type of impact it generates nor its extension is clear. Accordingly, through the mapping of research about the internet and democracy, the present article tries to identify some key moments of the discussion and to contribute to the development of the research field. A classification with three mains divisions has been adopted: the first one is related to the affiliation of the authors in relation to the social or institutional origins; the second one refers to the theoretical platform used and to the researchers’ choices in view of the theoretical framework; and the third one considers the types of impact of the internet. Finally, a conception named "forms of use", which systematic orientation may help the development of future research, is explained.

This paper aims at presenting some preliminary findings of an ongoing research on the public debate over the racial quota policy in Brazilian public universities, from 2001 to 2009, in the following newspapers: Folha de S. Paulo, O Globo and Estado de Minas. Our research distinguishes itself from previous studies because our corpus (692 articles) is wider hes and our unity of analysis consists of direct and indirect utterances (n=1037) that present any type of opinion upon racial quota policies. Our preliminary analysis reveals some very counter-intuitive findings: 1) we observed a polarization of opinions against and for the racial quota policy in editorial columns and op eds; 2) we noticed that common citizens are the most prominent speaker in the debate, surpassing actors who usually have privileged access to news media, such as federal government officers and experts. Our investigation about the category of speakers in the debate and our inquire into how their utterances are organized and hierarchised in the media arena show important tensions underpinning the media organizations, both on the inter-institutional levels and the journalistic social practices levels.

The aim of this paper is to compare Jürgen Habermas’ and Jacques Rancière’s views regarding communication, aesthetics and politics, in order to evidence that the formation of a political community express the tension between the familiar and the strange, the proper and the improper, the friend and the enemy. This formation process shows the gaps and breaks up the idea of the great social body protected by shared certainties and strongly unified by egalitarian principles previously accorded and almost never challenged. The habermasian concepts of “world of the life” and “ideal community of speak” are confronted to the notions of “dissensus” and “community of share” elaborated by Rancière, to show that the constitution of a political community must disclose that the partition of a common world is made, at the same time, of the attempt to establish bonds between broken universes and of the constant resistance to the permanence of these bonds.

This paper seeks to highlight the features of Brazilian Partisan Propaganda (BPP), a kind of advertisement offer by the Brazilian State to the political parties on national radio and television network, in the non-electoral period. This is an object of character eminently partisan, whose goal is to provide an opportunity for the parties to present its identity and political program to the population. On the other hand, the BPP should also be perceived by its bias propaganda, whose application to the world of politics (notably through political and election campaigns) has been defined by the practices of image enhancement of the candidates – at the expense of collective elements. As a result, issues such party decline, personalization and professionalization of politics, become increasingly relevant, guiding the study developed here.

This paper analyzes how the press covered the process of creation of the Empresa Brasil de Comunicação (EBC) - a public broadcaster proposed and managed by the Brazilian Government. The empirical sample considers a set of pieces published in the Folha de S. Paulo (the main Brazilian newspaper) while the Congress was voting the bill. As the main conclusions, it is possible to point out that (1) the coverage emphasized the decision-making process itself, and not the substance of the bill (its implications, for example); (2) the official voices prevailed over the perspectives defended by civil society actors; finally, (3) there is a strong suspicion that readers scarcely had the opportunity to understand the meaning of the policy at stake, once the coverage was superficial and not plural.