Car Wash, Crisis, and Political Cataclysm: Corruption Narratives in the Brazilian Mediascape
Public Defence of PhD thesis by Mads Bjelke Damgaard.
A wave of corruption disclosure, leaks, and media exposés engulfed the Brazilian democracy in the period 2014–2018. Below the surface of an uncommonly successful investigation into high-level corruption, undercurrents of political crisis swept President Dilma Rousseff from office through impeachment proceedings. Rousseff was ousted in 2016 by members of the political elite - themselves embroiled in the scandal going by the name of Operação Lava-Jato or “Operation Car Wash” – long before she even became indicted in the corruption case. Thus, the scandal featured a curious temporality and a displacement of crisis that dragged Rousseff, her popular presidential predecessor Lula and their party with it in the undertow. The media built up a crisis of increasing complexity as the investigations became ever more widespread in an avalanche of evidence and plea bargains.
This thesis analyzes the Lava-Jato scandal as a textual system, unfolding in the Brazilian mediascape and governed by a set of narrative structures. Countering the existing hesitance of media studies to draw in narrative theory, the thesis constructs a theoretical and methodological foundation to analyze intertextual narrative structures emerging in a distributed manner across a system of news texts dealing with scandal. With this, the thesis attempts to answer why the Lava-Jato scandal ended with such surprising and self-contradictory results, and how, theoretically, narrative theory can contribute to the field of scandal studies. Inspired by Frederick Jameson’s reading of Greimas, it is argued that the intertextual narratives that underpin the production of news texts on scandal constrain and co-constitute the field of political action. Thus, to understand the outcomes of the Lava-Jato scandal, it is necessary to analyze how the disequilibrium of Brazilian democracy was symbolically solved in the narratives interpreting the scandals and the impeachment.
En bølge af korruptionsafsløringer ramte Brasilien i 2014-2018. I kølvandet på en usædvanligt effektiv politiundersøgelse af politisk korruption blev landets præsident, Dilma Rousseff, suget med af bølgen og afsat gennem en rigsretssag i 2016. Bag rigsretssagen stod medlemmer af den politiske elite som selv var under efterforskning i sagskomplekset kendt som Operation Bil-Vask (Operação Lava-Jato), men afsættelsen fandt sted før Rousseff blev sigtet for korruption. Både Rousseff, hendes folkekære forgænger Lula og deres parti blev trukket med af skandalens bemærkelsesværdige temporalitet og transponering af krisestemning. Mens politiundersøgelsernes net blev bredere og bredere, byggede medierne en stadigt større og mere kompleks fortælling op om korruptionen på det højeste politiske niveau.
I denne afhandling afdækkes måden hvorpå Lava-Jato skandalens tekst-system udfoldede sig igennem narrative strukturer i Brasiliens medielandskab. Trods modviljen mod narrativ teori i gængse medie-teoretiske tilgange opbygges der i afhandlingen et teoretisk og metodisk grundlag til at analysere den slags intertekstuelle narrative strukturer som opstår i et distribueret tekstunivers på tværs af nyheder om skandaler. På dette fundament forsøger afhandlingen at besvare hvorfor Lava-Jato skandalen højst overraskende betød at en korrupt vicepræsident kunne overtage magten i Brasilien. Teoretisk består bidraget i at afdække hvordan skandalestudier kan integrere narrativ teori. Med afsæt i Frederick Jamesons læsning af Greimas hævdes det her at intertekstuelle narrativer i nyhederne former og begrænser de politiske handlerum. Derfor må man forstå hvordan Brasiliens demokratiske systems uligevægt forsøges løst i disse narrativer for at forstå hvordan rigsretssagen og skandalerne udviklede sig, som de gjorde.
Assessment Committee
- Associate Professor Jan Gustafsson, chairman (Universitet of Copenhagen)
- Associate Professor Mauro Porto (Tulane University)
- Associate Professor Ester Pollack (Stockholm University)
Moderator of defence
- Head of Department Jørn Boisen (University of Copenhagen)
Copies of the thesis will be available for consultation before the defence at the following three places
- At the Information Desk of Copenhagen University Library, South Campus
- In Reading Room East of the Royal Library (the Black Diamond)
- At the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, Emil Holms Kanal 6, 2300 Copenhagen S
