THE MEDIA APPROACH TO RACISM IN BRAZIL: AN ANALYSIS OF THE LIBERATUM CASE IN SALVADOR

Abstract

The Liberatum Festival, held for the first time in Brazil with the aim of valuing Afro-Brazilian culture and promoting social change, was marked by episodes of racism against some artists present at the event, generating public repercussions and exposing tensions between institutional discourse and observed practices. Given this contradiction, this research aims to analyze how news coverage portrayed the case, seeking to understand how progressive events and collectives also reproduce logics linked to the structural racism that persists in contemporary Brazilian society. This is a qualitative, exploratory-descriptive study structured as a case study. Articles published online about the case were filtered and analyzed technically to understand how each outlet addressed the issue and whether they provided in-depth insights. Based on the analysis of this material, and with the theoretical framework of authors who portray racism in the media critically and relevantly, such as Lélia Gonzalez and Stuart Hall, it was possible to identify a recurring pattern in media approaches: the overexposure of victims, often portrayed through narratives centered on individual suffering, and the preservation of the image of the aggressors, whose identification and contextualization are often omitted or softened. This form of coverage contributes to the maintenance of symbolic structures that reproduce racial inequalities and shift the focus away from reporting. Thus, the research highlights the importance of a critical approach to the ways in which the media represents episodes of racial violence and their social and communicational consequences.