Hunger in times of COVID-19 pandemic: a critical analysis of the (re)produced meanings by the media

Abstract

This study aims to understand the ways in which hunger has been represented by the mainstream press in Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic. From Discourse Analysis, a total of twenty-four news were analyzed, fifteen from the Folha de São Paulo and nine from the O Globo newspaper, published from february to july 2020. Discourses were found that evoke fundamentally for the neoliberal understanding of poverty, transferring the responsibility of the State on hunger to the subjects. However, despite the discourses showing hunger as a circumstance potentially increased by the pandemic period, the analysis of the results reveals that hunger occupies places in the causes and consequences of this health crisis, both in an emergency and in a structural way. From the results, the visibility of the narratives of the subjects who experience hunger is also highlighted, however, it was observed that there is a fine line between narrating the consequences of hunger and reproducing stigmas that echo in the collective imagination of society. In this perspective, the study reveals the need to deepen, review and critically read the media narratives about hunger and their contribution to the constitution of the social imaginary about the phenomenon.