123 BRAZILIANJOURNALISMRESEARCH-Voume6-Number1- 2010 CONFLICT AS A META-CATEGORY OF THE NEWS Conﬂict as an analytical category is present in the theory of journalism as a news-value, although this value is not always clear in the literature. Traquina (2005, p. 84), for example, identiﬁes conﬂict as physical or symbolic violence: an oral dispute between political leaders, but does not develop the concept. In other authors, conﬂict seems related to values identiﬁed with them, such as “deviation” or “infraction”. Some include conﬂict in the negativity category, which is related to abnormality or rupture of stability. Negative events would be more distinguished and signiﬁcant and therefore more easily apprehensible by journalists 2 . Gitlin (1980, p. 15) emphasizes that the news favors conﬂict, and on highlighting deviation, the professionals implicitly support society´s norms and values. Adding to these comments, in the case of television newscasts, television itself leads to dramatization because it is dependent upon the competition (Bourdieu, 1997, p. 25-27). The principal hypothesis of this article suggests that conﬂict is the CONFLICT AS A STRUCTURING CATEGORY OF THE POLITICAL NARRATIVE the case of the Jornal Nacional 1 LUIZ G. MOTTA University of Brasília LIZIANE GUAZINA University of Brasília ABSTRACT This article explores the hypothesis that the meta-category “conﬂict” centralizes and structures newscasts based on a bipolar framing. Characters from the political scene are placed successively against each other, interweaving the narrative texture. Conﬂict is taken as a pre-category preceding that which will become news, from which other subcategories (protagonist, antagonist, enemy) derive. Thus, news coverage not only represents political reality, but delimits and institutes it as well. The empirical analysis presented in the article focuses on the coverage of a recent political scandal by the Jornal Nacional, the main television newscast in Brazil. Key-words: political conﬂict, political narratives, framing, journalism and politics. Copyright © 2010 SBPJor / Sociedade Brasileira de Pesquisa em Jornalismo ARTICLE