There’s No Smoke Without Fire: Legacy Media and Junk News Discourses on the Amazon Fires
- Rafaela Campos da Silva
- 5 days ago
- 1 min read
Taylor & Francis
The 2020 Amazon Fire Season crisis can be summarized by record monthly deforestation numbers and by the negligence of the Brazilian government. Considering the political scenario in Brazil as a fertile ground for false information, we question which discourses on the Amazon forest fires were constructed by legacy media outlets and junk news sources during the 2020 fire season in Brazil. B
y means of a critical discourse analysis, we observe the ideological structure of the discourse created by both media types, comparing and synthesizing how the Amazon fires were portrayed throughout the fire season.
Our findings demonstrate that neither legacy media nor junk news websites framed the Amazon fire season as a sustainability crisis. Instead, coverage overlooked the main goals of environmental journalism, focusing on the economic consequences of deforestation resulting from Brazil’s “bad image” internationally.
Our results also indicate similarities and differences between legacy media and junk news discourses and suggest that Bolsonaro was able to instrumentalize the media ecosystem with conspiratorial denialism and populist discourse.
How to cite: Salles, D., Santini, R. M., Medeiros, P., Regattieri, L., & Estrella, C. (2025). There’s No Smoke Without Fire: Legacy Media and Junk News Discourses on the Amazon Fires. Journalism Practice, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2025.2544188
