Journalism and its links with nationhood and the ideologies that have built the nations (race, gender, and class, according to the historians) are the subjects of this study. They are researched through the analysis of the news coverage of two presidential elections which were remarkable in the both countries studied, the United States and Brazil. The elections of the first African-American president of the United States, Barack Obama, and of the first worker president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, are comparable for their symbolism and historical relevance.

Textual and historical analyses are combined in this dissertation to investigate, in the narratives of each nation and its ideologies, the meanings that the news magazines analyzed produced during the coverage of those elections. A total of 24 cover stories published in Veja (Brazil) and Time magazine (United States) within a period of approximately eight months in the years of 2008 (Time) and 2002 (Veja) are analyzed. In this close textual reading, visual grammar is also taken in account, since journalism is a language that communicates with its readership by means of layouts (especially in the case of magazines). In this study of interpretive character, the critical discourse analysis approach is used to investigate meaning ranging from the layout of the news magazines (with pictures and so on) to the lexical choices in the written text.

This is a study mainly of language and its relationship with the world, in which ideology occupies a special place. It is an international research, a cross-cultural examination of the news coverage of two important elections. In this comparative study, made possible due to the knowledge of the two native languages of the publications (English and Portuguese) by the researcher, the target language is in fact international journalistic language. The study found journalism both working for social change and at same time reproducing racist ideologies in the United States. In Brazil, the examination showed that journalism does not always nurture nationalistic sentiments, but that it can be used to keep the hegemony of one region over the rest of the country.