The court without nobility: polemicists and anti-intellectualism in the media

Abstract

This paper intends to present a genesis of the polemicist position in the press, which mobilizes anti-intellectualism as the main strategy, during the period of the New Republic in Brazil. Based on the correlation between social trajectories, modalities of intellectual and journalistic practices, public representations, strategies of the institutions and the configuration of lines of force in the space of production and reproduction of opinions in Brazil from the late 1980s to 2018, we seek to make intelligible the diffusion of anti-intellectual and anti-academic views in the media. The article traces the constitution, sedimentation and proliferation of a position that guarantees its permanence and collective power, but at the same time becomes depersonalized, routinized and loses prestige.