BETWEEN ALGORITHMS AND TRUTHS: A GENEALOGICAL READING OF THE GOVERNMENTALITY OF JOURNALISM
Algorithmic governmentality; Deep mediatization; Conditioned algorithmic autonomy; Professional subjectivation; Journalism on digital platforms.
This thesis investigates how algorithmic governmentality, as a political and technical rationality anchored in datafication, surveillance, and prediction, affects the productive routines, editorial criteria, and regimes of truth in journalism within digital environments. In dialogue with Foucault's work, especially with the notions of governmentality, regime of truth, and processes of subjectivation (Foucault, 2010; 2025), the research proposes an analytical reinscription of his thought in the field of journalism, taking it as a critical operator to understand the contemporary transformations of professional practice under algorithmic mediation. The contributions of Rouvroy and Berns (2015), Couldry and Hepp (2020), Sodré (2021), and Zuboff (2020) are particularly articulated. Methodologically, a qualitative approach is adopted (Figaro, 2014; Caballero, 1998) guided by a genealogical reading and a technology of listening (Foucault, 2024a, 2008), with in-depth interviews conducted with journalists from digital newsrooms in Rio Grande do Norte, a state in the Brazilian Northeast. The analysis examines discursive practices and modes of professional subjectivation in the face of the centrality of audience metrics and recommendation systems. As a theoretical proposition, the thesis supports the notion of conditioned algorithmic autonomy, understood as the reconfiguration of editorial autonomy in a context in which journalistic decisions remain formally free, but are continuously modulated, strained, and guided by algorithmic devices of measurement and visibility. The results indicate that, although ethical references and classic values of the profession persist, a hybrid regime is consolidated in which statistical correlation begins to compete with qualitative judgment, producing new forms of subjection, negotiation, and resistance within contemporary journalism.