This research analyzed newspaper articles published during the political campaign in 2014 for governor of Pará State in the local newspapers O Liberal and Diário do Pará aiming to identify phrases, key-words and other editorial resources – such as headlines, photo captions, photographs, infographs and facsimiles – in order to check if both papers took part in the construction of media political scandals so as to demage the opponents’ simbolic capital and influence the electors’ opinion. Considering that O Liberal declared support for the re-election of governor Simão Jatene and Diário do Pará for Helder Barbalho – who is son of senator Jader Barbalho and former mayor of Ananindeua municpality, in Belém Metropolitan region, we collected 100 articles published in both papers. Each of them was analysed based on two forms referring to quantity and quality data – such as if the article was the main headline of the newspaper; internal page headline; if it was published on even or odd pages or if it showed graphical resources; and another for the quality information: if the two sides involved were interviewed; if the article was against the candidates’ administration, their relatives or political allies; if the article was framed as political scandal, or even if there was omission of any public agent accused. Among the authors who provided theory reference to embase our research are Thompson (2002), Bourdieu (1998), Bakhtin (2006) and Mainguenau (2013), references for discourse analysis of the articles published in both newspapers. Based on the quantitative as well as qualitative data collected, we analysed how the newspapers do to say what they say, going through the discourse strategies each of them used on the construction of media political scandals aiming to conquer political power. In the end, we concluded that both newspapers not only worked on the attempt to influence the electors’ votes, as well as adopted similar discourse strategies, characterizing a sui generis form of political antagonism between the two communication groups which suported their respective candidates for governor of the State.
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