“O quixotesco Boris Johnson” da pandemia de Covid-19

Abstract

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson began to be the target of criticism in the country’s own media even before the coronavirus pandemic was declared, which took place on 11 March by the World Health Organization.
Also, in March, the government spokesman tested positive for Covid-19 and was in a critical state of health in a process of hospitalization. To put the case in perspective in Portugal and intending to understand how the journalistic narrative built the media character in question, we will analyse the news article "Specials, but few"in the Portuguese weekly newspaper Expresso, published on May 23, 2020. The methodological approach combines narratology and journalism theory, considering news narrative as a fundamental element for knowledge of the world and a field of formation and representation of identities. From these perspectives, we tend to understand how the media character Boris Johnson was built in the context of a pandemic crisis. The British Prime Minister figured from the characteristics of the protagonist of Miguel Cervantes’ literary work. It was possible to analyse how the character Don Quixote moves from the fictional-literary plane to the factual-journalistic plane and how his survival served to characterize him as crazy.