Meet Dr Ricardo Ribeiro Ferreira, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow based at the Department of Communication and Media. His research investigates the role of journalism in processes of de-democratisation, with a focus on hybrid political systems and journalistic cultures.
Learn more about Ricardo and his work in our 'researcher in focus' podcast below.
Dr Ricardo Ribeiro Ferreira writes:
Broadly speaking, I am interested in the role of journalism in processes of de-democratisation, meaning the gradual and systemic erosion of democratic institutions, norms and values. Since 2020, my research has focused on media capture and political instrumentalisation, examining the ways business and political elites collude to control journalists and news organisations, advancing private interests at the expense of the public good.
There is rarely a clear or static divide between democratic and autocratic states. I find it particularly interesting how countries’ paths toward democracy are subjected to interruptions or regressions—ranging from transitional democracies that never fully consolidate to so-called mature democracies that appear to be backsliding as never before. Journalism plays a crucial role in these processes, as it can reconfigure both the citizens’ decisions and the relations of power among political actors.
I analyse these issues particularly within hybrid political systems and journalistic cultures. Drawing on a well-established strand of research, I define hybrid politics or regimes as those characterised by political practices that combine democratic and authoritarian elements. Similarly, hybrid journalistic culture refers to the adaptation or distortion of Western ideals of journalism to local realities, including structural and behavioural elements from previous authoritarian periods.
My main project now is “Journalistic Resistance to De-democratisation: Towards a Theoretical Model”. Several studies show that journalists and news organisations often become tools for political and business elites, failing to hold these elites accountable and support public deliberation. However, few have explored journalists’ strategies to resist such ‘capture’ and political instrumentalisation that enable democratic decline. Literature remains fragmented, with South America particularly understudied.
Funded by the Leverhulme Trust, I will examine how and under what conditions journalists resist in countries experiencing similar patterns of democratic decline but operating within different media systems, to develop a more cohesive theoretical framework. Combining news ethnography and semi-structured interviews, I will immerse myself in newsrooms in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, where journalists work under intense political and economic pressure and face growing risks and attacks.
This project builds on my previous research, which examined how and why professional journalists and legacy news organisations facilitate and shape the decline in the quality of democracy, using Brazil as a case study. Through 40 qualitative interviews with journalists, I developed the concepts of ‘de-democratising journalistic practices’ and ‘instrumentalised political agency’.
Specifically, my analysis shows that professional journalists and legacy news organisations in the country actively and deliberately employed a set of distinctive practices designed to provide unfair, skewed or self-serving representations of these events and the political actors involved. These self-serving representations allowed them to use news outcomes instrumentally to advance private interests. These private interests included the individual interests of journalists (career and political) and those of their news organisations more broadly (commercial and political). As a result, critical and plural representations focused on serving the public interest were replaced by specific narrative frames designed to sway the public, which undermined democratic and informed deliberation.
I would highlight two key dynamics explored in this research. The first is the labour precarity of journalists, which is often treated as an afterthought in scholarship or even seen by many professionals as a normal part of the job—something normalised, mocked, or even glorified and ritualised. In Brazil, the growing precariousness of working conditions has enabled new forms of political instrumentalisation and complicity with democratic decline. Journalists were not only compliant with instructions they knew would undermine public deliberation out of fear of losing their jobs, but at times they also engaged in such practices proactively, viewing them as a means of securing better positions and career advancement within their organisations.
The second dynamic is the normalisation of control and the anticipatory compliance I identified. Few studies offer a systematic category that explains how instrumentalisation actually operates inside newsrooms. It is particularly revealing to map the forms of soft and hard steering in newsmaking, but I also found a significant degree of anticipatory steering. Journalists would, on their own initiative, adopt frames, select sources, and edit stories in ways that undermined democratic deliberation and norms—guided by prior instructions from media managers or by their perception of what “the house” expected. In doing so, they internalised and normalised a set of private interests and de-democratising practices. I have also collaborated on comparative studies exploring similar dynamics in other regions of the Global South and Southeast Europe, including India, South Africa, Turkey, and Serbia.
Overall, my research seeks to bridge the persistent divide between political science and journalism studies. Scholarship in political science has traditionally emphasised the political economy of the media—ownership, regulation, and elite collusion—while overlooking its internal dynamics and professional practices. In turn, traditional media sociology offers detailed analyses of journalists and their practices but struggles to engage meaningfully with political theory or with longitudinal processes such as de-democratisation.
Recent research on journalistic cultures has moved in this direction by combining newsroom sociology with post-colonial perspectives. However, this scholarship still lacks, to some extent, a sustained political dimension connecting journalistic agency to newer, systemic processes of democratic erosion. My work integrates the macro-structural perspective of political science with the micro-sociological lens of journalism studies, analysing how ownership, regulation, and political pressure intersect with professional cultures, newsroom hierarchies, labour precarity, and individual agency. This approach allows for a more complete understanding of journalism as both an instrument of power and a site of resistance, particularly within hybrid and de-democratising contexts.
My academic agenda has been deeply shaped by my personal background and professional experience as a journalist. I was born in the final years of a military dictatorship that targeted my parents in Brazil, and grew up surrounded by discussions on how to (re)build and protect democracy. These debates inspired me to pursue a career in journalism. For over 18 years, I worked for major Brazilian news organisations, including time as a reporter and editor in Brazil and as an international correspondent in Europe.
My experience as a journalist has provided me with an invaluable practical understanding of how different institutions and social actors operate on the international stage, as well as their relationship with the media. But the years inside the “meat grinder” eventually pushed me to analyse such relations and make the transition to academia in 2017. Today, I am particularly interested in bridging academic research and real-world contexts, striving to ensure that my work informs both professional practice and policymaking.
Before joining the University of Liverpool, I was a Guest Lecturer and a Research Assistant at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, where I completed my PhD in Politics. I also hold an MA in Journalism and Communication from the University of Coimbra (Portugal). I am an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the UK (AFHEA), an awful saxophonist, and a failed background actor.
Visit Ricardo's staff page here.
Recent papers published by Ricardo: