This work presents and discusses the hypothesis that reference journalism, always highlighted by research for its commitment to social mediation and action for democratic rights, seeks to attract the audience to animal stories through the infotainment strategies. In this context, this thesis makes a theoretical course on the history of the relationships between humans and animals in philosophy, literature and cinema; it presents the main forms of social engagement and the main legislative manifestations of the animal cause; it walks through the classic texts of biocentric discourse; and it analyzes the relation of journalism with entertainment in the routine of selecting and producing journalistic narratives. Through content analysis methodology, the results show that the discourses about animals in the reference newspapers selected as objects of study empirically prove the paradox of the journalistic field between the commercial and the ideological pole. The journalistic stories can be an audience boost, but they also highlight the shift from an anthropocentrism to a biocentrism system of thought.