Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper examines how the Brazilian media covered false and misleading claims made by President Jair Bolsonaro in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. To do so, we extracted titles from 111 news articles connected to twenty-one disinformation episodes. The texts were published by six news organizations, and we classified them into three categories using content analysis: contextualization, correction, and reproduction. Among our findings, we have discovered that 60.36% of the content reproduced the president's discourse without acknowledging it was a lie or an error, while 26.13% presented elements of contextualization. Only 13.51% of titles corrected Bolsonaro’s false or misleading claims. The results indicate that legacy and digital-native news organizations mostly failed to correct the Brazilian president’s errors and lies, evoking questions about ethics and transparency. Consequentially, journalism may increase the noise in an already polluted and high-choice online media environment if such issues are left unaddressed.
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