Brazilian News Research Articles

Application of Machine Learning Techniques for Fake News Classification

ABSTRACT Fake News consists of disseminating fake news in various social and digital media such as newspapers, television networks, and the internet. Fake news is not a new phenomenon in human behavior. However, the current dissemination is very different from what happened in the past. Social networks and the contemporary world have made it possible for the spread of lies to occur quickly and even intentionally. This causes serious problems, and its impacts can be felt in the real world. The identification of fake news can be useful in several contexts and can be used, for example, as a news filter in the virtual space. Thus, the present work aims to propose and evaluate strategies for processing and applying machine learning models, to improve the performance of classifiers in the problem of identifying fake news in Brazilian news.

Rains, Tragedies and Media Coverage: Analysis of Floods In Rio Grande do Sul

Objective: The objective of this study is to present how the tragedy in Rio Grande do Sul is handled by the media, in order to observe whether it is being related to climate change. Theoretical Framework: Environmental disasters have been intensifying with the great advances of human actions, which cause climate change and journalistic structures play a crucial role in shaping the public perception of natural disasters, framing them in the context of climate change. Method: From the use of text mining techniques in reports published in Brazilian news portals about the floods in Rio Grande do Sul, a corpus of 100 texts from Google News was selected, being processed through the Voyant Tools software for extraction and analysis of textual data. Results and Discussion: Media coverage of the tragedy in Rio Grande do Sul highlighted the social consequences and the impact on urban centers. The news simplifies the understanding of the causes of the tragedy, focusing mainly on heavy rains and neglecting factors such as global warming and El Niño. In addition, socioeconomic influences that amplify flood risks, such as poor infrastructure and housing conditions, were neglected in the discussions. The media also emphasized the importance of understanding the interaction between climate and geography to formulate strategies that minimize the effects of flooding and promote the sustainable development of the affected regions. Research Implications: By revealing how climate change narratives are being integrated into coverage of natural disasters, this study helps to understand the role of the media in educating the public and influencing public perception of the need for climate mitigation and adaptation policies. Originality/Value: This study examines how the Brazilian media approaches flooding in Rio Grande do Sul, highlighting the social consequences and the importance of understanding the interaction between climate and geography. Using text mining techniques to analyze a corpus of news stories, the research offers a succinct and objective analysis of media coverage, contributing to an understanding of communication about extreme weather events.

Social invisibility and discrimination of Roma people in Italy and Brazil

In everyday debates on topics such as cultural differences, it seems relevant to analyze not only institutional conversations or speeches, but also mass-media communications. The way the media portray social events contributes to the construction of our categories of explanation of the world. The main purpose of this research is to analyze the representations of ‘gypsies’ in news articles published in some of the most important national newspapers in Italy and Brazil. Results show that Italian news focuses on the living conditions of Roma people, stereotypes, crimes suffered or attributed to them, and political and cultural debates on the Roma question in Italian cities. Brazilian news indicated themes associated with Roma in the context of artistic-cultural productions (films, soap operas, songs, dances and opera and theatre plays), mentioned with other Brazilian traditional peoples and communities, as well as the death of gypsies during the Nazi period. The paper discusses the processes of social invisibility and the social production of the (re)presentation of cliché images of Roma as a social problem, marginalized in the sphere of public policies and of their fundamental rights.

All the President’s Lies: How Brazilian News Media Addressed False and Inaccurate Claims in Their Titles

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.

Mundo China: The media partnership reframing China's image in Brazil

This paper explores China's increasing media engagement with Latin American partners. It examines the case of Mundo China (MC), a China-news segment broadcast by the Brazilian news channel BandNews TV and co-produced in partnership with CCTV. By conducting content analysis, we assess how China is presented, contrast the framing of China before and since the partnership agreement, and compare the televised image of China between BandNews TV and other news channels in Brazil. The findings show that MC has assisted in diversifying and balancing the ratio of positive frames in relation to the overall China-related reporting across the broadcasters sampled.

Racism, Death, and Protests in Brazil: digital and traditional news coverage of Black Awareness Day after a racism crime on Twitter

Abstract Purpose On November 19, 2020, a man was brutally murdered by security guards of a supermarket chain located in a city in the very south of Brazil, home to the world’s largest Afro-Black community outside Africa. This killing triggered protests across the country, as a Black man was killed one day before Black Awareness Day. This large popular mobilization happened at the end of 2020 and resembled the George Floyd protests. Despite the anger resonating across communities in Brazil and abroad, the news media coverage on social media resulted in an inequitable distribution of editorial space to both the affective and critical dimensions. As users often adopt view-based practices by not clicking on social media content shared through URLs, it is essential to understand how news media portrays content in short text posted online. Study design Under the lens of news frame and social media theories, our study was built on a multi-method approach combining computational, quantitative, qualitative methods to understand how news media portrays content in a tweet. To do so, we collected 267,576 tweets. They were filtered through the case’s perspective and analyzed using frame theory. Findings Results show that Brazilian news media value different angles concerning Mr. Freitas’s death and subsequent events. While traditional media tends to be more neutral in portraying protests and the killing, digital media raised the debate on the issue and about racism in the country, highlighting protests and using supporting hashtags. Furthermore, cultural hybridity can be seen in Brazil with Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Practical and social implications In a media system that shares some aspects with those found in the United States, such as highly commercial media, our study demonstrates the importance of digital media for articulating racial issues and segregation in Brazil. Originality/value A long tradition of scholarship in sociology and communication studies has investigated how news media frames social movements and the impact this coverage might have on protesters and their ability to gather public support in Western-rich democracies. Less well documented is the use of news frames in Brazil. Furthermore, it shows how BLM is hybridized with local topics and has gained traction with digital media outlets. This study aims to fill this gap by becoming the first study investigating how news media frames social movements against racism in Brazil.

Regenerative Medicine in Brazilian Television News: Storytelling and Public Engagement

Public access to media contributes to public understandings of science and medicine. This paper explores patterns in television coverage on Brazilian regenerative medicine, as they are presented in You Tube videos that reproduce some of the main recent scientific and medical news in TV national or regional programmes regularly broadcast at peak times. The study builds upon the coproduction approach to civic epistemologies in an emerging economy – i.e. the way the wider public makes sense of public policies and demands proof of their validity, as well as, verification of their implementation. The coproduction approach is discussed in relation to two main of its analytical concepts: the public understanding of science and public engagement in science. Using textual analysis, the article chooses selected narratives on scientific sense-making processes according to the representations of reporters, scientists, as well as, patients and their families. Among other, similarities are found between global and local reporting of scientific and medical news in the videos studied: news segments validate benefits while downplaying uncertainties and legal, ethical and social concerns. Sense-making in TV news coverage is based on what can be defined as reductionist imaginaries of science and medicine. Also, news contents transmit a top-down communication model that influences the shaping of public understandings

Digital News Business Models in the Age of Industry 4.0: Digital Brazilian News Players Find in Technology New Ways to Bring Revenue and Competitive Advantage

The news media industry is a sector that is greatly affected by technology and the rapid speed with which changes are taking place. Industry 4.0 is upon us and promising a smarter production that is digitally networked and built on data-intense models. However, fostering innovation inside the newsroom takes place with as many hindrances and bureaucratic obstacles as possible. To address how news outlets are adopting new approaches to sustain their business, we conducted fourteen (n = 14) in-depth interviews with leading actors of news organizations in Brazil, a leading country within the Global South with a complex national reality. Our study systematically analyzes qualitative data to present technology-driven, innovative business models and technologies that will be major players in the news industry’s future. Results indicated that organizations do not rely on a unique income source but combine different sustainable models of funding. By deploying technological assets in the news business, these outlets are capable of meeting the needs of audiences and better identifying customer segments, which brings a competitive advantage to these organizations. In summary, this research resulted in responsive knowledge sharing about digital journalism’s business model that is being implemented for the next revolution.

NEWS INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVES: an analysis of innovation trends in media management

This paper explores innovation trends in media management for news organizations. The research method applied is a systematic literature review, with the collection and exam of academic and industry perspectives on the subject, based on two keywords: “media management” and “journalism innovation”. Following such a review, we describe examples from two Brazilian news media outlets, A Gazeta and Poder360, considering how and to what extent the innovation and management trends identified in the literature sources are depicted by ongoing practices for digital transformation and for the adaptation of their news media processes and products. As a result, premises are established for the elaboration of a specific taxonomy categorizing two different types of journalistic endeavors in the contemporary scenario, considering the companies' legacy distribution channels and the means used for organizing their news production.

INTRANSITIVIDADE, TRANSITIVIDADE INGÊNUA E TRANSITIVIDADE CRÍTICA DA CONSCIÊNCIA EM PAULO FREIRE

This article, as a bibliographic one, aims to analyze the intransitivity concepts, naive transitivity, and consciousness critical transitivity in Paulo Freire, based on Education and Brazilian News and Education as a Freedom Practice. Freire shows us the existing levels of consciousness and describes them emphasizing the importance of critical and problematized education in the transition process from a naive level to a critical level. We can affirm that there is a direct relationship between education, the level transition of critical consciousness and the human and society transformation.

Investment strategies applied to the Brazilian stock market: A methodology based on Sentiment Analysis with deep learning

The Efficient Market Hypothesis states that stock market changes reflect the arrival of new information through external events and news. Thus, many recent studies in the literature evaluate the impact of Sentiment Analysis (SA) applied to social media and news in the stock market. However, these studies generally do not present investment strategies that take advantage of sentiments in new publications considering the correlation between news and the stock market, specially when news are written in Portuguese. This paper proposes investment strategies based on Sentiment Analysis of financial news applied to the Brazilian stock market. For such, the following activities were performed: (i) identifying the most suitable Artificial Neural Network (ANN) architecture to perform Sentiment Analysis in financial news in Brazilian Portuguese; (ii) studying the correlation between the predominant sentiment in financial news of three major Brazilian news portals through the Granger causality test; (iii) proposing two categories of investment strategies based on Sentiment Analysis, considering both negative and positive financial news; and (iv) applying the proposed strategies to the Brazilian stock market. Experiments were conducted with financial news from the most popular Brazilian online news sources and the results showed: (i) the most appropriate ANN to perform SA in Portuguese is the Convolutional Neural Network; (ii) there is a significant influence of the predominant daily news sentiment in the stock market; and (iii) investment strategies based on Sentiment Analysis can bring profitability both in short and in long term, surpassing the strategies Random Walk and Buy & Hold.

Media Portrayal of the Rio 2016 Paralympics: Narrative Patterns in the Brazilian Online News Outlets

Media Portrayal of the Rio 2016 Paralympics: Narrative Patterns in the Brazilian Online News Outlets

Heroines and heroes of the pandemic? (In) visible violence at work in the health professionals in the Covid-19 pandemic

Objective: to analyze the aspects of violence at work (structural, illnesses and deaths and stigma/discrimination) of Brazilian health professionals in the pandemic, through analyzes of Brazilian journalistic media. Methodology: Qualitative analysis of reports reported in two Brazilian news websites (G1 and Uol), within the period from April 20th to 30th in 2020, by using the words Covid-19 and professional *;10 reports were selected, whose witch focus predominantly violence and health aspects of healthcare professionals during the pandemic. We used thematic content analysis to explore the journalistic material found. Results: violence is related to the intensification of work, in views of the increased demands for health care;shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) and human resources to face the pandemic, illnesses and deaths by Covid-19, as well as difficulties in producing data on this matter;experiences of stigmas and discrimination because they are possible spreaders of the virus;health professionals feel guilty and afraid of contaminating their families. Conclusion: there are impacts of structural violence at work, experiences of illnesses and deaths of professionals, stigma and discrimination, which corroborate the health care needs.

AVALIAÇÃO ANALÍTICA DE ANALISADOR DE COMBUSTÍVEL COMERCIAL NO CONTROLE DE QUALIDADE DE ETANOL E GASOLINA COMUM

ANALYTICAL EVALUATION OF COMMERCIAL FUEL ANALYZER IN GASOLINE AND ETHANOL FUEL QUALITY CONTROL. Brazilian news media is full of examples about fuels out of the compliances and needs to control fuel quality. This work proposed an analytical validation of a commercial near infrared photometer (Xerloq, Tech Chrom Analytical Instruments, Brazil) able to identify percentage of ethanol in fuels comparing with NBR standards. Four procedures were selected: analysis of ethanol percentage in gasoline type C samples comparing with standard method ABNT 13992; analysis of ethanol percentage in fuel ethanol samples comparing with standard method ABNT 5992; linearity correlation and selectivity of standard solution analysis. Comparisons between the photometer and standards measurements were to determine the accuracy and precision of the device which presented a little variation from the norm (ER < 1.3%, sR < 0.4%). With regard to the test for linearity, Ethanol:water mixtures was analyzed with R-squared larger than 0.999 with RMSEV less than 1%. On selectivity tests, Gasoline:Ethanol:water and Methanol:Ethanol:water mixtures were measured with bias error not exceeding 5% for regulated samples. In conclusion, this fuel analyzer can be used to analyze ethanol content in Brazilian fuels with similar results comparing with classical standard volumetric and glass densimeter analysis and may indicate adulteration gasoline and ethanol samples by anomalous data.

A relação entre a imprensa, o acontecimento discursivo do golpe-impeachment e o desmonte das políticas públicas

Neste trabalho, intenta-se demonstrar como o acontecimento discursivo do impeachment engendra novos sentidos, os quais permitem que o discurso do capital no Brasil possa, através de sua expressão política, realizar reformas de natureza neoliberal. Busca-se analisar os sentidos produzidos pelo discurso da imprensa, correlacionando-o ao golpe-impeachment de 2016 e à ascensão de governos que promovem o desmonte das políticas públicas em educação, cultura, saúde e ciência. O descaso com os direitos sociais e a desconstrução dos investimentos em políticas públicas básicas, como nas áreas da educação e da saúde, que beneficiam a coletividade, são apontadas como consequências deletérias diretas desse processo. Analisa-se, para isso, o discurso imagético que circula em importantes meios de comunicação do país e que representam discursos em defesa de projetos de lei e emendas constitucionais, como o “teto de gastos”, que privilegiam um Estado mínimo. Aponta-se, para este intuito, a Análise do Discurso como a ciência que se ocupa de estudos da ideologia, da história, do sujeito e dos efeitos de sentidos produzidos no e por meio do discurso para operar mudanças na sociedade.

A Multi-label Classification System to Distinguish among Fake, Satirical, Objective and Legitimate News in Brazilian Portuguese

Currently, there has been a significant increase in the diffusion of fake news worldwide, especially the political class, where the possible misinformation that can be propagated, appearing at the elections debates around the world. However, news with a recreational purpose, such as satirical news, is often confused with objective fake news. In this work, we decided to address the differences between objectivity and legitimacy of news documents, where each article is treated as belonging to two conceptual classes: objective/satirical and legitimate/fake. Therefore, we propose a DSS (Decision Support System) based on a Text Mining (TM) pipeline with a set of novel textual features using multi-label methods for classifying news articles on these two domains. For this, a set of multi-label methods was evaluated with a combination of different base classifiers and then compared with a multi-class approach. Also, a set of real-life news data was collected from several Brazilian news portals for these experiments. Results obtained reported our DSS as adequate (0.80 f1-score) when addressing the scenario of misleading news, challenging the multi-label perspective, where the multi-class methods (0.01 f1-score) overcome by the proposed method. Moreover, it was analyzed how each stylometric features group used in the experiments influences the result aiming to discover if a particular group is more relevant than others. As a result, it was noted that the complexity group of features could be more relevant than others.

A new approach for measuring subjectivity in Brazilian news

With the advent of digital journalism, information democratization has become a reality since news articles are published as soon as the facts occur, and that they are accessible from any device connected to the internet. It is common sense the perception that some media outlets are more biased than others when it comes to the way of exposing the facts. However, automatic ways of measuring such biases is still an open research challenge. Under the assumption that journalistic texts must have an objective and impartial language, high levels of subjectivity in these texts may indicate bias. This paper proposes an initial analysis on the usage of subjectivity lexicons to characterize subjectivity in seven popular media outlets in Brazil. To better understand the obtained results, we carried out a correlation analysis between the levels of subjectivity, readability, and news popularity metrics. The adopted methods, along with the findings obtained from this research, may contribute to a better understanding of the linguistic characteristics of the news that readers consume daily in Brazil.

Leading Newspapers in Brazil as Political Actors (1994-present)

Brazil’s three leading newspapers, O Globo, Folha de S. Paulo, and O Estado de S. Paulo, act as political actors whose ideological positions tend to mirror those of the dominant elites in a heterogeneous fashion. This thesis is discussed here in the light of two intertwining theories: the organizational and ideological levels of analysis proposed by Pamela Shoemaker and Stephen Reese’s hierarchical model of influences on media content (1996), and the media’s tendency to intervene in political debate, engage in advocacy, or influence political events, as suggested by Daniel Hallin and Paolo Mancini’s model of political parallelism (2012). This essay examines data from over 20 studies, mostly conducted by Brazilian researchers, about the leading newspapers’ coverage of the elections and terms of presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002), Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva (2003-2010), Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016) and Jair Bolsonaro (2019- present). These studies collectively corroborate the idea that the Brazilian news media offer content that seeks to further their own interests and reinforces the power of elite groups, if less effectively so since 2018. The findings from these studies are embedded in a historical narrative about the aforementioned presidential elections.

A representação do imigrante pela imprensa brasileira: uma revisão de literatura

The main objective of this article is to conduct an investigation into the representation of immigrants in public media discourse in Brazil, with the intention of understanding the use of stereotyped terms, as well as their frameworks. The work performs a literature review on media discourse related to immigration and its effects, focusing on Brazilian news coverage. The method of analysis and research was configured from the survey of academic productions in scientific journals in the country, between the years 2010 and 2019. It seeks to understand how the frameworks and representations are capable of producing meanings, especially when dealing with immigration as a fundamental problem.

Jornalismo internacional no Brasil: um estudo comparativo entre a cobertura noticiosa da editoria mundo dos portais Folha de S. Paulo e O Globo

This paper aims to identify how the coverage of the World section of two Brazilian news portals (O Globo and Folha de S. Paulo) is accomplished. We seek to comprehend in which range Latin America countries are presented within the World section of the researched portal, examining also the rate of appearance of the United States as well as European countries. The literature review enables to advance two hypothesis: 1) The United States is the country with the highest rate of appearance in both portals’ coverage; 2) Latin American countries have a low rate of appearance, even though both portals being Brazilian. In order to test this hypothesis, we used quantitative content analysis, which allows us to identify patterns and differences in the coverage of portals permitting comparisons. The data was collected since 2018 April until July and the results indicated similarities in the analyzed portals, with both coverages presenting Latin America countries, although showing significant differences in comparison to the so-called developed nations.Keywords: News portals. International journalism. Latin America. Comparative analysis.