Abstract
This research examines how the hostile policy of the extreme right-wing Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2023) towards the critical journalism has affected the access to public information by journalists in education. An exploratory data analysis was performed on the public database of requests of the Brazilian Freedom of Information Act (LAI). The years 2019 and 2020 (first half of the Bolsonaro term) had the highest number of requests, mainly addressed to education. Those findings guided the topic modeling with the Top2Vec technique, performed on the corpus of the 854 requests for information submitted by journalists and addressed to education, to generate clusters of words that synthesized the subjects of the requests. Semi-structured interviews with three journalists, experts in LAI and education, helped to shed additional light on the topics. The results demonstrated that the journalists acted as watchdogs of public administration, questioning fraud in racial quotas in universities, defaults in student financing, and the implementation of military schools. These issues were directly linked to the scandals of ministers of Education and the outcomes suggested that, due to the government’s resistance to responding to journalists, LAI remained as valuable resource for them. Although Bolsonaro’s term has been marked by lack of transparency in traditional channels (active transparency), no significant evidence was found that passive transparency, within the scope of the LAI and education, has been affected.
Author Information
Cristian Edel Weiss, Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Paper Information
Conference: MediAsia2024
Stream: Law
This paper is part of the MediAsia2024 Conference Proceedings (View)
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