This research assesses 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 the area of education. An exploratory data analysis was performed on the public database of requests of the Brazilian Freedom of Information Act (LAI), from 2015 to 2022. It was found that the years 2019 and 2020 (first half of the Bolsonaro term) had the highest number of requests (96078 and 111538, respectively), that journalists' requests were the most denied and education was the most demanded area. Those findings guided the topic modeling in Python with the Top2Vec technique (Angelov, 2019), performed on the corpus of the 6348 requests for information submitted by journalists 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 showed 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 suggest evidence that, due to the government's resistance to responding to journalists, LAI remained the only resource for them. Although Bolsonaro's term has been marked by challenging democratic institutions, no significant evidence was found that passive transparency Meijer (2012, 2013), within the scope of the LAI and education, has been affected.

Authors:
Cristian Edel Weiss, Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, Germany

About the Presenter(s)
Cristian Edel Weiss is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Mannheim and holds a Master's degree in Media, Technology and Society (Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences). As a journalist, he published in Brazil and Germany.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/cristianweiss/?locale=en_US

Connect on ResearchGate
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Cristian-Weiss

Additional website of interest
https://cristianweiss.com/en/

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