Rodarte, A. K., Kuahara, C. V., & Arif, A. (2026). Who controls the narrative? How Brazilian parliamentarians pursue epistemic authority in times of crisis. Digital Journalism, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2026.2669534
Summary
This article investigates how Brazilian federal parliamentarians competed to control the crisis narrative on Twitter during the January 2021 collapse of the Manaus healthcare system amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on hybrid media systems theory and network gatekeeping, the authors argue that political elites no longer merely serve as news sources but act as media producers vying for gatekeeping positions. Through analysis of 47,728 tweets from 450 deputies, they identify three distinct orientations by which politicians pursued epistemic authority — objectivity, authority, and proximity — each grounding truth claims differently and revealing how non-journalistic actors contest and appropriate journalistic legitimacy during moments of crisis.
Key Contributions
- Introduces the concept of “derivative reporting” — politicians repackaging and ideologically inflecting journalistic content to borrow objectivity-based credibility.
- Proposes a tripartite typology of narrative legitimation: authority claims, objectivity claims, and proximity claims.
- Extends gatekeeping and hybrid media theory by showing how non-journalistic actors appropriate journalistic credibility rather than simply bypass the press.
- Fills an empirical gap in Latin American political communication research on how parliamentarians (dis)connect with social media publics.
- Demonstrates a methodological pipeline combining word embeddings, network analysis, and qualitative coding.
Methods
The authors adopt a computational grounded theory approach, retrieving 47,728 tweets from 450 deputies (88% of the Chamber) over ten weeks via the 4CAT toolkit. Word embeddings and pointwise mutual information identified crisis-relevant tweets around “Manaus.” A @mentions network was built in Gephi (eigenvector centrality, ForceAtlas2, Louvain community detection at resolution 1.5), yielding two polarized clusters plus a third group of six Amazonas deputies. An inductive codebook (entities praised/blamed, thematic features) was applied to dual-coded 4,427 tweets with strong reliability (98% agreement, κ = 96%), followed by qualitative analysis of the top ten most central accounts per group.
Findings
- The network split into two polarized, low-density (0.001) clusters: a pro-Bolsonaro “blue” cluster (126 deputies, ~9,000 tweets) and a larger opposition “red” cluster (77 deputies, ~17,719 tweets).
- Opposition tweets mostly blamed the Bolsonaro administration (41.3%) and called for impeachment (10%); pro-government tweets praised the administration (24.4%) and deflected blame onto the Supreme Court or state governors.
- Six of the opposition’s top ten shared URL domains were news outlets; the pro-government cluster rarely linked to news media, favoring video streaming and alternative platforms.
- Opposition parliamentarians mimicked journalistic visual conventions (headlines, logos, breaking-news aesthetics, screenshots) while stripping ambiguity from news content to fit ideological framings.
- Pro-government parliamentarians attacked mainstream media credibility, relayed state-produced infographics as authoritative, and contested Twitter’s content moderation as an affront to state authority.
- Amazonas deputies rarely assigned blame (9%) or praise (5%), instead publicizing their own brokerage actions (13.2%) and citing citizen testimonies and state officials.
Connections
This paper’s focus on Brazilian elite communication and populist contestation of the press connects it to other Brazilian and Latin American political communication work such as Inacio-da-Silva2026-zf, Emilio2026-ik, Ventura2026-yc, and Ventura2025-sw. Its treatment of gatekeeping, journalistic authority, and disinformation dynamics in hybrid media environments relates to broader work on institutional trust and information disorder such as Rossini2026-jn and Cazzamatta2026-lo. The theme of political elites contesting which sources deserve trust also links to research on legitimation and epistemic authority in Marwick2026-qd and Marwick2025-ov.
Podcast
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