Who controls the narrative? How Brazilian parliamentarians pursue epistemic authority in times of crisis

Summary

This article investigates how Brazilian federal deputies competed to define the narrative of the January 2021 Manaus oxygen crisis on Twitter, treating the moment as a critical window onto how political elites contest journalistic gatekeeping during a public health collapse. Drawing on hybrid media systems theory and gatekeeping scholarship, Rodarte, Kuahara, and Arif argue that parliamentarians no longer merely act as sources for the press but operate as media producers vying for epistemic authority. From a network and content analysis of 47,728 tweets by 450 deputies, they distill three distinct legitimation strategies — objectivity-by-derivation, direct claims of authority, and proximity-based brokerage — each underwritten by a different theory of why their account of the crisis should be believed.

Key Contributions

• Introduces “derivative reporting” as a concept for how politicians repackage and ideologically inflect journalistic content to borrow its credibility.
• Proposes a tripartite typology of epistemic-authority claims — objectivity, authority, and proximity — for analyzing political narrative contests in hybrid media.
• Extends gatekeeping and hybrid media theory by showing that non-journalistic actors appropriate journalistic credibility rather than simply bypassing the press.
• Offers rare empirical grounding for Latin American political communication, focused on Brazil’s polarized Bolsonaro-era information environment.
• Demonstrates a mixed methodological pipeline combining word embeddings, network analysis, and qualitative coding for studying crisis narratives.

Methods

A computational grounded theory design combining network and textual analysis. The authors collected tweets from 450 federal deputies (88% of the Chamber) via 4CAT over ten weeks beginning December 2020, used word embeddings and pointwise mutual information to select Manaus-relevant tweets, and built a @mentions network in Gephi (eigenvector centrality, ForceAtlas2, Louvain at resolution 1.5). They inductively developed a codebook of praise/blame and thematic features, dual-coded 4,427 tweets (98% agreement; Brennan–Prediger κ = 0.96), and conducted qualitative textual and visual analysis of the ten most central accounts in each cluster.

Findings

• The mentions network split into two highly polarized clusters — a pro-Bolsonaro cluster (126 deputies, ~9,000 tweets) and an opposition cluster (77 deputies, ~17,719 tweets) — plus a small group of six Amazonas deputies; overall density was extremely low (0.001).
• Opposition tweets blamed the Bolsonaro administration (41.3%) and called for impeachment (10%); pro-government tweets praised the administration (24.4%) and deflected onto the Supreme Court or state governors.
• Six of the opposition’s top ten linked domains were news outlets; the pro-government cluster largely avoided news media, favoring video and alternative platforms.
• Opposition deputies mimicked journalistic visual conventions (headlines, logos, breaking-news framing) while stripping ambiguity from the underlying reporting — e.g., recasting approval-poll coverage as direct evidence for impeachment.
• Pro-government deputies attacked mainstream media, amplified state-produced infographics and ministerial statements as authoritative, and framed Twitter’s moderation as an attack on state legitimacy.
• Amazonas deputies rarely assigned blame (9%) or praise (5%), instead publicizing their own brokerage (13.2%) and amplifying citizen testimony and state-level officials — a proximity-based legitimation strategy that escaped the polarized axis.

Connections

This paper resonates with other work on Brazilian political communication and platformed polarization — see Ventura2026-yc, Ventura2025-sw, Rossini2026-jn, Kansaon2025-id, and Cazzamatta2026-lo — and contributes to the broader literature on elite-driven information disorder and hyperpartisan media ecosystems explored in Marwick2025-ov, Starbird2025-jj, and Bennett2025-xs. Its account of politicians appropriating journalistic form to claim authority complements studies of asymmetric media environments and partisan amplification such as Bakshy2015-rn and Budak2024-ef.

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