"It's that thing, Pelé talks, thinks, and says." With a certain amount of malice, this was how a colleague summarized the events of the king of football in a phase marked by his verbal incontinence. From platitudes to great ideas, some of it nonsense, what the greatest athlete in the world says needs to be registered.

Jair Bolsonaro is neither an athlete nor a majesty, but what the President of the Republic thinks and says is news. Or should be. It's a problem when those who occupy such important speech space forget the responsibility of the position they occupy. More serious when this occurs due to opportunism.

Bolsonaro changed tactics last week. He added a series of interviews to official radio and television channels to the playpen of supporters and the ostensive propaganda posted on social networks. As Folha noted in an article on Friday (23), he spoke plenty but answered few questions. He said what he wanted about construction projects, early treatment for Covid, and electronic voting machines. "We have difficulties with part of the mainstream media; we have difficulties with a Senate pandemic investigation that is working in Parliament," he declared to Voz do Brasil.

With so much difficulty, the president, only on Tuesday (20), received five articles in Folha with content produced from an interview with Itatiaia radio: Bolsonaro repeats that he will veto the fundão, Bolsonaro says that the economy has exaggerated in the tax reform, Bolsonaro disdains the third way in 2022, Bolsonaro claims that Bolsa Família will cost R$ 300, Congress evaluates negotiating fundraising with Bolsonaro at a time of less pressure.

On Thursday (22), the calls came from an interview with radio Banda B, from Curitiba:

• Bolsonaro makes a new attack on the electoral system.

• Bolsonaro says that economic downsizing will relieve Paulo Guedes.

• Bolsonaro says he ordered to investigate the price of Coronavac made by Butantan .

If it is true that people only read headlines on the internet, the balance for the president is reasonable.

Before anyone gets it wrong, Folha was not condescending to the president these days. The newspaper even produced assertive articles about its contradictions, setbacks and lies. As already proposed to the Newsroom in internal criticism, what is worth discussing is the difficulty of dealing with presidential verbiage, of separating what is news from bravado, and, finally, evaluating how much of the bravado, given the absurdity of the thing, is news. It is mandatory, for example, to register the proposal to pray to Our Father in the middle of a press conference after an uncomfortable question.

Cases like this are easy to decide, but in reality, the thing complicates, even more in the current dynamics of newsrooms, mired in factual records made compulsory by the dispute over the audience. This is fertile ground for Bolsonaro, who floods the public space with slogans, prejudices and authoritarianism as if he were still among the lower clergy of Congress. In fact, where he never left is now known. "I'm from the center. I was born there."

_{Translated by Kiratiana Freelon}