On Sunday (28), this column complained about Folha's lack of attention to the environmental issue in the elections, and the newspaper's website published an interview with Marina Silva, one of the most recognized names in the sector countrywide and worldwide. Before the ombudsman could even begin to ponder the criticism just published, the newspaper reinforced its insistence on justifying it. On the homepage, just below the headline for Marina, in space and prominence identical to those granted to the former minister of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Folha brought an interview with Ricardo Salles, the former minister of Jair Bolsonaro.

That said, two former ministers of the Environment, candidates for the Deputy Chamber, the confrontation seemed to make sense. The problem, however, is that Salles was never a minister of the environment. He may have held the post, but he was, above all, a derogator from the country's biome protection system, facilitating illegal activities, such as mining and forest clearing. He left the government under investigation by the Federal Police for facilitating the illegal trafficking of timber. The result of his disastrous management is what you see on the news almost every week, like this last one, when the record for the highest number of fires for a month of August since 2010 came out.

Salles took the country back decades in terms of environmental policy. A USP study, led by Ambassador Rubens Barbosa, finds the greatest erosion of Brazil's external image since the 1980s, when the military thought that the way out was building roads through the Amazon forest.

In the printed newspaper, the interview with the non-minister was given one page, just like Marina's. On the cover, a double headline did not report on the main event related to Salles over the weekend, his quarrel with André Janones during the presidential debate.

The problem is not that the newspaper gives space to the candidate. The interview is incisive and makes it clear that his platform in the Chamber is the relaxation of the legislation, which he embellishes as liberalism. The point is to leave Salles with the same stature as Marina, qualifying him for a debate in which he does not participate on principle. Folha committed the classic false equivalence and compared the incomparable. It gave Salles legitimacy as an agent on the environmental agenda, while he is nothing more than a reactionary and opportunistic voice.

The paper didn't have to do that to Marina or to itself. There are smarter ways to give space to the contradictory without having to turn a blind eye.

GOOGLE'S RULES

There has been no lack of inconsistencies in Folha these days. An extemporaneous defense of privatizations, seen by some readers as partisan, the silence on racial quotas, and the little emphasis put on one of the best headlines about the elections so far, from UOL: "Half of the Bolsonaro clan's assets were purchased in cash".

Instead of a news article, one of the most read things in Folha was the announcement that there would be a new Datafolha poll on Thursday (1st). The short text topped the site's audience list for nearly two days and, on Friday, competed with the survey itself, published the night before. In O Globo, something similar happened, shortly after Lauro Jardim published a note about the next Ipec survey, which would display its results on Monday (5). It would be good to believe in the great expectations generated by the numbers, but the explanation lies in the search engines, which privilege what generates audience engagement, not necessarily what is considered news. Journalism is in tow

AUTISM

Luiz Felipe Pondé is one of the columnists hired by Folha to make the ombudsman's life harder (keeping in mind how literal people can be these days, I clarify that this is a joke). His acid social criticism is often not tolerated. That was the case this past week when he talked about the autism diagnosis as a "trend-style hype." Sexist, misogynist, ableist, and transphobic, there was no shortage of adjectives for the philosopher.

Several readers, autistic and or with autistic children, sent personal reports to the ombudsman and the newspaper. One of them was even published in Trends / Debates. In response to these messages, Pondé wrote that the focus of the article was "not to let the suffering become a mere banal matter". "Those who understood my article took notice of this, whoever didn't understand it thought I was saying the opposite."

It would be practical to consider that the columnist's article remains offset by Vanessa Ziotti's grievance. The newspaper, however, within its logic of broad freedom of speech, opened space for a debate that now requires ample clarification. From the trivialization of suffering to the overcoming of the "refrigerator mother" thesis, from the columnist's point of view to that of his critics, the subject needs to evolve from a mere clash of opinions to a piece of balanced and accurate news reporting.

_{Translated by Cassy Dias}