"What makes a political party right-wing or left-wing: Folha has created metrics that position political parties", says the headline of the newspaper published last week. The reading of the article shows an intricate system of seven parameters, a ranking, and a graphical representation in the shape of a flower.

The closer to zero, the further to the left; the closer to a hundred, the further to the right. Graphically, the smaller the flower petal, the farther to the left; the bigger, the farther to the right. All this is to say that PCO is left-wing, and O Novo is right-wing. Or that the blooming of one is smaller than the other.

The ombudsman leaves to the readers the semiotic analysis of the zero being attributed to the left, and the big flower to the right, but reproduces the question of one of these readers: what would be the purpose of such an effort in the midst of one of the most difficult and violent electoral campaigns in the country's history? Locating the 32 parties registered in the Supreme Electoral Court is not an easy task, given the contradictions of national policy, says the text. Did voters need this apparatus to know that Gilberto Kassab's PSD is the most central party? Will someone decide their vote by the ideological latitude and longitude of a party?

There are people who do this, of course, but what could be understood as supposed political maturity is, most of the time, just the unbridled search for labels by people who growl on social networks; who cries out for values and rights, misinterprets concepts and clings to hostile feelings.

One reader even asked the newspaper not to use the term "leftist" anymore, due to the pejorative charge attributed to the term by the reactionary discourse.

The question, in short, is whether Folha created a product to help its subscribers to vote or just joined the Manichean wave that plagues the public debate. If this is an inevitable path, it may be the case to develop a model that also qualifies politicians, most of whom are usually averse to party order, which is indeed a serious problem. Perhaps the algorithm will make Folha discover that President Jair Bolsonaro inhabits the extreme right. Holding guns instead of flowers.

P.S.: Anyone willing to do some more semiotic analysis can play with the Electoral Match, Folha's interactive tool that compares users' responses with those of candidates for federal deputy and senator. Of the 20 questions, 14 stem from conservative and liberal assertions.

KEEP CALM

After the widespread crash of September 7th, the national media radically changed its attitude in the last week by delimiting the news of Jair Bolsonaro's international trip to what it really was, a campaign act. Jornal Nacional reported his speech at the UN only in the "Candidates' Day" section, and the major dailies, with the exception of O Globo, avoided the image on their front pages. It has been proven that there are always alternatives: covering the candidate, subjected to the fair division of space and the balance of electoral coverage, and covering the head of state, according to the relevance of his actions. In this case, irrelevance.

THIRD WAR

When everyone goes one way, whoever goes to the other is either very right or very wrong. The second hypothesis, of course, is the most likely. On Wednesday (21), the international news coverage dominated the websites of the planet, with Vladimir Putin talking about using a nuclear arsenal and summoning 300,000 reservists against Ukraine. The Brazilian afternoon, however, also produced news, with the enactment without vetoes of the bill on the tax role of ANS ( National Agency of Supplementary Health) and the Selic decision. Important, but nothing that could compete with the atomic threat.

Folha, however, did not see it that way and took Putin out of the headlines at the first news. The ombudsman noted in this internal criticism what he saw as an incongruity. After all, for the first time in a generation, an utterance involved atomic warfare. The paper maintained its choice until the next day's print edition when the Brazilian Central Bank interest rate was promoted to the main headline and the Russian autocrat was limited to one small title below the fold. In comparison with the main vehicles in the world, Folha was left standing alone.

The newspaper's stubbornness is reminiscent of a newsroom episode. In the late 1990s, on the eve of one of those dates when the world was supposed to end according to Nostradamus, the morning agenda meeting ended without the subject having been addressed. A prankster then asked if the world would not end the next day. Pressured by colleagues, the staff member of Cotidiano ( the everyday news section of the paper), a natural outlet for weird things in the newspaper, said "we didn't think about it". The Editor-in-Chief lost his patience and fired: "The world is going to end, and the everyday news team is not ready."

_{Translated by Cassy Dias}