"What is behind the conflict between Lula and the Brazilian Central Bank and what are the impacts on the economy." The headline, published by O Estado de S. Paulo on Tuesday (7), promises an answer but does not deliver it. The report listens to agents from the so-called market, who forecast catastrophes and classify Lula's speech as naive. What is behind the conflict, however, remains there, quiet, hidden, because the market, no less naive, does not know what is going on either.

Many other articles on the economy in recent days, in various publications, did no different. Analysts insisted on the need for an autonomous Central Bank, the maintenance of inflation targets, fiscal responsibility, and the certainty that the loose language of the President of the Republic would only make future rates rise. "A collection of mistakes", José Roberto Mendonça de Barros told Folha. In the wake of other similar statements, the economist stated that "what was happening on the right is happening on the left: talking to the audience". Lula, according to this thesis, would be speaking to a playpen of his own, like his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, who preached every morning to the madmen in the canary-yellow shirt.

A colleague from the newsroom then asks: who would make up the PT member's playpen? The underprivileged in the red shirt? Would they be worried about interest yield? While Bolsonaro defended the criminalization of abortion, the right to carry a gun and go out shooting freely, to express hatred without consequences, and that Indigenous people want cell phones, in short, the palpable world of the so-called good citizen, Lula thought it best to raise the conversation and discuss the fundamentals of the policy tax with his followers?

Two possible paths are open for discussion. First, the media. Much has been written about the president's rant, but little has been learned about his reasons. In both corners, there was the version that he was already anticipating the failure of a first year of government with a mere 40 days on the job. Pointing to Roberto Campos Neto would also be to anticipate a scapegoat. The president of the Central Bank, in the view of PT members, would be sabotaging the president, showed a report by Folha last weekend.

It is a right of the left wing to imagine that those who went to vote wearing a canary-yellow shirt and participated in the "Bolsonaro Ministers" group on WhatsApp could present some bias regarding the conduct of his work. It would therefore be the duty of newsrooms to ascertain the existence of a conflict of interest or the government's motives for precipitating a climate of mistrust. The media, for the most part, skipped the investigation stage and went straight to the stage of criticism. In ten days, in Folha alone, five editorials addressed the subject, and only one of them was restricted to technical arguments.

Good journalistic practice would also require some investment in the contradiction. There was almost none. One of the exceptions to the market's playpen was an article by André Lara Resende in the newspaper Valor Econômico, disdaining the publicized fiscal abyss and distributing jabs at financial institutions and press vehicles, including this very newspaper. Another economist far from the mainstream, André Roncaglia commented in Folha on "the abusive autonomy of the Brazilian Central Bank".

The second path for debate would be that of Lula's communication, seen as a kind of repetition, for some improved, for others worse, of the polarization so dear to the previous president. Perhaps national policy is no longer viable away from the extremes. The newspaper O Globo did the math: in 40 days, 20 explicit mentions of Bolsonaro's "cursed heritage".

The expression recalls the first term, when Lula also unleashed the dogs, not on the Brazilian Central Bank's president, as Henrique Meirelles was then one of his credibility anchors, but in several other directions. Different times, in which the barking in the morning was weighted by the government's own firefighters in the afternoon, and the news that got edited at night was consolidated by the day's average. There is no more day or night in journalism. What Lula says goes on the air immediately, as with Bolsonaro, without a filter, without editing, without a draft. When Haddads and Padilhas enter the circuit, damage done or not, it becomes difficult to modulate anything.

Even more so in the current dynamics of the news, a race boosted by ctrl C + ctrl V, which piles up statements, without any sequence, or allowing them to modify or explain themselves.

An apparently comfortable pace for Bolsonaro, an anti-establishment candidate, who used antagonism with the media to feed his hordes. It took journalists a while to understand how to deal with the rampant speech.

The strategy doesn't seem to make much sense for Lula, who was elected by building bridges and who, supposedly, won't go anywhere if he burns them down. Is that it? Somebody has to find out.

_{Translated by Cassy Dias}