Fact-Checking and Journalistic Authority in Brazil: An Analysis of Fato ou Fake and Estadão Verifica

In order to understand how mainstream media companies utilise fact-checking services, this paper investigates the following research question: to what extent did the Brazilian agencies Estadão Verifica and Fato ou Fake endeavour to reinforce their epistemic authority through factchecking during the administrations of Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022) and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2023–present)? For this examination, all texts published by the two agencies that mentioned Jair Bolsonaro in their titles between January and May 2022 and Lula between January and May 2023 were collected. The corpus consisted of 119 checks (95 from Estadão Verifica and 24 from Fato ou Fake) and was subjected to content analysis. The data indicates that the agencies’ coverage focused on similar issues during the two administrations, with more than half of the publications refuting rumours detrimental to Lula. The results also reveal that the fact-checking process prioritises journalism’s own sources. In other words, Estadão Verifica and Fato ou Fake primarily relied on their own material or that of other mainstream media companies to verify the selected stories — this approach suggests limits to the transparency of the investigation, since much of the information used has already undergone editorial filtering, which is not always clear to the public.