Folha says it's not "newsworthy" that 62% want new elections.

The newspaper Folha de São Paulo, owner of the Datafolha research institute, disclosed Data regarding society's perception of Michel Temer's interim government has caused some surprise: 50% of the Brazilian electorate would want Michel Temer to govern the country if Dilma Rousseff is definitively removed from office, while only 3% would want new elections.

The information was surprising because several institutes – including Datafolha – had been... spreading the word that more than 60% of voters wanted neither Dilma nor Temer, but rather new elections. Recently, for example, an Ibope poll showed that 62% of voters wanted new elections.

 

The headline published by Folha about the survey led the unwary to believe that half of Brazilians approved of Temer remaining in government, when in fact, the 50% the newspaper refers to is half of those who do not want new elections, that is, 38% of voters, since 62% want new elections.

From this perspective, the website Brasil 247 has arrived This leads to a plausible conclusion: if half of the 38% who don't want new elections support Temer, then only 19% of the total electorate wants the PMDB member in government.

Wow! Nineteen percent is a very different percentage from 50%. That's statistical fraud, the rest is child's play...

But perhaps worse than the fraud is Datafolha's admission about its "criteria" for publishing polls.

In the edition of Folha de São Paulo this Thursday, July 21st, the newspaper noticia The accusation against him is met with an "explanation" for why he manipulated the numbers in that way that is, literally, astonishing.

The newspaper published an "explanation" stating that, according to Alessandro Janoni, research director at the Datafolha institute, "There is no error [in omitting that 62% want new elections], and both Folha and Datafolha acted transparently."

According to the director of Datafolha, "researchers quantify spontaneous responses precisely to detect relevant options that were not mentioned in the prompted question. If an alternative is spontaneously cited by more than 1% of those surveyed, this should be highlighted."

Up to that point, Neves is dead – not Aécio, of course; it's a rhetorical Neves. The choice of questions will certainly generate this or that reaction.

But that's not even the point. The point is why the newspaper didn't report that an overwhelming majority of the Brazilian electorate wants new elections. The explanation comes from Folha's executive editor, Sergio Dávila. According to Folha, he claims that the newspaper omitted from the public that more than 60% of the electorate wants new elections because "It is the prerogative of the editorial staff to choose what it considers journalistically most relevant at the moment it decides to publish the research."

The icing on the cake, however, is Dávila's explanation of why he thinks Folha's audience doesn't need to know that 62% of Brazilians want new elections, preferring to say that 50% want Temer to remain in government, which is a lie because it's the 50% who don't want new elections who said that.

See below the article published by Folha this Thursday that "explains" the "little mistake" on screen.

Let's review the explanation given by Folha's CEO about why he concealed the fact that 62% want new elections.

"The result of the question regarding the possible resignations of Dilma and Temer did not seem particularly newsworthy to us, as it practically repeated the trend of the previous survey and because of the change in the current political scenario, in which this possibility is no longer taken into account."

"New elections are no longer being considered"?! What do you mean, Mr. Dávila? Your research shows that well over half of the more than one hundred million voters strongly believe that new elections should take place. Who is Sergio Dávila to hide what tens and tens of millions of Brazilians want?!

The desire of the overwhelming majority, which Datafolha concealed, can now be transformed into reality through a plebiscite. And for this plebiscite to proceed, the country needs to know that the vast majority of Brazilians want new elections.

Of course, Michel Temer and his proposals to suppress labor rights and hand over the pre-salt oil reserves to foreign oil companies may be more interesting to Dávila's boss than doing journalism, giving the public the correct information about what the majority wants, but to say that 62% not wanting new elections isn't news is an immeasurable leap.

This “explanation” from the Folha newspaper's “CEO” is even worse than the fraud that Datafolha and the newspaper that controls it committed together.