Brazil: A Portrait of Diparities

Resumo

Transparencia Brasil (an NGO dedicated to fi ghting corruption in the country) involves systematically gathering stories about corruption and associated themes published in the daily press.Titled “Deu no Jornal” (It Made the News), the initiative has been collecting news stories published in 59 dailies and four weeklies since January 2004. The publications covered by the project comprise all the main newspapers from all 26 states, plus the Federal District. No signifi cant newspaper from any state is absent. News is taken from the newspapers’ web editions and introduced into a data base. Each story is fi led under a specifi c “case”2 and cases are categorized according to several descriptive criteria. At the time of this writing, Deu no Jornal included about 142,500 stories distributed among 3,586 diff erent cases, corresponding to an aggregate of about 326 million characters. On the average, about 3.5 new cases of corruption are reported by the Brazilian press somewhere every day. Deu no Jornal is the most comprehensive database of news stories on corruption in existence, not only in Brazil but worldwide.