Polarization turns profitable and dismantles the common map of Brazil’s public sphere

In the cutting lucidity of José Bonifácio de Oliveira Sobrinho — Boni —, we observe a dissection of the soul of mass entertainment that goes beyond mere television criticism and becomes a precise diagnosis of our contemporary public sphere. By contrasting the traditional telenovela with the new vertical narratives, Boni offers us a perfect metaphor. Classic television drama is born as a rite of communion: the family gathered in the living room, the nation debating the fate of an Odete Roitman (the villain of the telenovela Vale Tudo), the building of a collective imaginary. Yet the grammar of the vertical screen, designed for the cellphone, brutally breaks that civilizing pact.

The mobile-device experience proves, par excellence, a journey of isolation. Journalism, which in its Platonic conception should emulate the function of the traditional telenovela — by establishing a shared cartography of facts and relevance —, now finds itself fragmented. The TV newscast, once the tribal fire around which we warmed ourselves with the same factual truth, gives way to the “vertical telenovela” of the algorithmic news feed.

We thus navigate an ocean of atomized information, in which each individual draws up the menu of their own reality and erases the common maps of coexistence. The fact ceases to be an imperative of reality and becomes a psychological projection of the user. The recent pretrial detention of former President Jair Bolsonaro uncovers this abyss and reveals a moral schizophrenia that swings, dangerously, between the comic and the tragic.

We witness, stunned, those who today celebrate the imprisonment and promote the humiliating exposure of the adversary, in flagrant contradiction with their historic banners of defending human rights and penal garantism (the defense of due-process guarantees). Simultaneously, we glimpse the claim of injustice by those who, without any shame, divorce themselves from the facts.

There is even the emblematic figure of a relative of ours — once proud of “popular sovereignty” when his candidate triumphed — who now calls that same people “idiots” for not sharing his selective indignation. Such incoherence denounces the urgency of emancipating ourselves from these polarized political forces, if we still nurture the wish to preserve some vestige of civility.

However, we understand that this polarization is not an accident along the way but a highly sophisticated business model. The vacuum left by the digitization of journalism is filled by groups that monetize fury. Pedro Doria’s analysis sheds light on this perverse mechanism: most of the population is unaware of the intrinsic relationship between journalism and democracy. The most alarming fact, however, lies in the financing: no group shows more willingness to pay for news content than the most misinformed portion of society.

Doria details that the “hard-core Bolsonarista right,” although it represents only 12% of the electorate, makes up precisely the core that finances this machinery. The market, in its implacable logic, responds to the incentive: if there are people who pay to have their beliefs validated, a complete parallel reality is built. While almost half of the Brazilians who identify with the left still turn to TV as their primary source, the right scatters across the recesses of social networks and messaging apps — reaching 9% use as a main source, against an inexpressive 4% on the left. The result is a “journalism” of bias, which profits by whispering exactly what the radicalized subscriber longs to hear.

The problem has, beyond its economic root, a regulatory origin. Traditional journalism operates under the republican yoke of public concessions. The Federal Constitution, in its Article 221, and Decree No. 52,795/1963 impose clear duties: educational purposes and the obligation of a news service. There is an ex ante, a prior duty of civility. On the internet, however, we live under the law of the jungle or, more tragically, under the absence of law. The Marco Civil da Internet (Law No. 12,965/2014), by establishing the network’s non-liability in its Article 19, exempts platforms from editorial responsibility. There is no right of reply; there are only private algorithms that optimize engagement through hatred.

In this anything-goes scenario, the effort of the professional press to keep facts sane sounds like a scream in a vacuum. The latest report from Lab Journalism 2050¹ on coverage of Bolsonaro’s arrest shows an almost sterile neutrality among the major outlets (78% neutral bias), focused on factual narrative. Among 109 mentions, the report records 17 favorable to the arrest (15.6%), seven opposed (6.4%) and 85 neutral (78%). Yet such content proves unable to pierce the cognitive blockade of the groups that pay to inhabit the parallel reality. The assessment covers nine of the ten most-visited online outlets in the country according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025.

To regain a common map and escape this vertical telenovela in which each person stars in their own solipsistic delusion, we need new solutions. If the pursuit of happiness is already creeping in as a public policy goal, perhaps it is time to consider “love” — not as serialized romance, but as civic empathy and the Socratic search for common ground — as a pragmatic principle for rebuilding the public space. Without that, we will remain prisoners on separate screens, paying expensive subscriptions to hate the neighbor, while democracy silently crumbles in an empty living room.

1. The sample of outlets analyzed comprises: Globo News online (G1), UOL online, Globo.com, O Globo online, Record News online (R7.com), CNN Brasil online, Metrópoles.com, Band News online and Folha de S. Paulo online. The Yahoo! News portal was not included because the site was unavailable at the time of collection. The analysis was conducted on Nov. 23, 2025, using the Python programming language to process the HTML code of the home pages. The methodology consisted of scraping (web scraping) all headlines ranked in the heading tags (H1 to H6). A semantic filter was then applied to select exclusively headlines related to “Bolsonaro’s pretrial detention.”