Fake News Explosion in Portugal and Brazil the Pandemic and Journalists’ Testimonies on Disinformation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Mentioning "media literacy" need more detailed explanation, not just "it is necessary that society invest in media literacy..." - that is political and not scientific speech. Scientific speech is to explain and recommend how they should invest in media literacy. When? Where? With what means? "Critical thinking" is missing part and that is what media literacy is for. Also, too much quotes within the text. I wanted to see the specific outcomes and "could see the forest because of some wood trees."  Media literacy is deeply connected with the "fake news" and I expected more things to be related to that. Why? Because, the "fake news" are the product of the part of the society to another part of the society. If the first literate and another is illiterate, then "something is rotten in Denmark", as W. Shakespare wrote. If people are more literate it decreases "fake news" acceptance and, in a long turn appearances as well. Also, I have not seen anywhere within the text "media ethics" mentioned (only three times, superficially). Also, another very important thing related to the "fake news" issue. Ethical person will not use and abuse "fake news". How journalists stands within it? I cannot see that from the paper. Even conclusion should both - media literacy and media ethics. Unfortunately, it does not have. Within the Conclusion we do not need to see quotation of other at all. I need you methodic focus and suggestions how, when and where something can be improved, based on the comparative qualitative and quantitative scientific facts from the interviews and total analyses. Conclusion could be more focused on the findings from the survey.

Author Response

1) During the interviews, journalists pointed out some items that they understand as correlated with the problem of fake news, such as credibility, media ethics, regulation, and media literacy. However, as we tried to emphasize in this new version, these items are not the main theme of the investigation and are only mentioned in the corpus.

2) The selection of answers that appear in the paper obeys to criteria of space - it was necessary to condense the manifestations - and of precision. Those that responded more objectively to the questions were highlighted. Those that contained some important observations on the subject were also highlighted. The entirety of the interviews is part of the overall project.

3) We tried to attend to all the suggestions proposed by the reviewers. We added some new authors to discuss the theory and explain the meanings of the phrase fake news.

4) The References were checked in this new version.

Reviewer 2 Report

Please see attached report.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

What qualified as main answers is not explained, however. Given the small corpus, I assume this determination was made on the basis of a close reading. There is only one table, which properly and clearly describes the sample and interview medium.

The selection of answers that appear in the paper obeys to criteria of space - it was necessary to condense the manifestations - and of precision. Those that responded more objectively to the questions were highlighted. Those that contained some important observations on the subject were also highlighted. The entirety of the interviews is part of the overall project.

The Conclusions section summarizes the results without making clear how they converge (or not) with previous research, or connecting them to theoretical questions, or suggesting new directions for research other than to implicitly acknowledge the limitations of this study’s small sample and relatively truncated interview format.

We have reviewed the Conclusions to clear up the results and connect them to the theories.

However, there are some other literatures that seem relevant to the study; namely, the literature on professionalism in journalism, the literature on boundary work in journalism, and the literature on journalism cultures.

Unfortunately, we would not have enough space to discuss those interesting themes.

Finally, some more background on the regulatory context in Brazil and Portugal would have been helpful to contextualize some of the findings and to better understand how fake news fits into these country’s information ecosystems.

Brazil is on the move to set regulations on fake news.

I think its value would increase by providing more theoretical and regulatory context and by treating this study less as an end in itself than as a first step in generating questions for future research.

We have suggested some guidelines for future research.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

As confirmed, now authors met required methodic approach in complete.