Starominski-Uehara, M. (2020). Mass Media Exposing Representations of Reality Through Critical Inquiry. 

summary by Claude:

The paper presents a critical discourse analysis of a public interview given by Brazil's newly appointed Health Minister in April 2020 during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. The author argues that journalists could more effectively expose contradictions and shallow thinking in authorities' statements by asking straightforward questions invoking the interviewee's personal notions of space and time, based on Immanuel Kant's ideas of "a priori intuition" laid out in his work Critique of Pure Reason.

The analysis finds that the minister's statements and responses to journalists' questions highlighted confusion, ignorance of best practices, manipulative language, and lack of understanding about contingency planning amid uncertainty. The author suggests that by depriving themselves of prior knowledge and instead personalizing questions to reveal how authorities' experiences shape their representations of reality, journalists could better help the public grasp complexity and critically assess political rhetoric during crises.

The paper provides examples of how journalists could reframe their questions along the lines of Kantian space and time intuitions to expose flaws in the minister's reasoning and crisis management strategy. The author argues this "personalized" inquiry approach, guided by Kant's epistemology, can enhance public trust by clearly contrasting facts with manipulative narratives that may put lives at risk amid uncertainty.