Criteria of relevanceandpolitical classificationin the internationaljournalistic discourse

ABSTRACT In an age in which content is indexed by Internet search tools, transnational new agencies and traditional news media are still important sources of information for data bases in the main languages, according to their own criteria of relevance on what and how to inform. With the purpose of mapping the political classifications adopted on the coverage of the 2010 Brazilian presidential election, this article analyses terms used before, after or as a substitution to the name of the four main candidates - Dilma Rousseff (PT), José Serra (PSDB), Marina Silva, and Plínio de Arruda Sampaio (PSOL) -, present in 261 news texts, both in English and Spanish, of four agencies (AFP, AP, EFE and Reuters) and four traditional news media (BBC and CNN TV networks, plus the newspapers El País and The New York Times). From these results, parallels are traced among the criteria adopted by the journalistic sources when attributing relevance to information associated to each candidate and the generalizations of Tefko Saracevic (2009) about how information system's users infer relevance in search processing, suggested based on 40 years of studies in the field of Information Science.