Apr. 25 2016, 7:39 p.m.
(Para ler a versão desse
artigo em Português, clique
aqui.)
What was the most powerful man in Brazil, the
billionaire heir of the Globo empire, João Roberto Marinho (above), doing in
the comment section of The Guardian? Granted: his
comment received a coveted “Recommended” tag from Guardian editors
– congratulations, João! – but still, it is not the place one expects to find a
multi-billionaire plutocratic Brazilian heir.
On Friday, April 21, I published an op-ed in The Guardian, in which I posed numerous
questions about the impeachment process against Brazilian President Dilma
Rousseff, as well as the role played by the dominant Brazilian media, led by
Globo. João responded with anger – and with obvious
falsehoods. As one can see, João criticized my article by calling me a liar in
various ways in his response.
Look, João: like virtually all Brazilians, I
had to battle a great deal to earn my place in life. I did not inherit a huge
company and billions of dollars from my parents. The things I have had to
overcome in my life are far more burdensome than your effort to discredit me
with condescension, and it is thus not difficult to demonstrate that your
response was filled with falsehoods.
In fact, João’s response deserves more
attention than a mere comment because it is full of deceitful propaganda and
pro-impeachment falsehoods – exactly what he tries to deny Globo has been
spreading – and thus reveals a great deal (today, Guardian editors upgraded
João’s comment into a full-fledged letter!).
Before addressing what João does say, let’s
begin with something he neglects to mention: Globo’s long-standing role in
Brazil. Under the rule of his father, Roberto Marinho, Globo cheered and glorified the 1964
military coup that removed Brazil’s
democratically-elected left-wing government. Far worse, Globo, under the Marinho family,
spent the next 20 years as the powerful propaganda arm of the brutal military
dictatorship that tortured and killed dissidents and suppressed all dissent. In
1984, Globo simply and deliberately lied to the country when its on-air anchor
described a massive pro-democracy protest in São Paulo as a celebration of the
city’s birthday. The Marinho family’s wealth and power grew as a direct result
of their servitude to Brazil’s military dictators.
When anti-government protests erupted in 2013,
by which time the military coup was widely despised by Brazilians, Globo’s
history became a huge corporate embarrassment. So they did what all
corporations do once their bad acts begin to hurt their brand: they finally
acknowledged what they did and apologized for it (and separately apologized for
their lie about the 1984 protest). But they tried to dilute their
responsibility by noting (accurately) that the other media outlets that still
dominate Brazilian media and which have been as supportive of Dilma’s
undemocratic exit (such as Estadão and Folha) also supported that coup,
and they downplayed the role of Globo in supporting not only the coup but also
the 20-year dictatorship that followed.
That is the ugly history of Globo and the
Marinho family in Brazil, a major source of their wealth and power, and a
reflection of the role they – and their highly-paid TV personalities – continue
to play. It’s the same family running Globo now, governed by the same
tactics and goals. That is not the conduct of a genuine media outlet. It is the
conduct of an oligarchical family using its media outlet to shape and
manipulate public opinion for its own purposes. Now, to João’s comment:
Mr. David Miranda’s article (“The real reason
Dilma Rousseff’s enemies want her impeached,” from April 21, published by The
Guardian) paints a completely false picture of what is happening in Brazil
today. It fails to mention that everything began with an investigation (named
Operation Carwash), which in turn revealed the largest bribery scheme and
corruption scandal in the country’s history, involving leading members of the
ruling Workers Party (PT), as well as leaders of other parties in the
government coalition, public servants and business moguls.
What is “completely false” is João’s
attempt to deceive readers into believing that Dilma’s impeachment is due to
Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash). It is true that PT, like most of the major
parties, has been revealed to be full of major corruption problems, and that
many PT officials have been implicated by Lava Jato. But the case for Dilma’s
impeachment is not based in any of that, but rather in claims that she manipulated the budget to make it
look stronger than
it was.
João’s misleading attempt to confuse a foreign
audience by mixing the corruption and bribery scandals of Car Wash
with Dilma’s impeachment exemplifies exactly the kind of pro-impeachment deceit
and bias Globo has been institutionally disseminating for more than a year.
Beyond that, the political figures that Globo
has been cheering and which impeachment will install – including Vice President Michel Temer andHouse Speaker Eduardo Cunha of the
PMDB party –
are, unlike Dilma, accused of serious personal corruption, proving that when
people like João cite corruption to justify impeachment, that is merely the
pretext for undemocratically removing the leader they dislike and installing
the one they like.
The Brazilian press in general, and the Globo
Group in particular, fulfilled their duty to inform about everything, as would
have been the case in any other democracy in the world.
The suggestion that Globo is a neutral,
unbiased news organization – rather than the leading propaganda arm of the
Brazilian oligarchy – is laughable to anyone who has ever seen its programs.
Indeed, the bias of Globo, and in particular its leading nightly
news show Jornal Nacional, has been so extreme that it is now the source of regular mockery. There’s a reason pro-democracy
street protesters choose Globo buildings as their
target.
Protesters change “Rede Globo” to “Rede Golpe,”
meaning “coup.”
Photo: NurPhoto/Getty Images
Precisely to avoid any accusations of inciting
mass rallies – as Mr. Miranda now accuses us – the Globo Group covered the
protests without ever announcing or reporting on them on its news outlets
before they happened. Globo took equal measures regarding rallies for President
Dilma Rousseff and against the impeachment: it covered them all, without
mentioning them prior to them actually taking place, granting them the same
space as was given to the anti-Dilma protests.
That Brazil’s dominant media corporations are
right-wing propaganda arms for the rich is not even in reasonable dispute. The
universally respected group Reporters Without Borders just this week ranked Brazil
104th in press freedoms, explaining this was due in large part to the fact that
its media is owned and controlled by a tiny handful of rich
families:
Brazilian media coverage of the country’s
current political crisis has highlighted the problem. In a barely
veiled manner, the leading national media have urged the public to help bring
down President Dilma Rousseff.The journalists working for these media
groups are clearly subject to the influence of private and partisan interests,
and these permanent conflicts of interests are clearly very detrimental to the
quality of their reporting.
Foreign journalists based in Brazil regularly
note that leading Brazilian media outlets are the opposite of neutral and
unbiased. The Rio-based reporter for Canada’s Globe and Mail,
Stephanie Nolen, reported last month on a column in the magazine
Veja, which she identified as a magazine that “leans, like most major
Brazilian media, to the right.” Long-time Brazil-based journalist Alex
Cuadros observed: “Brazil’s mainstream media leans right
politically, and its coverage often reflects that.” Headded: “There’s very little media criticism in
Brazil that isn’t blatantly partisan, so big magazines can distort facts
without much fear of censure.”
Folha columnist Celso Rocha de Barros has documented how Brazil’s dominant media
obsesses on corruption stories about PT while downplaying or ignoring equally
shocking corruption stories about opposition leaders they like. Globo, for
instance, virtually buried news ofthe Odebrecht list, which identified numerous leading
opposition figures who received highly questionably payments. One Globo
commentator, Arnaldo Jabor, even depicted the list as a government conspiracy.
Compare the 14 minutes Jornal Nacional spent melodramatically re-enacting
the recorded Lula telephone calls like it was a soap opera, to the 2 minutes and 23 seconds it devoted
the Odebrecht list.
Neither of these two cases contained proven criminality – the
justification they used for not divulging the names on the Odebrecht list.
For more than a year, one Globo-owned Epoca Magazine cover after the next used manipulative, demonizing art to incite the public in favor ofimpeachment. The Twitter feeds of Globo’s stars
– both news and entertainment – are filled everyday with pro-impeachment
propaganda. Even when Jornal Nacional tries to deny that it is placing its
heavy finger on the scale in favor of pro-impeachment protests, it cannot help
itself: it glorifies those pro-impeachment protests and gives them far more
airtime than their pro-democracy counterparts:
There’s nothing inherently wrong with partisan,
activist media. All of those organizations, including Globo, have good
journalists working within them, and do some good reporting, including about the
serious corruption scandal. But what is wrong is to deceive the public by
telling it what everyone knows to be false: that Globo and the other large
media corporations are neutral and opinion-free, and that they are merely
observers of political events rather than prime movers of them.
The Globo Group did not support the impeachment
in editorials. It simply declared that, whatever the outcome, everything had to
be conducted according to the Constitution, which in fact has been the case
thus far.
João insists that Globo has no editorial
position on impeachment, and then – in the very same sentence! – proceeds to
justify impeachment as fully legal and Constitutional, a position that is very
much in dispute among jurists.
The Supreme Court – where eight of eleven
justices were appointed by the PT administrations of presidents Lula and Dilma
– has approved the entire process.
In fact, the Supreme Court has not ruled on
whether the accusations against Dilma justify impeachment under the
Constitution, and manyexperts believe – contrary to what João contends – that this is false. One former member of that court
who oversaw the prosecution of PT officials for the Mensalão scandal, Joaquim
Barbosa, said this week that he “has a ‘bad feeling’ about
the fundamentals of the impeachment process against Dilma and that the
allegations ‘are weak and a cause of discomfort.'”
Of course, it’s permissible for João to
disagree with former Justice Barbosa and numerous other experts questioning or
outright opposing impeachment on legal and Constitutional grounds. But he
should stop pretending that he is not supporting impeachment. Everything João
wrote in his response to me proves that he is.
Lastly, the assertion that the Globo Group
leads the national media, especially coming from a Brazilian citizen, can only
be made in bad faith. The Brazilian press is a vast and plural landscape of
several independent organizations, 784 daily printed newspapers, 4,626 radio
stations, 5 national television broadcast networks, 216 paid cable channels and
another multitude of news websites. Everyone competes with great zeal for the
Brazilian audience, which in turn is free to make its choices. Among strong competitors,
what one finds is independence, without any tolerance for being led.
The only “bad faith” is João’s attempt to
deny his own media corporation’s dominance. In June 2014, The Economist published an article about Globo. The headline?
“Globo Domination.” It reported that “no fewer than 91 million people,
just under half the population, tune in to it each day: the sort of audience
that, in the United States, is to be had only once a year” – the Super
Bowl. In sum, “Globo is surely Brazil’s most powerful company, given its reach
into so many homes.”
Many of the outlets João cites are owned by
Globo and its plutocratic sister, Abril. Explained The Economist:
“Globo counts pay-TV stations, magazines, radio, film production and newspapers
as part of its empire.” As a result, “critics are unsettled by the firm’s
share of advertising and audience. It controls everything from Brazilians’ access
to news to the market rates for journalists’ salaries.”
As the columnist Vanessa Barbara wrote last year in The New
York Times:
“Everywhere I go there’s a television turned on, usually to Globo, and
everybody is staring hypnotically at it.” And: “being Latin America’s
biggest media company, Globo can exert considerable influence on our politics.”
That Globo plays a dominant role in shaping
public opinion is proven by the data, but also by the government’s actions.
Under both Lula and Dilma, the Brazilian government has shoveled billions of dollars in
taxpayer money to
the media giant.
It is true that Globo does not own all of the
influential media outlets. There are a small handful of other billionaire families
that own most of the rest. When Reporters Without Borders last week published
its Ranking of Press Freedom for 2016, it explained Brazil’s low ranking this
way: “Media ownership continues to be very concentrated, especially in the
hands of big industrial families that are often close to the political class.”
It is not just media ownership which lacks
diversity, but also those they hire to report. As Folha documented last year, “of 555 columnists and bloggers of
8 media vehicles (Folha, O Estadão de S. Paulo, O Globo, Epoca, Veja, G1, UOL e
R7), 6 are black. The debate over racism thus occurs very distant from the
majority of the population which, day after day, it affects and interests.” Of
course, this massive disparity shapes news coverage generally.
It is true that internet is threatening Globo’s
dominance. Social media has allowed Brazilians to share information outside of
Globo’s empire, and Brazilians can now read articles in foreign papers (such as
The Guardian) that provide information far beyond the narrow range
opinion permitted by Globo, Abril/Veja and Estadão.
That’s precisely why João is lashing out at
articles like mine in foreign newspapers: because he’s scared of what will
happen when he loses control over the information flow Brazilians receive. As
the Marinho family has known since the mid-1990s, when Roberto Marinho had a
Brazilian court bar the broadcasting of a highly critical film about Globo
(“Beyond Citizen Kane”: watch below with English subtitles) only for it to go
viral, the internet is threatening Globo’s monopoly on news and public opinion.
That’s why they’re angry. It’s also why it’s so vital – as I explain in this video – to protect and safeguard
free, equal access to the internet.
[Click “Settings” for English subtitles]
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