Anyone who is minimally interested in Brazil—interested in learning the truth about what’s going on there—had better avoid the mainstream media altogether.
Most Brazilian media companies decided in early 2019, the first year of former President Jair Bolsonaro’s term, to jointly produce and distribute a common, fictional story about Brazil that has few points of contact with reality. This story, evidently, excludes any thought, comment, idea, interpretation, or even fact that has not been approved by the official leftist narrative.
That is still—with a few exceptions—the case.
Some Americans and citizens of countries such as Canada and Australia might be familiar with this mockery of the freedom of the press. What they might not know is how far the Brazilian media advanced down the censorship road in servitude to progressive power.
During the pandemic, Brazil faced the same dilemma as the rest of the world, often having to choose between respecting individual rights and adopting authoritarian measures whose efficacy was often questionable and whose scientific basis was flimsy. The response from the Brazilian media, rather than denouncing the clear violations and standing up for citizens’ rights, was to unite all major media outlets in a “consortium,” with the alleged goal of providing trusted “science-based advice” and information to the public.
This media consortium claimed ownership of the absolute truth, while acting as a parrot to all kinds of conflicting and baseless advice coming from both international agencies and from local “experts”—often young YouTubers or media personalities with no specialized training at all.
The consortium also backed large and small despotic decisions, laws, and regulations issued by the hundreds of micro tyrants—governors, mayors, public administrators, and inspectors of all kinds—who swarmed over individuals and businesses across the country wielding the same motto—“I am in favor of life”—which, they believed, granted them absolute authority to trample on individual rights.
In fact, the barely hidden goal of the “consortium” was to attack, day and night, the first non-leftist federal government to be elected since the early 1980s using every conceivable weapon.
Bolsonaro delenda est. Bolsonaro must be destroyed.
He was.
The media consortium was disbanded some months ago, but its spirit lives on. With few exceptions, if you read one Brazilian newspaper or news website, you’ve read them all. Almost all media vehicles report events in the same way, recruit the same liberal-leaning pundits to comment on them, and provide intellectual, so to speak, support for whatever action the leftist state decides to take, no matter how obviously misguided and harmful it may be.
This explains why a big chunk of the media is losing any relevance, having assumed the role of spokesperson for the progressive government (an inappropriate word, if there ever was one). Their attempts to put a positive spin on absurd, preposterous, or borderline unconstitutional acts make for a laughable matter. No wonder an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on April 14 described Brazilian democracy as “dying in broad daylight.”
On one famous and unforgettable occasion, a senior female journalist, with a respectable professional record, went to unbelievable lengths to avoid praising the Bolsonaro government, twisting mind and language—and face—to declare that during his government, the economy was not improving, it was “unworsening.”
Once the left was back in power in Brazil, there was no falsehood most of the media was not willing to replicate, and no fact they weren’t willing to distort or hide, to win the good graces of the public money lords. The servitude is paying back. Graces have already started flowing in the form of large sums for government advertising.
Examples abound. Most Brazilian media fully support the government’s daily attack on a citizen’s right to armed self-defense, even though data clearly show that, as civilian gun ownership went up, the rate of serious criminal offenses, such as murders, took a dive. Of course, this is far from conclusive proof that more guns mean fewer deaths. But it’s clearly conclusive evidence that the government’s assertion that civilian guns end up in the hands of criminals and increase crime is a lie.
A monstrous lie.
You will never find these data in any mainstream newspaper.
Brazil’s crime crisis has no equivalent in any Western democratic country of its size and stage of economic development. The 2017 murder rate of 30 per 100,000 people is record-breaking. Most Brazilian media vehicles, guided by the ideological leadership of the American left, have decided that the police are the problem and that Brazil jails too many people, when the reverse is true.
Not only that, Brazilian penal law and its application by magistrates has adopted the view that criminals are moved by poverty and by a lack of opportunities or that they are revolutionaries fighting against social injustice and inequality. The result is sheer impunity.
There is a long list of “rights” and special benefits enjoyed by Brazilian inmates, most of which are unknown in other countries. The Brazilian criminal justice system has a mandatory “progression” system, which moves all inmates through increasingly open incarceration regimes, the last of which is a testament to Brazil’s ability to innovate when it comes to giving criminals a good life: it’s the open prison regimen (regime aberto)—the criminals, although still recorded as inmates in the official records, are actually free, out on the streets, with no supervision and the ability to do whatever they feel like.
Of course, most of them do what they have always done for a living: assault, robbery, rape, larceny. Gruesome, especially perverted murders, which would result in a life sentence in countries such as France, Germany, and Canada, and probably in the death penalty in most of the United States, are treated in Brazil with such lenience that most murderers rarely spend more than four years in a cell before they “progress” to the semi-open “prison” regime.
All this is celebrated by most media outlets in Brazil, who stand ready to criticize and blame the police for all actual or imaginary offenses. Dangerous operations in the large areas controlled by drug lords in the slums are always followed by a media barrage against the police.
Brazilian media have shown themselves willing to support legislation and judicial rulings that will, in the long-term, implement censorship mechanisms that could lead to silencing the most vocal journalists. A recent judicial decision has declared that media outlets are, from now on, liable for statements made by the people they interview.
Another recently approved law creates a confusing and potentially abusive system to compensate media outlets whenever their content is distributed by social networks. Whenever a user posts a link to a news report on a social network, the network would have to pay a fee; it wouldn’t even be allowed to remove what the user posted. As the amounts to be paid have yet to be defined, and could be significant, social network companies are afraid this could become a mechanism for control and censorship that could leave some of them having to take their business elsewhere. There’s more similar legislation in the pipeline.
Your best bet to know what’s “really’’ going on in Brazil is to follow a very small number of media vehicles currently led by the Jovem Pan group, a traditional network of radio stations whose leadership has taken them into innovative and unexplored formats that mix radio, cable TV, and the internet. Although its cable news operation is only a little more than two years old, it now holds second place in ratings among competitors in the cable news space (disclaimer: I work for the Jovem Pan group—and I am proud of it).
The other way to find out the truth about events in Brazil is through social networks. Several independent operations, such as Revista Oeste and Gazeta the Povo, have strong online operations (they have now been joined by the Brazilian edition of The Epoch Times). Their disposition to challenge the ever-increasing restrictions on freedom of speech and the press has attracted top talent and great readership. These online magazines and social media platform X are the places where many Brazilians go for unvarnished truth and independent, insightful, and courageous commentary.
In Brazil, as elsewhere, media people, politicians, and activists who, for a long time, made a very decent living and accumulated political clout (and wealth) by positioning themselves as defenders of freedom and justice, were the first ones to seize the opportunity presented by the pandemic to turn their beliefs around for power or cash. Overnight, they became the staunchest proponents of repression of thought and censorship, which they, in any ingenious use of what George Orwell called newspeak, call “fighting misinformation.”
The main difference between the situation in Brazil and the situation in the United States is that, although people are canceled, attacked, and defamed in the United States, people in Brazil who fail to comply with the thought police can end up in jail. And many of them have.
Brazil may be serving as the prototype for media and public speech controls that will later be applied in other democratic countries.
