Posted by DU'er Baobob in Good Reads: The real reason Dilma Rousseff’s enemies want her impeached
The real reason Dilma Rousseff’s enemies want her impeached
David Miranda
Corruption is just the pretext for a wealthy elite who failed to defeat Brazil’s president at the ballot box
Thursday 21 April 2016 15.37 EDT
The story of Brazil’s political crisis, and the rapidly changing global perception of it, begins with its national media. The country’s dominant broadcast and print outlets are owned by a tiny handful of Brazil’s richest families, and are steadfastly conservative. For decades, those media outlets have been used to agitate for the Brazilian rich, ensuring that severe wealth inequality (and the political inequality that results) remains firmly in place.
Indeed, most of today’s largest media outlets – that appear respectable to outsiders – supported the 1964 military coup that ushered in two decades of rightwing dictatorship and further enriched the nation’s oligarchs. This key historical event still casts a shadow over the country’s identity and politics. Those corporations – led by the multiple media arms of the Globo organisation – heralded that coup as a noble blow against a corrupt, democratically elected liberal government. Sound familiar?
For more than a year, those same media outlets have peddled a self-serving narrative: an angry citizenry, driven by fury over government corruption, rising against and demanding the overthrow of Brazil’s first female president, Dilma Rousseff, and her Workers’ party (PT). The world saw endless images of huge crowds of protesters in the streets, always an inspiring sight.
But what most outside Brazil did not see was that the country’s plutocratic media had spent months inciting those protests (while pretending merely to “cover” them). The protesters were not remotely representative of Brazil’s population. They were, instead, disproportionately white and wealthy: the very same people who have opposed the PT and its anti-poverty programmes for two decades.
More:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016158910
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On The Media has a pretty good piece about Brazil and Globo this weekend...
Jul 15, 2016
It's a tough time for the Brazilian press. In the unfolding political drama around corruption and presidential impeachment, the mainly right-wing media is accused of deeply biased coverage and coup-mongering. Especially Globo, a giant network of TV and radio stations, newspapers, and magazines with a history that includes supporting the dictatorship.
While a corruption scandal makes huge headlines every day, trusted watchdogs are struggling to keep up at a time of newsroom cutbacks. But in Brazil, everything is complicated. Bob dives into why the country's concentrated media powers are so deeply distrusted -- and what's filling the vacuum.
With:
-Professor Maria Immacolata Vassallo de Lopes, of the Center for the Study of Telenovelas at the University of São Paulo
-Mauricio Santoro, a political scientist with Rio de Janeiro State University
-Diego Escoteguy, editor of the Globo-owned newsweekly, Epoca
-Tai Nalon, co-founder of the independent, crowdfunded fact-checking site Aos Fatos, "To the Facts”
-Patricia Campos-Mello, a reporter-at-large at Folha de Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest daily newspaper
-Eliane Goncalves, a reporter at the national public broadcaster, EBC
-Marcelo Rafael, chief reporter for EBC
-Political columnist Celso de Barros
http://www.wnyc.org/story/empires-and-underdogs
The transcript will be up Monday but you can listen at the link.
