The voice of journalism
Brazilians will return to the polls on Oct. 30 to make a decision on a stormy presidential race, and polls show that right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, who has led the country’s slide into authoritarianism during his four-year term, is expected to be eliminated.
In the first round of voting, on October 2, none of the presidential candidates (the current Bolsonaro or left-wing challenger Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010) won 50% of the vote.
Patrícia Campos Mello, itinerant journalist and columnist for the newspaper Folha de São Paulo and researcher at Tow, has been at the forefront of Brazil’s tumultuous 4 years.
Campos Mello’s investigative reporting has made her a target of direct attacks from Bolsonaro, who fabricated sexist accusations that she “tried to seduce” resources for him with her reporting, with misogyny being a key theme in the president’s ongoing attacks on journalists. Campos Mello sued Bolsonaro and won $3,800 in payments earlier this year.
Having focused more recently on disinformation and covid in Brazil, Campos Mello has reported from fifty countries, covering the wars in Syria and Afghanistan, Ebola in Sierra Leone, and the September 11 attacks in New York. His paintings have won many awards, adding the Committee to Protect Journalists’ 2019 International Press Freedom Award. Campos Mello’s reportage, at its best, is like an arrow that flies and faithfully pierces the false and inflated narratives of the powerful.
I spoke to Campos Mello’s video from his busy newsroom in São Paulo, 3 days after the first day of voting in Brazil. We talked about democracy, disinformation, electronic voting machines and how to deal with relentless attacks. Our verbal exchange has been edited for duration and clarity
JB: It’s been called the highest election since the return of democracy to Brazil in the 1980s. Is democracy at stake whether Bolsonaro wins or loses?
PCM: Absoluto. Si Bolsonaro is re-elected, the first thing he will do is increase the number of Supreme Court justices from 11 to 15. There’s already a constitutional amendment he’s peddling to do that, which new lawmakers are most commonly aligned with him, and the next president can decide on two more justices as two retire. This means Bolsonaro will have a majority in the Supreme Court. And we’ve noticed what’s happening in the United States. Last of the checks and balances in place. So if he’s re-elected, he’ll have the Supreme Court, Congress, which has seen a lot of votes in favor of pro-gun lawmakers and evangelical fundamentalists. So, yes, democracy is at stake.
JB: There have been many comparisons between Bolsonaro and Trump, especially their attitude towards the 2020 election, such as pointing out that any final result other than victory would be a “fraud. “infrastructure?
PCM: It’s very similar to what Trump did. Trump sowed doubts about voting by mail and Bolsonaro is doing the same with electronic voting. We’ve had such electronic voting machines since 1996, and there’s never been widespread fraud. The first day of his inauguration, because he claims that he won in the first circular in 2018 and that votes were stolen.
To undermine the electoral system, it does 3 things. First, he says, unless there are paper receipts for electronic voting machines, it’s for verification, which is false: there are several other verification mechanisms. He says the electoral government is biased towards left-wing candidates. And finally, spreading incorrect information about the polls, saying that the classic polls were communist, or not accurate or fair.
JB: Most polls showed Bolsonaro behind Lula, but in the first circular he defied the polls. How can we understand what happened here?
PCM: Excellent question. Basically, we’ve spent the last few weeks looking to set the record directly and say, you know, this whole Bolsonaro thing is incorrect information about the top voters on the ballot, and then it turns out they’re literally wrong. They didn’t get bad votes for Lula, but they underestimated the votes for Bolsonaro by about 10 or 12 percentage points. Overall, they underestimated the votes of Bolsonaro supporters, which is very similar to what happened in the United States in 2016. But instead of looking to figure out what was wrong with ballot samples, why electoral institutes don’t get electorate, or why it’s not an accurate portrait of society — it’s simply discarded, other people say ballots are just a “snapshot in time. “Which doesn’t help. Almost every single ballot was wrong, reinforcing Bolsonaro’s narrative that the formula opposes him and that there is widespread fraud. A congressional hearing and an investigation into the votes is not easy now.
JB: Do you think that, by sowing doubt in the polls, Bolsonaro enthusiasts simply refused to participate?Like a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
PCM: Yes, I think so. I think one reason is this: If you keep delegitimizing the polls for weeks, Bolsonaro’s supporters probably won’t respond to the pollsters. That is one of the explanations. But other people are still looking to find out what happened.
PCM: Since 2019, after the new legislation, WhatsApp learned that they were having a PR nightmare and started taking legal action against agencies that provide mass messaging services. This time we have a complete ecosystem of Bolsonaro disinformation. There is a universe of junk news sites, sites that claim to be normal news but are propaganda and disinformation. And those websites are promoted through Bolsonaro’s supporters, allies, politicians and ministers as the only reliable resources of information. Links and stories are broadcast in WhatsApp and Telegram groups. Basically, there is propaganda and political advertising that deserves to be reported to the electoral authorities, but it is not reported. Because those websites – which are essentially dedicated to electoral campaigns, campaigns opposed to Lula – we don’t even know who the owners are. They are all anonymous. Therefore, it is simple for Bolsonaro to distance himself. It’s literally effective. In this way, he was able to erase the atrocious control of the pandemic and the current economic crisis in Brazil.
JB: So characterizing Bolsonaro’s quotes with journalism and the media, is it fair to say that he bypasses the classic channels, speaking directly to the broadcast electorate, other platforms, and his own data ecosystem?
PCM: Absolutely, yes. Part of the strategy is that, for years, he attacked bloodhounds and the media. To say that you deserve not to read newspapers or watch TV and that all hounds are communists. Part of it is misogynistic: it attacks bloodhound women. They are now seeing it is the result of 4 years of attacks on the press: it is in a very clever position to circumvent the elimination of the classic media.
JB: And maybe I wanted to ask you a tough question. For forcibly reporting as a journalist, you were personally attacked through Bolsonaro, you and your circle of relatives were threatened through dozens of his enthusiasts and supporters, fake news was written about you. . If you are polite in talking about it, how is this abuse in this election, when you are not just a candidate, it is in force, and how do you deal with such relentless attacks?
PCM: (Sighs) This election, each and every time we post something that is investigative or opposed to the government’s narrative, we have a wave of far-right YouTubers and bloggers attacking me or other bloodhounds. So yes, every once in a while I have far-right politicians or journalists making videos saying I’m a communist, that I am, I don’t even know the words they use. It happens. Bolsonaro himself has not said anything more contrary to me. In fact, he has a new goal in recent weeks. A colleague of mine. She is the host of our edition of Meet the Press. He attacked through him personally. And each and every time the president or his allies attack you, you start being attacked online. But it is very sad to think that this is the new general now. bad [this election cycle]. It has been much worse in other periods.
JB: But you know, you say maybe it’s the new normal, but you’ve reported in war zones: Syria, Iraq, Lithrougha, Afghanistan, but only in Brazil did you need to hire a bodyguard through your newspaper. How do you think about that and how do you deal with those attacks?
PCM: It’s very sad to think about that. We are meant to be in a democratic country and, yes, that is the only position where I needed someone with me for security reasons. And every time I covered conflicts, I never had a security officer, just because it’s disrespectful to others. who live in this country. You know, we come from a very privileged situation. I have a space and I can come back whenever I want. But suddenly, you’re in your own country, covering elections or the covid pandemic. , and you are being attacked through your own government.
It’s like everything we learned in school or college about what you want to do to write a smart story: check your sources, your documents, check to be balanced, it’s like there’s one more thing you want to do: prepare. Are you going to call me and say they’re going to hit you in the face?I don’t think we censor ourselves before we publish. But I don’t know, it’s not easy.
JB: You talked about those attacks on bloodhounds, which attack women, as a kind of censorship, reminiscent of the time of the dictatorship of the Brazilian army before the 1980s. Can you elaborate on that?
PCM: Yes, of course, the bloodhounds today are not imprisoned or tortured as in the dictatorship of the army. In fact, it is a component of history that Bolsonaro tried to erase and rewrite, because part of the population does not know that the army regime was a genuine dictatorship and that other people were tortured and killed. But there is a more sophisticated and insidious form of censorship.
First, you have what’s called noise censorship. The amount of misinformation circulating on social media and friendly TV channels is simply overwhelming. People don’t know what to believe. I’ve talked to other people who say, “I know WhatsApp’s settings are rarely very reliable, but TV channels and newspapers are also biased. Thus, Bolsonaro has managed to stifle professional journalism. And then, on the other hand, you have intimidation and attacks against bloodhounds and the media. It’s very difficult. This is a new form of censorship. And the result is that it is much more difficult for other people to access a quality form.
JB: So if we quickly jump ahead of the circular moment of the election and say that Bolsonaro loses, after laying the groundwork by sowing distrust in the electoral infrastructure and at the same time doing things like doubling personal gun ownership in Brazil, how bad can that be?A threat of extra-political violence, or even insurrection?
PCM: There’s no way he’s going to settle for effects if he loses. She said it clearly. If he loses, he will contest the effects. Some foreign diplomats said: Oh well, do you think the army would really pull a punch? I don’t think that’s the question. Because you have a minority of the population that is so radicalized that they will resort to violence. You may simply have, and this is not a far-fetched scenario, that Bolsonaro or one of his allies does a live broadcast saying, “These electoral staff are manipulating the effects, and you deserve to come by and confront them. ” [If that happens] there will be violence. Brazil is a much younger democracy than the United States. Until about thirty-five years ago we had a military dictatorship. So I am not sure that Bolsonaro will carry out a coup attempt, but I am sure that if he loses, he may not be satisfied with the effects. And he will inspire his companions to go outside. And they’ve given us a million more guns in the flow since it opened, because it’s been a lot less difficult to buy guns, that of course is a concern.
JB: There are two questions I need to ask you about whether Bolsonaro defies the polls and wins. The economy is a big challenge in elections. About thirty-three million people in Brazil are struggling to eat, inflation reached 10% at the beginning. of the year, the expansion is slow. If he wins a momentary term, how will those other people struggling to put food on the table be affected?
PCM: In addition to all the electoral misinformation, he tried to buy votes. Bolsonaro replaced the electoral law and the fiscal austerity law so he could spend more than fifty billion reais ($10 billion) to distribute cash two months before the election. It bypassed the same procedure as before and Congress was given passage of a constitutional amendment to do so. On the one hand, it is smart for the other thirty-three million people who are starving. Illegal and seeking to buy votes, there is no guarantee that this will continue next year. It has made all these additional expenditures in the budget, so with next year’s budget situation, it will be very difficult to maintain social programs. Because he just spent everything now.
JB: And The Guardian reports that the destruction of the Amazon has accelerated in recent months, and corporations are appropriating it out of fear that a Bolsonaro defeat will make it more difficult. What would all this mean for Amazon if it wins?
PCM: It’s a tragedy for the world. Because it is going to continue with the environmental policy – if we can call it that – of dismantling all the control bodies, all the organisms that fight against deforestation by fires or illegal mining. It is seeking a law to pass a law authorizing mining within indigenous territories. It would be the same or worse. One thing that can be said is that he is not cheating with his plans. He thinks that the Amazon will be developed for agriculture or mining and that foreign powers only need to borrow the resources of the Amazon, so they criticize his policies. It’s a tragedy.
JB: With a few more weeks of this race, what are you and the editorial staff going to do to cover it?
PCM: One thing we do is introspect about voting, how to cover it. The sensible thing about that is that it’s going to be a very close race, so we have some demanding situations. Don’t magnify disinformation, even by accident, because they use the mainstream media to give an appearance of legitimacy to wild claims. The other thing is: try to perceive the Bolsonaro voter better. Just like [the Trump voter] in the United States, we would possibly have this very condescending view of those people who are incredibly devout and very conservative, but we don’t get the point and we don’t perceive those voters. We want to work harder on that. And finally, we all communicate about what to do if Bolsonaro demands situations the results.
JB: You mean, as a newsroom, editors and journalists who talk about political violence, how are we going to cover that?
The editors had this conversation: how to cover it, how not to magnify it. So if President Bolsonaro says the votes are wrong, but the electoral government announces the results, how are they going to cover those two things?Are you going to give them the same weight? Also, if there is civil unrest, how will the bloodhounds cover this when the media is attacked and shouted directly and face hostility protests?
JB: Wow.
PCM: And it’s a democracy.
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