I don’t know how many of you have been following the ongoing “corruption” protests in Brazil but the Intercept published an article on them yesterday that flipped my preconceived concept of them on it’s head.
I also don’t mean to speak for anyone else, but based on the way the standard corporate media has been covering the protests I think many had assumed that they were just anti corruption protests, I know I had and was even hoping that they would succeed in their goal of government overhaul. However, as so much is, the actual story is much more complicated and should definitely not be taken at face value, as I now personally know.
Was it just me getting confused over the actual ideology behind the protests currently occurring in Brazil because of the inability of western media to dig beneath the surface of a current event? Has anyone else misinterpreted the protests or just shrugged them off as the usual local unrest? Is this a good example of late stage capitalism?
I think if it includes a Latin American government that the United States has at some point had some sort of stake in, you can gurantee it’s something to do with late State capitalism! Thanks for the link, as the NPR reporting has been very evocative, but at the end of the day, really unhelpful on what’s going on, I think.
Thank you for spotting this article about whether concentrated private ownership of corporate media is categorically unreliable for political reporting.
From the OP:
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To provide some perspective for how central the large corporate media has been in inciting these protests: Recall the key role Fox News played in promoting and encouraging attendance at the early Tea Party protests. Now imagine what those protests would have been if it had not been just Fox, but also ABC, NBC, CBS, Time magazine, the New York Times, and the Huffington Post also supporting and inciting the Tea Party rallies. That is what has been happening in Brazil: The largest outlets are owned and controlled by a tiny number of plutocratic families, virtually all of whom are vehement, class-based opponents of PT and whose media outlets have unified to fuel these protests.
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The reported issues are corruption or not? Democracy or not? I’d rather have old fashioned facts than breathy, poorly sourced NPR quotes about democracy and corruption.
This sounds rather similar to the issues with US reportage on Venezuela - as far as I could sort it out from what I could see here, on the one hand the government was being fairly repressive and doing things that made no economic sense, yet at the same time much of the organized protests against it and in particular all the Venezuelan reporting on the protests was tied to the highly corrupt, repressive, and entrenched power structure that the Chavez government had replaced, and the US media were uncritically recycling all of it. (Of course.)
I wonder if there is any good Nicaraguan reporting on the situation in Brazil? From what I hear from an expat friend now living in Nicaragua, it sounds to me like they are one country in that region which has finally got through the aftermath of their civil war and economic turmoil and turned into a pretty settled and decent place for everyone living there. It’d be interesting to see what their current journalism looks like.
To be honest when the shit started hitting the fan here I had great fun telling everyone who asked that we had no path out until the last banker was hanging on a lamppost from the guts of the last journalist.
These days most people I talk to find journalists more unforgivable culpable. I just can’t talk to them any more.
