Why did the US left media bash a successful democratic socialist party during a right wing coup? by Brian Mier, Sean T. Mitchell, and Bryan Pitts On November 29, 2018, the socialist magazine and news site Jacobin co-sponsored a public interview with Fernando Haddad, the 2018 presidential candidate of Brazil’s Workers’ Party (PT). The former São Paulo mayor and […]
“If The Guardian was what it purports to be, Brasil Wire wouldn’t need to exist”. The British Newspaper’s coverage serves as a case study of how perception of what happened in Brasil became so distorted internationally. The Guardian is of course the closest thing that the UK has to a mainstream progressive newspaper, and it had, until relatively recently, a […]
“Calm down, let me answer,” PT presidential candidate says during one of his 64 interruptions. by Brian Mier Formed with government support during the military dictatorship, TV Globo has a long history of performing character assassination against Workers Party politicians, as shown in the documentary Beyond Citizen Kane, which Globo worked to censor in Brazil, and […]
On Thursday 23 August, TV Globo’s flagship Jornal Nacional news programme ran segments following the campaigns of Presidential Candidates Marina Silva (Rede), Geraldo Alckmin (PSDB), Jair Bolsonaro (PSL), and Ciro Gomes (PDT). It later trailed its invitations to these four Presidential candidates onto the programme next week. Missing was leading candidate Lula da Silva, who is now […]
Update March 2022: With Lula’s freedom to run for president, the “LulaMeter” is back. By Louis Smith “A metalworker with a Socialist background had to become President of Brasil to make Capitalism work. If you look at Brasil’s banks, they have never made as much money as under my government” Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, […]
Two competing narratives on Brazil: one says Dilma Rousseff was deposed in a procedural Coup d’état and Lula’s imprisonment is to stop him becoming President again. The other says that all of the above is totally legit. One of these narratives has Wall Street and Big Oil right behind it. Can you guess which? Coup-Denial […]
Brasil Wire editor Brian Mier addresses Brazilian Congress on fake news, censorship and the independent media. On Monday morning, June 19th, I was invited to fly to Brasilia to address Congress on the subject of fake news and the independent media. My invitation, extended by the progressive news outlet Brasil 247, was the result of a […]
According to the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, land banking is a crime. Unlike in, for example, the United States, it is illegal for a landlord to hold a building empty for years, without paying real estate taxes or maintaining the property, waiting for real estate values to rise so that he can flip it. If […]
During the lead up to the 2016 Coup, a series of alarmist articles in the Brazilian and international media warned of Brazil’s spiraling public debt. In January, 2016, for example, the Economist wrote, “public debt is worryingly large for a middle-income country and rising fast. Because of high interest rates, the cost of servicing it is […]
When Rio City Councilwoman Marielle Franco was assassinated on March 14, much of the international coverage omitted the fact that she was a socialist and the most prominent critic of Rio de Janeiro’s federal military occupation. In this article from the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ) Manchêtometro project, which quantifies bias in media coverage, […]