The international press has paid attention to the manifestations of voters who are unhappy with the defeat of President Jair Bolsonaro at the polls and the victory of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a result announced by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) and recognized by part of Bolsonaro’s support base. Sky News, with a central editorial line (see below about the classification of the political bias of each publication), highlighted thousands of protesters in the streets of São Paulo with images. “They are calling for intervention,” says the channel, closing the image on a poster of a protester, “basically, they want a military coup. They hate Lula da Silva’s leftist policies and want him to leave at any cost.”
A NBC News, by moderate left, said the protesters “do not accept their narrow but decisive defeat”. For the publication, which mentioned flight delays and bad economic consequences of the approximately 150 blockades of streets and roads, “Bolsonaro was silent while his supporters got louder”.
Al Jazeera in English, a center publication linked to the government of Qatar, interviewed a voter who said “we want a third turn, we will not give the country to a thief to become Venezuela, he was sentenced to prison and released by a friend”. A reporter for the publication was at the site of one of the blockades near Brasília early last week, which was blasted with tear gas. “The president’s silence only increases tensions,” she said. Lula is shown during the visit of Argentine President Alberto Fernández. Another report by Al Jazeera reports the incident in which a person drove his car over the protesters, “injuring seven people, including two federal highway patrol officers”. The report closes by saying that “Bolsonaro made a public appeal for peace.”
The famous anchor of the American right-wing publication Fox News , Tucker Carlson, made an editorial in which he compared the rhetoric of “threat to democracy” of the Brazilian left with the American left, about to contest the midterm elections in the USA. “If you care about democracy, if you think procedure is essential,” says Carlson, “then you investigate these allegations. . Anything less is not democracy.”
For Fox News, in the anchor’s words, “you don’t have permission to ask questions about this election in Brazil, and not allowed because the Biden administration doesn’t want to. YouTube, which has operated in recent years as an arm of the Biden administration, has announced that it is censoring any publication in Brazil that questions the results.” Mentioning Alexandre de Moraes without mentioning his name, Carlson found it strange “widespread censorship, in a ‘democracy’, preventing people from asking questions about how ‘democracy’ works”, and commented that Bolsonaro was the only one who challenged China’s hegemony in America.
“The demonstrations are weakening” since Bolsonaro’s demonstrations, reported Australia’s
ABC News moderate left. “There was a lot of concern that Mr. Bolsonaro would challenge the results, but he authorized the beginning of the transition.”
How did the coverage go according to the biases of the publications
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To know the bias of different publications and coverage, there is little method beyond direct observation. But the news comparator Ground News, founded in
by Canadian Harleen Kaur Jolly, promises to change the rigor of this assessment. It uses an average rating from three independent media monitoring organizations: All Sides, Ad Sources Media and Media Bias Fact Check. This average gives an index of editorial bias for each publication, which is then classified into seven categories, from far left to center to far right. Thus, the aggregator also classifies whether the coverage of a given issue was dominated by the left, the center or the right.
O Ground News also classifies publications according to a “factuality” index, which takes into account, for example, the speed in correcting errors. The index leads to three categories: low, mixed or high factuality. Brazilian newspapers such as Gazeta do Povo are listed but not ranked in the indexes. Therefore, the ratings are valid for the international press, especially the English-speaking one.
The aggregator shows that the greatest interest in covering news about Jair Bolsonaro is on the left, with 47% of coverage, followed by the center, with 33%, and by sources right, with 22%. The coverage of topics about Lula also has a majority of left-wing newspapers (45%), but the interest of right-wing publications is also greater, with 33% of coverage. The center is less interested, with 22%. In comparison, news of the transition of governments was mostly covered by mainstream outlets, with 53% of coverage.
News of Bolsonaro’s request for protesters to clear the roads was predominantly covered by 13 publications from the center such as BBC, Reuters and South China Morning Post (a Hong Kong newspaper) Kong). Eight publications from the left and eight from the right covered it. With 60 sources in total, about half of them were classified according to the bias index. The left-wing website The Daily Beast and the right-wing newspaper The Epoch Times were the most polarized publications in this coverage.
One of the news with the greatest political imbalance in coverage was that Bolsonaro did not participate in the September 7 ceremony in Congress. Only 7% of the sources were from the right, 53% were from the left. For this reason, the news comparator warns of a “blind spot” in this coverage.
