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Media Governance and Fake News in Brazil

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Media Governance

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Abstract

The Brazilian mainstream media have never been subject to any kind of media regulation. In fact, they perceive any attempt to promote a legal framework to regulate them as a menace to freedom of press. The effort made by the governments led by the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores; PT) to establish such a framework was a major reason that led the mainstream media to fiercely oppose PT. Recently, however, a major change has occurred in this respect. A new model of media regulation, based on the idea of governance rather than the government, has emerged. This model contains a pool of agents, including the mainstream media, fact-checking agencies, and social media platforms. In this model, the media are no longer subjected to external regulation; instead, they become a part of a broader system aiming to regulate public discourse. This system aims to identify disinformation spread on social media platforms and punish those responsible for it while remaining invisible. This chapter discusses how the emergence of this model relates to the rise of Jair Bolsonaro to presidency and the moral panic concerning fake news and disinformation campaigns.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The analysis of the titles of articles published in EPTIC, which is the main Brazilian academic journal focusing on political economy of communication, since 2010 shows no reference to the word “governance” (or its Portuguese correspondent “governança”). Mick and Tavares (2017) presented one of the few cases of Brazilian researchers that focus on governance. Nevertheless, they did not make any effort to present an original definition in this regard.

  2. 2.

    Pedaladas fiscais is the Brazilian name given to the use of funds from state banks to cover budget gaps. At that time, there was no consensus that this constituted a crime. In fact, this is a usual practice in Brazil. Only two days after overthrowing Rousseff, the Senate decided this would not be a motive for impeachment anymore.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fluminense Federal University, Niterói, Brazil

    Afonso de Albuquerque & Lucineide Magalhães de Matos

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  1. Afonso de Albuquerque
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  2. Lucineide Magalhães de Matos
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Correspondence to Afonso de Albuquerque .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada

    Sarah Anne Ganter

  2. Department of Communication Studies, Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria

    Hanan Badr

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Albuquerque, A.d., Matos, L.M.d. (2022). Media Governance and Fake News in Brazil. In: Ganter, S.A., Badr, H. (eds) Media Governance. Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05020-6_7

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