Brazil: a democratic media at work?
Dec 18, 2002

Donna McLachlan: John Fitzpatrick is a journalist who's lived in Brazil for 10 years. So many of the issues that have been raised in this Cultures of Journalism series are also present for journalists in Brazil. How to distinguish facts from PR spin, the challenge of impartiality, maintaining a free press, and so on. But in Brazil the big difference for journalists is that they're no longer writing under the brutal censorship that was imposed on them during the military dictatorship. That ended in 1985. So how is the Brazilian media structured now?

John Fitzpatrick: The Brazilian media is very lively, and for a developing country it's very sophisticated. I don't have any figures here, but I know for a fact that we have dozens of daily and weekly newspapers and magazines and they cover an enormous range of subjects. And these subjects go from politics to business to sport to glamour, travel—and we even have, believe it or not, magazines about plastic surgery here. And yesterday, as I was looking at a news stand, I counted 20 weekly and monthly magazines, just on news, politics and business.

We now have a democratic government but that's fairly recent. It's only in the last 20 years that we have had what you in Australia would regard as a proper democracy, and so the government created its own news agencies and these news agencies still exist. They're not particularly providing propaganda as we would call it, but they're providing a service to small communities where you have radio stations or television stations that simply don't have any money.