In the early days of Lula’s presidency, the New York Times (2/10/23) stressed what he had in common with Joe Biden (attempts to overthrow their governments) over what divided them (the Ukraine War).
A front-page article (4/30/23) in the Sunday, April 30, edition of the New York Times served as a hit job against Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST), one of the most important historic allies of President Lula da Silva’s Brazilian Workers Party. Two days later, the Times ran an op-ed piece (5/2/23) framed to damage Lula’s reputation. Together, these pieces represent a troubling narrative shift in the newspaper of record’s Brazil coverage.
The Times published years of yellow journalism against Lula and the Workers Party, including 37 one-sided articles promoting the deceptions of the now-disgraced, US DoJ–backed Car Wash prosecutorial witch hunt. With the 2018 election of neofascist President Jair Bolsonaro, and his close relationships with Donald Trump and Steve Bannon’s far-right international network, the Times began to temper its approach.
When Lula returned to office at the beginning of 2023, he got a honeymoon period in the paper, in which its coverage remained relatively neutral (e.g., 2/10/23, 4/14/23). Even after Lula’s April 2023 visit to China, the Times (4/20/23) published a more or less straightforward article, despite the Brazilian president pledging to stop using the dollar in trade between the two nations, and suggesting that the US and NATO were exacerbating the war in Ukraine. The Times remained neutral as Western news agencies Reuters and AP delivered a White House warning to the Lula administration (FAIR.org, 4/21/23).
‘Marxists May Take It’
The New York Times (4/30/23) waits 18 paragraphs before hinting that the reason “Marxists” may take unused land is that doing so is completely legal under the Brazilian constitution.
This changed on April 30 with an article that appeared online under the Red Scare headline “If You Don’t Use Your Land, These Marxists May Take It.” (The print version, also April 30, had a more neutral headline, “Brazilian Group Occupies Land Unused by Rich.”) Superimposed over a photo of a poor village next to a tilled field, the subhead reads: “The Landless Workers Movement organizes Brazil’s poor to take land from the rich. It is perhaps the largest—and most polarizing—social movement in Latin America.”
To a casual news reader, the article—by Times Brazil correspondent Jack Nicas—probably looks balanced. It features quotes from residents of a recent MST settlement as well as someone misleadingly introduced as a farmers’ “union” leader, a member of a new armed movement to keep people off unproductive land. It even correctly describes the MST as one of Latin American’s largest producers of organic food.
It’s the facts that are left out of the article that expose it as the hit job that it is. The omissions could easily be interpreted by Brazil’s oligarchical rural elites as a green light to commit more violence against the nation’s peasant class—on the rise since Bolsonaro and his allies began encouraging it in 2019.
‘Communist and criminal’
“You defend what’s yours,” the New York Times (4/30/23) quotes a Brazilian cattle rancher—ignoring the fact that under Brazilian law, it’s those who fail to use their land, and not the beneficiaries of land reform, who are illegally squatting.
The first thing missing from the piece is a proper explanation of the difference in land rights between Brazil and the US. It takes 18 paragraphs—ten paragraphs after telling readers that “many Brazilians view it as communist and criminal”—before it offers an incomplete admission that the MST works within the framework of Brazilian law:
Despite the landless movement’s aggressive tactics, the Brazilian courts and government have recognized thousands of settlements as legal under laws that say farmland must be productive.
Article V, section XXIII of Brazil’s 1988 Constitution stipulates that all property must serve a social function, which renders commonly practiced US real estate speculation tactics, such as land-banking, illegal in Brazil. As laid out in a series of laws based on this passage, any non-land owner has the right to occupy unproductive farmland and farm a modest plot—normally ranging between 10 and 40 hectares, depending on the biome.
Furthermore, there is an entire government agrarian reform agency, INCRA, that is responsible for appropriating this land from its original owner at market rate, minus all back taxes owed plus interest, and providing a deed to the new owner. In many occupations coordinated by the MST, the ostensible owners of the unused land owe millions in taxes.
Land-grabbing tradition
A large percentage of them are unable to prove that they own the land at all, due to the common practice of land-grabbing, known as grilagem, which has been going on since the 19th century in Brazil. (The word is derived from grilo, or “cricket,” a reference to the trick of putting a bogus land deed in a box full of crickets to make it look authentically old.)
Brazilian politician Ricardo Salles’ campaign ads encouraged the use of .30-06 ammunition “against the left and the MST.” He later became Bolsonaro’s environmental minister.
One common tactic used by traditional rural elites, most of whom are descendants from slave plantation owners, is to buy the deed to a small amount of land, say 10 hectares, then build a fence around 10,000 hectares, and kick all of the peasant farmers out with armed gunmen. This violent process is one of the main factors that resulted in cities like São Paulo growing by five times or more between 1950 and 2000, as tens of millions of Northeastern peasants were forced off their land and migrated to the big cities of the southeast.
Another common practice is to fence off huge tracts of Amazon rainforest, burn it down, then sell the land for soy farms or cattle ranching. These practices were not just tolerated by the Bolsonaro administration, but encouraged.
During his first year in office, Bolsonaro issued an executive order forgiving grilagem of Amazonian public lands that had taken place before December 2018, and expediting land deeds to the big ranchers and farmers who supported his presidential campaign. Furthermore, he liberalized gun laws and encouraged big farmers to stock up on weapons to “defend their land” (Bloomberg, 5/11/22). Consequently, murders of rural peasant leaders increased dramatically, by 75% in 2021, according to the Brazilian Catholic Church, which has been working closely with the MST since it was founded in 1984.
This MST, which works within the law in partnership with INCRA, and is supported by the Catholic Church and its charities like Caritas, and has made a significant dent in poverty in Brazil, is the one widely seen as “communist and criminal,” according to the Times. It’s true that that is a narrative that has been actively spread by elite rural landowners and the Brazilian far right for decades, increasingly so during the Bolsonaro years. It’s no secret that the January 8 coup attempt against Lula was financed by big rural landowners. In its article, the New York Times treats the narrative as a rational concern raised by the “polarizing MST.”
With dozens of peasant leaders assassinated every year by rural land barons and their hired gunmen, legitimizing this false narrative, as the Times does, encourages more violence against the rural poor. (The Times is widely read by Brazilian elites, who tend to view it as the world’s most important newspaper.)
‘Is Brazil Anti-American?’
The New York Times (5/2/23) later changed the headline to “My Country Is Reaching Out to People the West Can’t Stand.”
The day after April 30 article on the MST, the New York Times (5/2/23) ran an op-ed piece by Vanessa Barbara, a Brazilian columnist for the right-wing Estado de São Paulo newspaper. Her paper is a historic supporter of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–85) and cheerleader for Operation Car Wash, the kangaroo court that resulted in Lula’s arbitrary election-season arrest and cleared the way for Bolsonaro’s election.
Barbara’s op-ed provides a reasonably good explanation of the logic behind Lula’s foreign policy objectives, at least within the Overton window allowed in the Times’ op-ed section. (She does hold Brazil to a double standard by criticizing Lula for not recognizing Taiwan as an independent state, when the United States also doesn’t recognize the breakaway island’s independence.)
The main issue with the piece is the headlines that editors put on it. The piece was launched online with the headline, “Is Brazil Anti-American Now?”—an odd choice, since the thrust of the piece was that Lula’s foreign policy should not be seen as anti-American. Since more people always see a headline than read the associated article, this headline seems likely to spread the idea that Lula might be anti-American among US readers and the Brazilian elites who follow the Times.
The headline on the electronic version was later changed to “My Country Is Reaching Out to People the West Can’t Stand”—less aggressive but still negative.
The print edition headline, on the May 3 op-ed page, had the headline: “Lula Isn’t Trying to Make Brazil a Pariah. He’s Just Being Pragmatic.” Like the MST story’s print headline, this more accurately reflected the content of the article—and perhaps reflected the paper’s more liberal readership in the New York City area.
‘Grand Visions Fizzle’
The New York Times (4/12/14) playing its traditional role of insisting that attempts at radical change are doomed to failure.
During Lula’s first two terms in office, the New York Times was forced to back down in embarrassment after its Brazil correspondent, Larry Rohter, used gossip from a political enemy to accuse Lula of being incapacitated from alcoholism in “Brazilian Leader’s Tippling Becomes National Concern” (5/9/04). For years afterwards, New York Times coverage of Brazil was more objective than most big US media groups.
Then the 2014 election pitted Brazil’s first female president, Dilma Rousseff of the Workers Party, against US DNC favorite Aecio Neves, who hired David Axelrod’s former PR firm to run his social media campaign. The Times (4/12/14) ran a long hit piece by correspondent Simon Romero on the cover of its Americas section, full of depressing-looking black-and-white photographs, called “Grand Visions Fizzle in Brazil.”
This ushered in a new era of negative reporting, full of false innuendo about Rousseff’s involvement in corruption schemes. The smear campaign served to normalize her technically illegal impeachment in 2016. The subsequent privatizations and neoliberal structural adjustment plunged tens of millions of people below the poverty line, and saw Brazil return to the UN’s World Hunger Map.
I fear that, like Romero’s 2014 article, these two New York Times pieces are signaling a new era of biased reporting on Brazil. The fact that the editors twice changed the title of the op-ed piece suggests that they are still working out the details.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter: @NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
The post NYT Signals Lula’s Post-Bolsonaro Honeymoon Is Over appeared first on FAIR.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting | Radio Free (2023-05-12T20:37:05+00:00) NYT Signals Lula’s Post-Bolsonaro Honeymoon Is Over. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/12/nyt-signals-lulas-post-bolsonaro-honeymoon-is-over/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.