The text below is a slightly edited version of the author’s remarks to the M20 Media Freedom Summit held online in Delhi on September 6, 2023 by the M20 Organising Committee, which comprises 11 editors from India and a former judge of the Supreme Court.Good morning to you all, and thank you for inviting me. Mostly, thank you for putting together this initiative, which I think is timely and necessary. Very briefly, I could say that freedom of expression and press freedom in Brazil are at risk in many ways.I would start by mentioning attacks, both violent personal ones and virtual ones. Journalism and journalists have been attacked in many ways in Brazil by public and private actors, including our previous president who is very explicit in how he despised journalism and journalists, particularly female journalists. I think that we have a background there, where journalism as a trusted information source has been discredited little by little, and today we face a difficult situation when it comes to public trust in relation to the media in general.I would say the second risk that we face is a strategy called judicial harassment. It is becoming very popular in Brazil to judicially pursue journalists and media organisations. This is a tactic that has been used a lot by political and/or religious groups to intimidate journalists.My third point would be that an element of risk comes with our great dependence on tech platforms. I think that the media industry today in Brazil, as well as globally – I don’t think we differ strongly from many other countries – have an enormous level of dependence on media platforms. They are the great mediators between us and our audiences. We depend greatly on them to distribute our content, but not only that. They have been shaping markets, our market, distributing, giving out a lot of money and with not very transparent criteria – selecting who would get these financial resources and who won’t get these financial resources in a market that is already fragile from a financial perspective, creating a lot of imbalance in an already very unbalanced market.Also read: Media Faces Counter-Offensive as States, Including Elective Democracies, Repress Independent JournalismIn Brazil over the past two years, we have been trying to approve some regulatory legislation. We had an attempt to vote a bill three or four months ago and we saw the power of the lobby coming from the platforms. They played very strongly, although they keep saying ‘you need to regulate us’. Once regulation time comes, we see that it is absolutely not in their interest to become regulated, and what we saw in Brazil can be perceived as an example to the rest of the world in the sense of how much money, effort and people they have put in to prevent a legislation to be passed.I think that also what we are considering now in Brazil is the kind of retaliation that we are observing in other parts of the world, such as removing news content from news feeds in the case of Facebook and from search in the case of Google. The Brazilian market is a market that is largely dependent on these tools, so if news is removed from search, this would harm publishers from small to big publishers very much, and it’s something that we need to address also as a risk, from my point of view.I would say that another risk is our market itself. Brazil has a very traditional and concentrated media market, that is mainly owned by some families. The shape of the market ends up shaping the public debate – how the public debate is shaped in the country.Our media market is also always very fragile from a financial perspective, which makes it more vulnerable to different interests –political, religious and commercial. I think that the Brazilian media industry has had a hard time innovating. It has a lot of barriers to new entrants – I speak from experience – which also creates a lot of barriers to a more diversified media market, which would be healthier and strengthening for the media industry.Finally, I would like to emphasise that we also have a lack of vision of a public policy towards media, the media ecosystem. I think the debate in Brazil ends by talking about media regulation which is perceived as censorship, and is not elaborated further than that, and we need to have a broader vision. One would be to have a public policy that is not tainted or contaminated by private interests – that really plans to shape and to stimulate and to develop a stronger media ecosystem that is attached to the strengthening of our democracy.I would like to end by saying that I think that this kind of initiative that [the Indian M20 Organising Committee] have put together can be a great forum for us to develop – to debate all those issues that I’ve mentioned, but also to induce a national debate that is connected to other public agendas.The media so far is not perceived as an element that has to do with the development agenda within our country. I think it’s perceived as something that is not side-by-side with our other public policy issues such as education or health or things like this. I think that if we consider the media ecosystem and its strengthening and development as part of our public agenda, it could bring very positive outcomes for our market, our industry and our ecosystem.To conclude, we would be happy to contribute and help organise an event in Brazil next year, let’s talk about that. Thank you very much.Paula Miraglia is Co-founder & Director General, Nexo Jornal and Gama Revista, Brazil
