By Piero Locatelli, Andrew Fishman for the The Intercept
LEIA EM PORTUGUÊS
LAST MONDAY, CNN announced that it will launch a Portuguese-language channel in Brazil. The U.S.-based cable news channel will roll out the latest foreign operation to bear the CNN brand through a license. However, the scandal-prone records of the two Brazilian partners behind the venture are already raising questions over the forthcoming channel’s credibility.
Principal funding for the venture will come from the new channel’s chair of the board, Rubens Menin, a construction magnate who is a vocal cheerleader for far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and whose company has been caught multiple times using modern slave labor. CNN Brasil also announced that it will bring on Douglas Tavolaro as its CEO. Tavolaro previously served as vice president for news of Rede Record, a channel that in 2018 earned the nickname “Fox News Brasil” for its fawning coverage of Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign and the preferential access it secured as a result. When orders from on high at Record demanded that journalists cease criticism of Bolsonaro and increase negative coverage of his competitor, a minor staff revolt ensued and multiple journalists resigned in protest.
On Friday, the two figures behind CNN Brasil — Menin and Tavolaro — met with Bolsonaro and his son Eduardo at the presidential palace. Earlier this week, Eduardo tweeted his skepticism of the new outlet.
CNN Brasil said it plans to hire 400 journalists and begin operations during the second half of 2019. A press release noted that the 24-hour news channel will have total editorial independence, as well as the rights to rebroadcast CNN’s non-Portuguese language content. CNN Brasil appears to be swimming against the tide in an industry in which wave after wave of layoffs in major TV and print news organizations have thinned out Brazil’s newsrooms in recent years.
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