Patrícia Campos Mello on the Bolsonaro machine: "exposing journalists is a modern form of censorship"
A journalist from Folha de S.Paulo, who has just released the book "The Hate Machine: Notes from a Reporter on Fake News and Digital Violence," told TV 247 how journalists are suffering under the current government. Watch.
247 - In an interview broadcast on TV 247, journalist Patrícia Campos Mello explained how the Bolsonaro hate machine works and recounted how she suffered at the hands of this mechanism in 2019, when she was a victim of... sexual offense on the part of Jair Bolsonaro after having published an article about the sending pro-Bolsonaro messages via WhatsAppShe has just released the book "The Hate Machine: Notes from a Reporter on Fake News and Digital Violence".
Patricia emphasized that she She was not the only media professional to be attacked. And she pointed out that attacks against journalists have never been as frequent in Brazil as they are now under the Bolsonaro government. “It’s this thing of assassinating the reputation of journalists; this type of leader depends on that, on delegitimizing and discrediting the press. I’m far from being the only person who has gone through this; we have several examples. Right after me it was Vera Magalhães, before that it was Constança Rezende, Miriam Leitão directly, so it’s something much more aggressive towards women. I would say that journalists as a whole are facing much greater hostility than in previous governments.”
For Patrícia, the way Bolsonarism has found to censor journalism is by exposing professionals, intimidating them through the power of social media. “Even though there was previous hostility, I think it has now broken all records, whether in relation to media outlets, like Globo and Folha, or in relation to individual journalists; they want to expose journalists, this is kind of a modern form of censorship. Before publishing a story that you know will generate a reaction, an investigative piece, you think twice, you think, 'Oh no, they're going to talk about me, they're going to talk about my family, and they're going to distribute this massively through social media using this hate machine.' At the time, the number of memes with pornographic montages that superimposed my face was overwhelming, and this kind of thing doesn't disappear, it's there forever.”
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