Minister defends separation between public and government communication.
"We want to build a project so that public television has editorial independence and its own operating logic," said Minister Paulo Pimenta.
Agency Brazil - One day after taking over the command of the Secretariat of Social Communication (Secom) of the Presidency of the Republic, Minister Paulo Pimenta visited the headquarters of Empresa Brasil de Comunicação (EBC), in Brasília, where he once again highlighted the importance of separating public and governmental communication.
“I think it’s important for the public to understand that government communication, which is also of public interest, aims to provide services and institutional communication of the country’s and government’s positions. Public communication, within which EBC is included, has more specific objectives,” Pimenta said in an interview with professionals from the public company itself.
“But when we talk about public communication, we are also talking about government communication. Therefore, it is impossible to imagine that there will be no repercussions when there is a [political] change, when the population chooses a different [political] project. What we have to do is preserve [separate] the issues that are state matters from those that are government matters. Obviously, each government has specific focuses, what it considers a priority. In a democratic regime like ours, there will always be some political influence,” added the minister, citing public health issues, such as vaccination campaigns, as examples of topics of public interest.
EBC was created in October 2007 with the purpose of coordinating and implementing a national public communication network and managing federal public broadcasting services. The company is responsible for TV Brasil, the Nacional radio stations in Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, Amazônia, and Alto Solimões, as well as the MEC radio stations in Rio de Janeiro and the federal capital. Agência Brasil and Radioagência Nacional are also part of EBC. The company, which was linked to the Ministry of Communications in Jair Bolsonaro's government, is now linked to Secom in the new government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Speaking to company workers on Wednesday morning (4), Pimenta assured that he received a request from President Lula to give “special attention” to EBC. “He asked me to build, with a lot of dialogue, a transition process so that the company can not only be strengthened, but also integrate a project that aims to restore the credibility of the federal government as a disseminator of credible information.”
Pimenta had already mentioned the issue of the credibility of the Executive Branch as a source of relevant information when he took office yesterday. On that occasion, he stated that, in recent years, some "authorities" have "distanced themselves from the truth and the facts," fueling a disinformation industry. Today, when asked about the strategic importance of EBC, he said that, even enjoying editorial independence, the company can "integrate a project aimed at restoring the credibility of the government."
Still in his inauguration speech this Tuesday, Pimenta promised to work so that the former state television broadcaster, NBR (which was also managed by EBC), and TV Brasil "return to having specific roles," with the former reassuming its character as a channel responsible for broadcasting government acts, and the latter being able to dedicate itself to showing informative, cultural, artistic and scientific programming complementary to commercial media.
TV Brasil and NBR merged in April 2019, prompting the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office (MPF) to file a public civil action to try to annul the operation, which prosecutors claimed resulted in the "improper inclusion of typically state-run programming and programming of interest to the current occupants of the [federal] Executive Branch on the federal public channel, TV Brasil."
“We want to build a project so that public TV has editorial independence and its own operating logic,” said Pimenta, clarifying today that the intention to prioritize technical decisions over ideological bias extends to other EBC media outlets and that the plans to strengthen EBC include recreating the Board of Trustees, a body for social participation in the company that was dissolved in 2016 through Provisional Measure No. 744.
“We will discuss [the creation of a new] council that can fulfill this role. We will discuss how [the defunct council] functioned, whether it was adequate, and if anything needs to be corrected. In a public company, we need to have a supervisory body with plural representation from society that monitors all the work done,” the minister commented.
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