A unit of the public defender’s office in the central Brazilian state of Goiás has sued 10 media outlets, seeking the removal of online content related to a brutal crime in which police say a local official shot and killed his two children before taking his own life.
The women’s rights unit of the Defensoria Pública do Estado de Goiás, Brazil’s public defender and legal aid institution, said coverage shifted attention away from the perpetrator’s violence and toward the moral conduct of the children’s mother, who survived. Many reports focused on an affair the man accused her of having, though it was never proven, exposing her to “online lynching.”
The office added that the outlets did little to curb hate speech directed at the woman on their websites and social media platforms. Some published attacks and videos from her private life, while others circulated a letter written by the man explaining his actions.
The mother had to leave one of her children’s wake early due to safety concerns and alleged threats.
In a statement provided to LatAm Journalism Review (LJR), the public defender’s office said the lawsuit seeks the removal of publications and collective moral damages, as a matter of public interest to protect the interests of vulnerable groups in general.
The lawsuit names the following media outlets: CNN Brasil, Unigraf Unidas Gráficas e Editora Ltda, Globo Comunicação e Participações, Mais Goiás Comunicação Marketing e Internet Ltda, Metrópoles, Rádio e Televisão Record, Televisão Goya Ltda, Televisão Anhanguera S/A, TV Serra Dourada Ltda, and Opção Notícias Ltda.
Some of the outlets named in the suit are part of the Brazilian Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters (ABERT for its initials in Portuguese). The organization declined to comment on the case when contacted by LJR.
Criticism of coverage of the crime allegedly carried out by Thales Machado, who was a municipal secretary in the town of Itumbiara in southern Goiás, has also come from other journalists. Newspaper Diário da Manhã published an in-depth report on the hate speech that followed, highlighting comments that directly blamed the children’s mother, Sarah Araújo.
Columnist Fabiana Moraes, writing in The Intercept Brasil, said many outlets were “sharpening the knife” against Araújo.
“It is not the media outlet that pulls the trigger. But it is the one that prepares the symbolic ground where certain triggers find social justification. By insisting on ‘infidelity’ as a central element, the coverage does not merely inform: it suggests an understanding, almost an explanation,” she wrote.
Veteran journalist Cileide Alves, former editor in chief of O Popular, the largest newspaper in Goiás, told LJR the episode revealed a lack of respect for Araújo and women in general, but recognized some of the reporting was responsible.
“Those who were spreading the killer’s letter were acting as an extension of him against the woman’s honor and mental health,” Alves said. “So I think that while part of the press got it wrong, it was also part of the press that put things back in their proper place. And from that moment on, people on social media also began to see another point of view.”
The case drew national attention to what experts call “vicarious violence,” in which someone harms children in order to affect the mother. The Itumbiara case recently prompted the Brazilian Senate to approve including this type of gender-based violence within the scope of the Lei Maria da Penha, landmark legislation on domestic and gender-based violence.
Brazil is seeing an increase in gender-based violence. Last year, the country recorded a 4.12% rise in femicides to roughly four per day, according to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security. Recent cases have sparked mass protests.
For investigative reporter Cecília Olliveira, the Itumbiara case was problematic also because of how it was structured and presented to the public.
“Framing is not a technical detail of journalism. It is the central mechanism of meaning-making,” Olliveira told LJR. “When a story suggests, even indirectly, a sequence such as ‘man discovers infidelity and then kills the children,’ it is not just describing facts in chronological order. It is establishing a causal relationship. It offers the reader an interpretive key that turns an act of extreme violence into an emotional reaction. And that shifts the axis of responsibility. It does not explicitly absolve the perpetrator, but it relativizes his actions by introducing an element that begins to compete with the crime itself at the center of the narrative.”
The history of media coverage of femicide in Brazil was the focus of the 2021 book “Histórias de morte matada contadas feito morte morrida” (Stories of violent death told like a natural passing) by journalists Niara de Oliveira and Vanessa Rodrigues.
In it, they examine how the press has reported on femicide in Brazil over 40 years and show that, in many cases, news coverage blames women for their own murders. The Itumbiara case is of a similar nature, the authors told LJR.
One characteristic of this type of coverage is the use of the passive voice, the authors said. Niara de Oliveira told LJR that, in cases of femicide, the passive voice “shares” responsibility with the victim, casting her as partly to blame for the crime that ended her life.
“The constant use of the passive voice is one of the most powerful linguistic tools for erasing authorship in crime and human-interest journalism,” Rodrigues told LJR. “When the media uses constructions such as ‘Woman was killed’ or ‘Woman’s body is found,’ it promotes a semantic shift: the focus moves away from the perpetrator and falls on the isolated event or on the victim.”
Freelance journalist Lola Ferreira wrote the 2020 manual “Best Practices in Covering Violence Against Women.” Brazil has made some progress in gender coverage, but despite its importance, there is still a long way to go, she said.
“When we talk about this kind of violence—whether the rise in femicide or the killing of children to harm these women, which is an extension of a gender-based crime—I think we still need to focus on the fact itself, on the crime itself,” she told LJR.
Reporters and editors frequently focus on what is at the periphery of a violent act, rather than the act itself, which is a mistake, Ferreira said.
“It took a long time, historically, for journalism to understand that you cannot provide a step-by-step account of how someone died by suicide. We are still in the early stages of understanding that we also cannot provide a step-by-step account of how someone decided to kill a woman or punish a woman with violent crimes, as happened in this case,” she said, referring to the letter left by Machado in his social media profile that was published by many outlets.
Additionally, Niara de Oliveira, co-author of “Histórias de morte,” said the quality of daily crime coverage has declined in recent years.
“Today, it is easy to find headlines like ‘Find out who the doctor is who poisoned his ex-wife,’” she told LJR. It’s “an entertainment-style approach that promotes the killer’s profile, as if it were any other beat covering the latest Big Brother champion, the new prime-time soap opera heartthrob, or the latest rising sports star.”
