Officials say they’re following court guidance to avoid appearing to favor candidates during this year’s elections. Journalists say the purge amounts to censorship.
Pedro Vilela, a reporter for Empresa Brasil de Comunicação (EBC), recently searched for an old interview of his in the federal public broadcasting corporation’s website to hyperlink it to a story he was working on. But to his surprise, the page was unavailable.
“It was an interview I did with Ana Maria Gonçalves, the first Black woman to join the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL, for its initials in Portuguese). When I tried to access the story EBC had published about it to add to my article, I discovered it was offline,” Vilela told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR).
Vilela and other colleagues quickly realized this was not an isolated incident. EBC had also unpublished tens of thousands of news stories, podcasts, TV programs, photos and other content.
EBC explained that it was not an error or the result of a hacking attack: The company was following electoral guidelines.
Brazil has a three-month restriction period(opens in new tab) preceding the first round of elections that prohibits public officials and entities from certain actions to prevent benefitting any candidate. In a July 4 statement, EBC said(opens in new tab) it would follow recent recommendations from the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) and the presidency’s Secretariat of Social Communication regarding some of EBC’s content.
As a result, more than 180,000 links(opens in new tab) were unpublished, at least temporarily, according to EBC president Antônia Pellegrino. The purge affected content that had been available on EBC websites, social media platforms and its intranet from Jan. 1, 2023, to July 3, 2026.
In a recent article(opens in new tab), Pellegrino called the guidance from the electoral courts objective, and added that there is a general lack of understanding of how publicly-funded journalism fits the electoral guidance.
“[Because of that] Agência Brasil chose to archive its collection — not because the texts already published constitute government propaganda, but because checking, one by one, more than 180,000 articles for mentions of authorities running for office or terms that could be considered publicity is humanly unfeasible”, she said, adding that the company does not have a reliable way to carry out such a nuanced verification at scale.
Pellegrino’s article, alongside an EBC petition(opens in new tab) asking the TSE to provide legal certainty for Agência Brasil work during the election, tried taking the political heat off the public media company.
Pellegrino was somewhat critical of the federal guidance. She explained that holding EBC to the same standard as, for example, the press office of a ministry — and in the absence of guidance that recognizes their different functions— ends up, in practice, treating equally two governmental entities that the Constitution itself conceived as opposites.
“It was not for EBC to engage in an act of civil disobedience when the restriction period came into effect. However, it is up to the company to assert its specific role by requesting judicial authorization from the TSE so that Agência Brasil can restore the thousands of articles that were hidden”, she said.
Many workers inside the public company, however, were unconvinced by EBC’s efforts and have criticized it publicly.
Refusing to unpublish articles “would not be civil disobedience, as Pellegrino says, because public outlets under EBC’s umbrella produce journalistic content,” said the workers’ collective Valoriza EBC in a statement. “It wouldn't even be civil disobedience, since the current interpretation has never been applied in any previous election. It's unprecedented.”
Asked by LJR via email about the decision, EBC's press team responded by sending three links that it said explained its reasons and subsequent actions. All three(opens in new tab) were(opens in new tab) offline(opens in new tab).
The episode is the latest chapter in the troubled relationship between EBC's journalists and the government of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva(opens in new tab). Many journalists have complained that bowing down to electoral rules in bulk blurs the line between public-service journalism and government communications.
Political columnists like Guilherme Amado have reported that some senior Lula administration officials are extremely concerned that content from EBC and other institutions — such as the National Archives of Brazil, which preserves the country’s historical records — could be “closely monitored(opens in new tab)” by the political opposition like Flávio Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL), flagged as content that violates the three-month restriction, and used to file complaints with electoral authorities.
“In more than 20 years at the company, I have never seen anything as absurd as this. This mass removal of content, based on no criteria other than its age, only to then assess one by one what could be considered ‘sensitive,’ shows the continuing confusion between a public media service and the government's institutional communications,” EBC journalist Akemi Nitahara told LJR.
In 2023, after Lula returned to power following the four-year administration of former President Jair Bolsonaro, then-EBC President Hélio Doyle said the new administration's priority was to restore the separation between public journalism and government communications(opens in new tab).
“We see EBC as the great instrument we have to produce quality public communications that truly reaches people and provides a public service. In the case of journalism, we intend to make it very clear what is public-service journalism and what is government information,” he said.
Journalists' associations saw EBC’s recent mass removal of content as evidence that that goal hasn’t been achieved. The National Federation of Journalists (FENAJ) described the removal as censorship and said it represents a direct attack on EBC's autonomy, promising to take legal action to restore the content.
ABCPública, a Brazilian nonprofit that represents public communications workers, said content removal has been common for years at all levels of government.
The mood among EBC journalists is now one of tension and uncertainty ahead of this year’s electoral period.
“Everything we have learned to do as journalists suddenly stopped being valid. For example, how do you produce a story about a vaccination campaign without mentioning the Ministry of Health, without providing context? That is what is being imposed on us,” Carol Barreto, an EBC employee, told LJR.
“How will coverage of the electoral process work? We don't know that either,” she added. “The risk we face is having very superficial coverage that simply reports the dates and hours of voting, without addressing any of the major issues or analyzing anything in depth, because everything could be interpreted as propaganda.”.
Recent internal EBC data gathered by employees and shared by Brazilian media(opens in new tab) showed that audience traffic has fallen 65% since the content was removed.
Former EBC ombudsman Joseti Marques told LJR that while she does not consider the recent content removal censorship, it is still a serious and discouraging episode.
“It is the tacit acknowledgment by the government and the company's management of the lack of importance they both attribute to a public good, namely the public media system administered by EBC, at a time when the growing importance of communications in promoting critical awareness in society is increasingly recognized,” she said.
Translated with AI assistance and reviewed by Alejandro Martínez-Cabrera
