Published: 2 April 2013
Region: Brazil
The majority of newspapers in Brazil avoid mentioning the concept of racism even when they address the issue of racial inequality, according to the report “Parliament and Racism in the Media” (in Portuguese).
The Institute of Socioeconomic Studies (Inesc) and Andi, a not-for-profit media watchdog, conducted this investigation with the objective in finding out how the media in Brazil cover racism when it is linked to the Parliament.
Black Brazilians represent more than 50 per cent of the country’s population; however, only 43 of the 513 federal deputies and only two of the 81 senators in Brazil identify themselves as Black.
“Representative democracy in Brazil is much distorted in Parliament. For us at Inesc, the explanation for that distortion is racism and, in this study, we wanted to understand how media outlets deal with the issue of racism using Parliament as a basis: parliamentary positions, legislation, voting,” explained Eliana Magalhães Graça, a political advisor with Inesc, to Journalism in the Americas blog.
In total, 57% of the articles analysed did not refer to the concept of racism, even though they wrote about topics related to the issue such as legislation and actions adopted by the Parliament.
For Graça, one of the main problems in the country is “how media outlets distort reality: their articles reveal data and discuss racial inequality, but they don’t acknowledge the existence of racism per se.”
The newspapers that covered the issue of racism the most was A Tarde, a regional newspaper form the state of Bahia. It published 51 stories (12.7% of the stories analysed) about the issue of racism and the Brazilian Parliament.
Estado de São Paulo follows with 46 stories (11.5%) and the study stated that this publication “waters down the idea of a society marked by racism, neglecting parliamentary voices and other sectors that reaffirmed the existence of the phenomenon”.