02/18/2020 - 18:01
- Clarín.com
- World
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Tuesday unleashed a controversy by suggesting that a well-known journalist sought information in exchange for sex with the employee of a company suspected of spreading false news, during the 2018 election campaign, which ended up winning the ultra-rightist.
"She wanted to give a 'furo' at all costs against me ," Bolsonaro said upon leaving her official residence, using a word ('furo') that in Portuguese means both an informative first and a hole.
His statements, referring to the journalist Patricia Campos Mello , of the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, caused laughter among his supporters.
Campos Mello, with several journalism awards under his belt, has been harassed for weeks by "digital militias" of Bolsonarism, for an investigation into an organization that spread false news on WhatsApp against the leftist Workers Party (PT) during the election campaign.
The controversy has increased since Hans River do Rio Nascimento, a former employee of one of the alleged digital marketing companies that participated in that campaign, told a parliamentary commission that the journalist "wanted a certain type of information in exchange for sex."
Folha denied these accusations and published the messages exchanged by the reporter with her source during the journalistic investigation.
The National Association of Newspapers (ANJ for its acronym in Portuguese) and the National Association of Journal Publishers (ANER) said Tuesday that "the president's insinuations seek to disqualify the free exercise of journalism and confuse public opinion."
Bolsonaro maintains since its arrival in power in January 2019 a situation of permanent tension with a large part of the Brazilian media, which he accuses of trying to systematically discredit his government.
A repudiated antecedent
At the end of December, contrary to journalists' questions about a corruption scandal involving one of his children, Bolsonaro reacted aggressively against the press. He gave a strong insult with homophobic expressions to one of the reporters and another responded with a rude comment.
"You have a terrible face of homosexual and that is why I accuse you of being homosexual," said the president at the entrance to the Alvorada Palace, the presidential residence, before a group of reporters. He responded to the journalist of the newspaper O Globo, who asked him if his son Flavio, now a senator, could not have committed a "slip" in his behavior.
Source: AFP
