Threat to press freedom in action against Jovem Pan

Jurists heard by the People’s Gazette criticize the decision of the Attorney General’s Office (AGU), the Executive’s judicial representation body, to join the Federal Public Ministry (MPF) in the active pole of the action that requests the revocation of Jovem Pan’s radio concessions for abuse of freedom broadcasting.

The AGU did not join the request to revoke the concessions, but endorsed the other requests in the action, which include the imposition of compensation of R$13 million for collective moral damages and the obligation to broadcast advertisements about the reliability of voting systems in Brazil.

The action arises from a civil investigation initiated against Jovem Pan after acts of depredation in Brasília, on January 8, 2023, on suspicion of broadcasting “disinformative and inciting content of violence” throughout the year 2022.

Lawyer Eduardo Maurício, master from the University of Coimbra, points out the “contradictory stance” of the AGU, which, on Monday (4), had taken a position against the requests of the Public Ministry.

At the time, the AGU had defended press freedom and highlighted that “it would be extremely dangerous for the democratic regime itself to assign to any state body the role of evaluating the ‘quality of content’ broadcast by radio or TV stations”.

Less than 4 hours later, the chief minister of the AGU, Jorge Messias, went public on the social network deny the petitionwhich was followed by another, reversing the body’s position to request a ruling on the merits of the action.

Although the AGU was more moderate than the MPF in not endorsing the request to revoke radio concessions, Maurício considers the other requests to be equally harmful to press freedom: “all these claims cause obvious illegal embarrassment to the broadcaster”.

André Marsiglia, a lawyer specializing in freedom of expression who has press outlets among his clients, agrees. “Not only asking for cancellation of a grant is a censorious act”, he says, emphasizing that censorship can come in different forms. “One of them is compensation that makes the vehicle’s operation unfeasible, another is forcing the broadcaster to publish government propaganda, silencing the voice of its editorial.”

In this regard, the MPF argues that Jovem Pan would be subject to a “especially limited regime of freedom of speech”, because the right to occupy a frequency in the broadcasting spectrum is subject to concession by the Public Power (the case of Jovem Pan, which operates in part through this modality, maintaining, according to the MPF, three public radio concessions, located in São Paulo and Brasília).

The ministerial body claims that the “limited nature” of radio, available to a finite number of companies, would justify greater State control power over “the quality of content”, to “guarantee that the exploitation of this scarce asset serves the maximum benefit of collective.”

Lawyer and professor Rodrigo Saraiva Marinho, CEO of Instituto Livre Market, disagrees with the thesis, which he describes as a “restriction of freedom of expression” provided for in the Constitution, conceived by him as “listening to what you don’t like”. He describes the action as “absurd” and argues that the consumer “is not obliged to listen to Jovem Pan, you can always change the channel”.

In this regard, Marinho states that the advent of social networks would have had a transformative effect on the market, by increasing the possibility of alternative sources for the consumer. As recognized by the MPF itself, digital platforms “have infrastructures widely available to anyone who wishes to explore them”, without the same limitations as radio and television.

Marinho considers that Jovem Pan’s editorial line, a minority in the press, is a market response to consumer demands, which began to manifest themselves more clearly with the advent of competition from social networks. He claims that Jovem Pan would be suffering “political pressure” for its editorial line. It was also the view of the Spanish newspaper La Gaceta, which considered what happened as evidence of a “politicization of public institutions” in Brazil. The newspaper compared the legal action in Brazil with the closure, in Venezuela, of the broadcaster Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV) in 2007.