โNaked Truthโ RSF campaign to defend reliable reporting in Brazil, a country where press freedom has been challenged
Produced by the BETC Paris advertising agency, the new RSF campaign will draw attention to the naked truth โ the reality of the facts beyond Bolsonaroโs preposterous and manipulative claims โ by means of a photomontage showing him naked behind a sign displaying the latest figures for Covid-19 deaths and positive tests.
According to RSF, the aim is to make Bolsonaro symbolically face reality, instead of blaming the media in order to shirk responsibility for his disastrous mishandling of the crisis in Brazil, which has the worldโs third-highest number of confirmed Covid-19 infections. The aim is also to emphasize the importance of facts for understanding the pandemic and taking appropriate action, facts that Brazilians could not access without the work that journalists do.
โThis โshockโ campaign is meant to raise awareness and combat the Bolsonaro systemโs constant attacks on the media,โ RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said. โThese attacks are both intolerable from the moral viewpoint and dangerous for the Brazilian population, which is deprived of vital information about the pandemic. The work of journalists is crucial for reporting the facts and informing people about the reality of the health crisis. The right to information, which is closely linked to the right to health, must be defended more than ever in Brazil.โ
RSF reminds that the work of the Brazilian media has become much more fraught since Bolsonaro was elected president in October 2018. Constantly insulting, denigrating, stigmatizing and humiliating journalists has become the presidentโs trademark. Any media revelation threatening his or his administrationโs interests triggers a new round of violent verbal attacks:
In January, he invited journalists to โgo have sex with their whore mothersโ and to โram condensed milk cans up their backsides.โ These outrageous and crudely-worded comments were just the latest volley in a well-oiled strategy of attacks on the media by the president and his closest allies, as RSF noted when reporting that it had logged no fewer than 580 attacks on the media in 2020.
RSF says that โNaked Truthโ is one of a long line of powerful, irreverent communication campaigns created to draw the publicโs and international communityโs attention to violations of the freedom to inform. Produced by the BETC Paris advertising agency, it is available in four languages (Portuguese, Spanish, French and English).
Brazil is ranked 107th out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2020World Press Freedom Index.
In June 2020, a group of leading Consortium of Brazilian newspapers consisting of UOL, O Estado de S. Paulo, Folha de S. Paulo, O Globo, G1 and Extra, decided an unprecedented alliance – the Consortium of Newspapers – to obtain coronavirus case numbers directly from local authorities in the countryโs 26 states and the Brasilia federal district, and to issue their own bulletins.
