NEWS

As Fox News settles its case for $787m, a similar outlet in Brazil is in legal trouble

Jovem Pan, a group which endorsed Jair Bolsonaro, is facing a legal challenge for spreading misinformation. Its radio licence can be revoked.

The fortunes of Jair Bolsonaro and Jovem Pan have followed similar paths. The Brazilian media group endorsed Bolsonaro unconditionally throughout his Presidency and this move made it thrive. After Brazil’s far-right leader lost the election and Brazil’s capital was raided, Jovem Pan soon went into troubled: the group announced a round of layoffs, its President was replaced and its journalists were challenged in court for spreading dangerous disinformation.

Established in 1942 as a radio station in São Paulo, Jovem Pan is now called the “Brazilian Fox News”. The moniker is appropriate as the network has amplified Bolsonaro’s propaganda in the same way Fox News amplifies Donald Trump’s views. Pro-Bolsonaro rallies frequently featured posters with pictures of the company’s commentators along with the message “the real press.”

The origins of Jovem Pan
Decades before Bolsonaro rose to power, Jovem Pan gained a big following for its news programmes, with a big focus on sports. In 1976, they launched a musical station aimed at a younger audience, and it succeeded with that segment too.

For almost all its history, the group has been run by the Carvalho family, which is still in charge. The Carvalhos are one of the pioneers of broadcasting in Brazil. Entrepreneur Paulo Machado de Carvalho, the grandfather of the current president of the board of Jovem Pan, purchased the radio in 1944. He also took part in the foundation of TV Record, the second most watched TV in Brazil, today owned by a Protestant church.

Jovem Pan’s headquarters are based in an imposing building on São Paulo’s most famous avenue. Today the group operates more than 100 affiliated radio stations across Brazil. It also has almost 25 million YouTube subscribers, and a cable TV channel that was launched at the height of Bolsonaro’s presidency. The company does not disclose the number of journalists in its newsrooms.

On an email, a Jovem Pan spokesperson said the accusations of sharing fake news or hate speech were “false” and added that the group was not authorised to enter into details due to judicial secrecy. The spokesperson also said that the change in the group’s presidency and its commentators was already scheduled before the election, and denied that the group is an outspoken supporter of Bolsonaro.

According to Tony Goes, media correspondent for the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, Jovem Pan has always been considered an important radio station. He says the group changed in 2015, when Brazil was going through a delicate political moment, right after the impeachment of left-wing former President Dilma Rousseff.

Rousseff’s removal was endorsed enthusiastically at Jovem Pan’s, and the group decided to launch opinionated shows, with an emphasis on one called Os Pingos nos Is, which might be translated as “The dots in the I’s.”

“At the same time, they began filming these programmes in the radio studios and broadcasting them live on YouTube. This move had a significant impact”, Goes says.

Goes explains that the owners saw right-wing audiences as a promising niche, and decided to pursue it. “They realised that putting incendiary commentators on air increased the ratings and they went down that road. That’s how they were transformed into a Brazilian Fox News,” he says.

It was during this same period that Jovem Pan became the most listened-to news radio station in Brazil.

“They started hiring commentators who are not journalists, who have no sources and who do not do the basics of journalism,” Goes says. “When anyone criticises this behaviour, they are immediately called out for restricting free speech.”

The alignment with Bolsonaro’s government reached a point in which the network live-streamed the President’s broadcasts on Thursday evenings. During his speeches, the former president often mentioned Os Pingos nos Is and exclusively answered the friendly questions asked by the programme’s commentators. During an interview for Fox News in June 2022, Bolsonaro referred to Jovem Pan as an “example of journalism”.

Hand in hand
In a gripping feature for the prestigious magazine piauí, reporter Ana Clara Costa told in detail how the meteoric ascent of Bolsonaro and the increasingly incendiary tone of his messages made Jovem Pan’s ratings soar.

Jovem Pan was already a right-wing group. But its alignment with Bolsonaro’s messaging escalated at the beginning of the pandemic. As COVID-19 ravaged Brazil, the former president minimised the severity of the plague, encouraged crowds to ignore safety measures, spread lies about vaccines, and recommended unproven miracle drugs. Bolsonaro also attacked the Supreme Court, which resisted his attempts to end lockdowns.

As the pandemic lingered, Jovem Pan amplified Bolsonaro’s dangerous messages. “When it became clear that the Supreme Court was (as it is to this day) the most solid obstacle to Bolsonaro’s coup plans, Os Pingos nos Is took up the trenches,” Ana Clara Costa recalls. After spreading Bolsonaro’s lies about the pandemic, the broadcaster followed the President’s line again in saying that Brazil’s electronic voting system was vulnerable and that Bolsonaro’s reelection would be threatened by alleged fraud.

The group’s commentators went as far as to attack the station’s own professional reporters who were on the ground offering factual information. On one occasion, a commentator shouted that the news ticker was wrong and said it should be corrected immediately. The ticker was mentioning a Supreme Court investigation into anti-democratic acts organised by Bolsonaro fans. “There is nothing anti-democratic! Our news ticker is wrong and biassed!”, he said.

Growth under Bolsonaro
Adherence to Bolsonaro’s agenda proved to be lucrative for Jovem Pan. The group experienced huge growth. In October 2021 it achieved the founders’ dream and launched its own television channel. Jovem Pan News quickly rose to second place in the news segment during the election, surpassing CNN Brasil’s audience ratings. “This happened despite Jovem Pan’s much more precarious structure. They simply took the Youtube programmes and threw them on TV,” Goes says. This growth took a hit briefly after the election. But the company said it’s recovered in March, according to a survey by Kantar Ibope. It’s important to take into account that cable news is not massive in Brazil: according to Reuters Institute’s survey data, 53% of Brazilians said in 2022 that they never watch cable news.

After launching on cable TV, Jovem Pan has become a unique case in Brazil’s media landscape. The channel broadcasts all of its programmes on multiple platforms: on YouTube, TV, social media and the radio. “It is tough to evaluate the audience on all these platforms since each one uses different measurements and the same consumer might be measured in different channels. But it is estimated that the ‘Jovem Pan universe’ attracts around 50 million people [in a country with a population of 214 million] between viewers and listeners each month,” explains Costa in her piece.

With this remarkable digital footprint, she writes, Jovem Pan has become “the most powerful disinformation hub of Bolsonarismo.” This was precisely the argument used by the Federal Prosecutor’s Office to open an investigation against the group. According to prosecutors, an analysis of their content over several months showed that Jovem Pan had broadcast false news and speeches that undermine the institutional order “in a period that coincides with the escalation of the coup and violent movements across the country.”

The same court order, issued on 9 January 2023, requests YouTube to preserve all videos published by Jovem Pan in 2022. The purpose of the order is to prevent any evidence against the company from being wiped. YouTube was also given 30 days to inform the court of any videos that have been deleted.

The case against Jovem Pan
According to prosecutors, statements discrediting institutions and the democratic process have been gaining ground on Jovem Pan’s programming since mid-2022, even before the start of the electoral period. “The free expression of thought does not exempt Jovem Pan from respecting other constitutional and legal guidelines regarding communication activities, especially since part of its content is broadcast via radio, a public concession subject to relevant limits,” the institution argues.

The investigation will assess whether Jovem Pan violated the fundamental rights of the population and abused the freedom of broadcasting. The channel can be subjected to fines and made to pay compensation for collective moral damages. The government can suspend their broadcasting licence for up to 30 days or even revoke it. No deadline has yet been set for the announcement of a decision.

Ironically, Fox News has almost gone through a defamation trial in the United States. The lawsuit was presented by Dominion Voting Systems after the American broadcaster made false accusations against the company. In its defence, Fox News has used an argument similar to that of Brazil’s Jovem Pan, that it was simply exercising its freedom of expression. In a last-minute settlement on 18 April, the network agreed to pay $787.5 million to Dominion, around half of the $1.6 billion initially sought in the lawsuit.

A few weeks before the court decision to suspend Jovem Pan’s monetisation, YouTube had already announced the demonetisation of Jovem Pan’s channels, thereby preventing the company from generating advertising revenue from its content on the platform. In a statement to the press, the platform clarified that the decision was motivated by “repeated violations of policies against disinformation in elections.” Jovem Pan is also the target of a demonetisation campaign promoted by Sleeping Giants Brasil, a project that warns advertisers about companies that spread disinformation and hate speech.

Humberto Ribeiro, one of the three founders of Sleeping Giants, explains that Jovem Pan caught his attention when they noticed that some traditional media organisations had realised that disinformation could be a great business strategy.

“Jovem Pan took advantage of some people’s desire to consume content that reinforces their personal beliefs,” says Ribeiro. Before targeting Jovem Pan, Sleeping Giants initiated a campaign against TV host Sikera Jr, a staunch Bolsonaro supporter whose regional TV show gained national notoriety for promoting hate speech and misinformation.

The TV station airing Sikera’s show recently announced that they will not be renewing his contract. According to Ribeiro, the work of Sleeping Giants has led to approximately 200 advertisers pulling their support from Sikera and his show. In the case of Jovem Pan, he says, around 60% of the advertisers alerted by the movement ended their campaigns.

Will things get worse?
Jovem Pan’s problems intensified in 2022. The group desperately needed Bolsonaro’s victory in the presidential race, and its pundits’ comments during the campaign caught the attention of authorities. Some Jovem Pan’s political commentators were also embroiled in the legal battle, with many of them having their social media accounts suspended by the Supreme Court. Because of this, for some time the network displayed black tags on its programmes as a way of claiming it was operating under censorship. Bolsonaro’s bravado that he would “impose limits on judges” fuelled the company’s belief that its problems with the Justice would be overcome with the president’s re-election.

However, Lula da Silva narrowly won the election, Bolsonaro flew to the United States and Jovem Pan’s managers came under pressure. In the days that followed the election, many of the pundits who claimed there had been voting fraud resigned.

After the riots in Brasilia, the owner of the company stepped down as president and took over the board of directors. Other commentators left. In the same week, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office decided to open the investigation.

Jovem Pan claimed that all the changes were already planned and that they had no connection with the riots or the election result. However, the group’s editorial line has changed substantially. Jovem Pan is still critical of Lula, but conspiracy theories have disappeared from the airwaves.

As this change happened, Jovem Pan’s audience rates have taken a hit, with some of its shows experiencing a sharp decline in viewership. In the first two weeks of February, for example, the audience of Os Pingos nos Is on Youtube dropped by 75% compared to six months earlier. Similarly, the political show 3 in 1 saw a 64% decline during the same period.

Tony Goes says it is impossible to say whether Jovem Pan will be able to resume a routine of normality. “It’s still too early to say what will happen,” he says. “Perhaps the company will realise that if it softens its discourse too much it will lose its most loyal audience. And there are still many businessmen sympathetic to Bolsonaro willing to finance a project like this. But as I said, it is still too early to make any predictions.”

NEWS

Almost two-thirds of elephant habitat lost across Asia, study finds

Elephants have lost almost two-thirds of their habitat across Asia, the result of hundreds of years of deforestation and increasing human use of land for agriculture and infrastructure, a new study has found.

The Asian elephant, listed as endangered, is found across 13 countries in the continent but their forest and grassland habitats have been eroded by more than 64% – equating to 3.3 million square kilometers of land – since the year 1700, researchers said.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, compiles the work of several experts led by biologist and conservation scientist Shermin de Silva, a professor from the University of California, San Diego.

The team found that large-scale habitat loss has driven up the potential for conflict between elephants and humans – a situation that shouldn’t be accepted as inevitable and one that can be avoided with proper planning.

“My worry is that we are going to reach a tipping point in which cultures of mutual non-confrontation toward one another get replaced by cultures of antagonism and violence – by both species … We have to de-escalate this situation,” said de Silva, who is also founder and president of Trunks and Leaves a non-profit dedicated to the conservation of wild Asian elephants and their habitats.

The study found that the greatest decline in elephant habitats was in China, where 94% of suitable land was lost between 1700 and 2015. That was followed by India, which lost 86%.

Meanwhile, more than half of suitable elephant habitats have been lost in Bangladesh, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia’s Sumatra. Bhutan, Nepal and Sri Lanka also saw a significant decline – mostly in areas where elephants still roam today.

“Restoring these habitats doesn’t necessarily mean keeping them static. Instead we need to better understand the role of people (rural agriculturalists, indigenous communities) who are often marginalized in the economic systems that have been put in place,” de Silva said.

“We also need to reckon with how these dynamics can be maintained sustainably, given the current and future human population size as well as climate change.”

Colonization sped up the loss of habitat
Researchers found there was an acceleration in elephant habitat loss from the year 1700, which coincided with the expansion of European colonization of the region.

During this time, logging, road-building, resource extraction and deforestation ramped up, and farming became more intense on land that might otherwise have hosted wildlife.

The era also saw “new value systems, market forces, and governance policies” reaching beyond the cities of Europe into the forests of Asia – speeding up elephant habitat loss and the fragmentation of the species, the study found.

“In the year 1700 an elephant might hypothetically have been able to traverse as much as 45% of the ‘suitable’ area without interruption, but by 2015 this was down to just 7.5%,” the authors said.

India and Sri Lanka have the largest remaining wild population of elephants in South Asia.

Both countries were “transformed” by colonial-era road-building and logging “during which elephants and other wildlife were eradicated from higher elevations and lowland rainforests, which were converted to plantations and settlements,” the researchers said.

De Silva said the industrial revolution was followed by “a second wave” in the middle of the last century that drove greater habitat loss.

“We observed that in some places, like Thailand and China, the major losses occur following the 1950s. The colonial era had already introduced large-scale plantations in South Asia, but these later changes came from large-scale agriculture,” she said.

Today, humans are expanding further into wild spaces with population centers, agriculture, and extractive industries like mining.

And elephants are increasingly coming into conflict with humans.

Encounters between elephants and humans
In India’s eastern state of Assam, conflict with elephants dramatically increased in the 1980s, corresponding with a drop in forest cover below 30% to 40% of the landscape, the study said.

Political and social issues have also played a part.

During the Rohingya crisis in 2017, thousands of minority Muslim Rohingya people from Myanmar arrived in neighboring Bangladesh, fleeing a violent military campaign. About 1 million people are now living in the world’s biggest refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar – in an area that was once the forest home to an elephant population.

NEWS

How an underwater film inspired a marine protected area off Kenya’s coast

Famous for its sprawling nature reserves that are home to all “Big Five” animals, Kenya’s 882 miles of coastline along the Indian Ocean are often overlooked. It’s a place where people go to “chill out,” but not to observe and connect with the wild and unique ecosystem, says Kenyan filmmaker, photographer and conservationist Jahawi Bertolli.

Bertolli is determined to change this outlook and believes that visual storytelling is one way to do it. “No one was telling stories about the ocean here (in Kenya),” he says.

So far, his work has focused mainly on the Lamu Archipelago along Kenya’s northern coast, where his wife Elke Bertolli, also a photographer and filmmaker, grew up. Lamu is a hidden gem, he says, and filming has led to new discoveries. “There’s not much scientific work that’s happened up here so a lot of what we’re finding is new,” he adds. “We’re finding these incredible reefs. We’re finding incredible biodiversity.”

But this rich biodiversity is increasingly under threat. Bertolli says that harmful fishing practices, such as drag netting, coupled with habitat degradation due, in part, to coastal development, pollution and an increasing human population have caused a reduction in fish populations.

Related: Stunning images from African Wildlife Foundation’s photography award are inspiring conservation

Not only is this bad for the ecosystem, but for local fishers too. Lamu is home to one of the oldest Swahili settlements in East Africa, a community who have depended on the ocean since the 12th century. Traditionally these fishers respected the balance with nature, says Bertolli. They stopped fishing when they had enough for what was needed, they only fished in certain seasons, and they left the coral reef alone, understanding it to be a home for fish, where they needed space and time to reproduce and grow. “There’s a lot of cultural knowledge, which is actually conservation knowledge. It’s just packaged differently,” Bertolli explains.

“A powerful tool”
In 2020, Bertolli made a short film about Lamu’s sea life and the conservation traditions of the local fishers. He called it “Bahari Yetu” – “Our Ocean” in Swahili – and began showing it the local community. The screenings were a gamechanger, he says: “When you bring back that imagery, all of a sudden people are like, ‘Oh my God. Wow, this is ours … this is our heritage, these are our reefs, this is what’s happening underwater in our ocean.’”

A viewing of “Bahari Yetu” was also put on for local beach management units and members from the county government and fisheries department. Bertolli also screened another film he had made a few years earlier on locally managed marine areas in Africa. The next time the group met, all members voted unanimously to begin setting up a marine protected area around Lamu’s Kinyika island, a craggy rock that acts as a nursing ground for seafaring birds and hosts a bustling coral reef system.

For Bertolli and the people of the Lamu Archipelago, this has been a significant first step to ensuring the preservation of an essential ecosystem. While it’s only the beginning and a management plan still needs to be established, Bertolli believes it has also been a testament to the power of visual storytelling. “Because it was their film, told in their language, filmed here – it became an incredibly powerful tool to inspire the community to come together to try and start actually conserving these areas,” he says.

NEWS

Starship could be ready to launch again in ‘six to eight weeks,’ Elon Musk sa

Since SpaceX’s inaugural test flight of the most powerful rocket ever constructed, the company’s engineers, federal regulators and environmentalists have been trying to assess the aftermath of the spacecraft’s explosion and what happens next.

“The outcome was roughly in (line) with what I expected and, maybe slightly exceeded my expectations,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said during a Twitter Spaces chat on Saturday evening.

The April 20 liftoff of Starship, as the vehicle is called, was tremendously powerful, causing some damage to SpaceX’s launchpad in South Texas.

Musk said he was “glad to report that the pad damage is actually quite small,” though it would take “six to eight weeks” to get the infrastructure prepared for another launch. He later added that when the rocket’s engines — 30 out of 33 of which fired on for the flight test — reached “full thrust,” it “probably shattered the concrete.”

The explosion in midair also prompted a federal investigation that could take weeks or months to complete.

In the test mission, SpaceX’s Starship launched toward space atop a Super Heavy rocket booster.

Minutes after liftoff, the spacecraft was expected to separate from the rocket booster, but the Super Heavy “vehicle experienced multiple engines out during the flight test, lost altitude, and began to tumble,” according to SpaceX.

The company described what happened as a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” — its oft-used euphemism for an explosive mishap.

The vehicle’s flight termination, or self-destruct, feature was triggered, exploding the spacecraft and booster over the Gulf of Mexico. Musk said that feature took longer than expected to blow up the rocket, ensuring it didn’t careen off course, and that the flight termination system would need to be re-certified. That could be the determining factor in how long it takes the company to get a new Starship on the launch pad.

But there was some good news: “The vehicle structural margins appear to be better than we expected,” Musk said. “As we can tell the vehicle is actually doing somersaults towards the end and still staying intact.”

Here’s what the Federal Aviation Administration, NASA and other agencies have had to say since then.

The FAA
The FAA is charged with overseeing the mishap investigation. The agency licenses commercial rocket launches and gave the green light for the launch attempt after more than a year of back-and-forth.

Such investigations are routine and have taken place after previous — but smaller-scale — Starship test launches in South Texas.

The FAA’s review “will determine the root cause of the event and identify corrective actions the operator must implement to avoid a recurrence,” the agency said in an emailed statement Friday.

eculate on timelines,” the FAA said. “Safety will dictate the timeline.”

Cameron County, Texas, which encompasses SpaceX’s facilities near Boca Chica Beach, the city of Brownsville, as well as South Padre Island and Port Isabel — alerted the public to contact SpaceX if any debris is found.

“If you believe you have found a piece of debris, please do not attempt to handle or retrieve the debris directly,” a notice on Cameron County’s website reads.

A hotline to report debris has been set up at 866-623-0234, or officials can be reached by email at recovery@spacex.com.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service
The US Fish and Wildlife Service said in a statement that it’s working with SpaceX, the FAA and other involved parties to “provide on-the-ground guidance to minimize further impacts and reduce long-term damages to natural resources.

That activity includes ensuring that SpaceX is complying with the Endangered Species Act — which became the subject of concern after reports that debris from the launch or explosion may have reached nearby protected wildlife areas.

“Following the launch and mid-air explosion, Cameron County closed Boca Chica Beach and State Highway 4 for 48 hours due to launch pad safety concerns, which prevented Service staff from accessing refuge-owned and managed land,” the agency’s statement reads. “Once the closure ended, Service staff began their assessment of the launch impacts at 10 a.m. April