Brasilia (AFP)
Journalists are "an endangered species," Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro launched on Monday during one of his first meetings of the year with a press that "poisons" the public.
"You are an endangered species," the far-right head of state told reporters who questioned him outside his residence in Brasilia. "I think I am going to put journalists in Brazil under the responsibility of Ibama," the Brazilian Environment Institute, he said.
"The one who doesn't read the newspaper is not informed and the one who reads it is misinformed. You have to change that," he said.
Jair Bolsonaro was particularly targeting a report from the UOL news site on alleged financial embezzlement on his part, which he called "imbecility".
He recently canceled subscriptions to a dozen major daily newspapers and Brazilian magazines at the Presidential Palace of Planalto. "Those who want to read them will go buy them, because reading the newspaper poisons," he said on Monday.
Jair Bolsonaro had previously ended in November the subscription of government bodies to the daily Folha de S. Paulo, one of the largest in the country, and threatened in a veiled manner its advertisers, in a new episode of its confrontation with the press .
"We are no longer going to spend money on a newspaper like this. And those who buy advertising in the Folha, let them be careful," he said.
Shortly before, the White House had taken the same action with regard to the daily newspapers New York Times and Washington Post, which the American president Donald Trump considers as vectors of disinformation.
During his election campaign, Jair Bolsonaro had regularly attacked the press. He continued his offensive after coming to power in January 2019.
During one of his exchanges with the press outside his residence in December, he had arrested a journalist who questioned him on the corruption investigation of which his son Senator Flavio Bolsonaro was the subject, launching him: "you have a terrible homosexual head! ".
© 2020 AFP