Why The Intercept is launching a Brazilian edition First Look Media company aims to take on Brazil's corporate media

First Look Media’s investigative news site The Intercept is launching a new Brazilian edition, Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald announced on Tuesday.

The Brazilian edition will be run by Andrew Fishman, a reporter for The Intercept who lives in Rio de Janeiro. With an office in the Botafogo neighborhood of Rio, it will start with about ten staffers, plus a few regular columnists. It will also have a correspondent in Brasilia, the country’s capital city.

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The Intercept Brasil is aimed at a Brazilian audience and will be published in Portuguese. Stories that may be interesting to non-Brazilian readers will be translated into English and published on The Intercept’s main English-language site (and vice-versa).

“We want to provide a different perspective, give voice to the opinions and perspectives ignored by Brazil’s large media outlets,” Greenwald told POLITICO.

Intercept editor in chief Betsy Reed said that the idea for a Brazilian edition grew out of Greenwald’s reporting on the current political crisis in Brazil. Greenwald, an American journalist best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on the NSA’s secret surveillance of American citizens, has lived in Rio for the past 11 years.

“We made the formal decision [to launch a Brazilian edition] a couple of months ago, but the idea emerged organically over the past six months,” Reed said. “Glenn, being based in Rio, naturally began to cover what was going on around him, and we began translating some of his writing into Portuguese, and it struck a chord. There is clearly a hunger in Brazil for the kind of journalism we are doing; and the political upheaval means we have a lot of news to cover, from angles that are not being pursued by the dominant Brazilian and international media outlets.”

The Intercept already has a sizable following in Brazil. That’s largely thanks to Greenwald’s aggressive coverage of the politics behind the attempts to impeach Brazilian president Dilma Roussef. The Intercept’s Portuguese-language articles on Brazilian politics have attracted hundreds of thousands of unique visitors and are among the most popular articles on the site. Brazilians make up about 15 percent of The Intercept’s followers on Facebook.Since launching yesterday, The Intercept Brasil has already racked up more than 16,000 “likes” on Facebook.

The launch of a new Brazilian edition, just in time for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil, is a way to build on that substantial following.

“Before, while we were able to do one-off articles in Portuguese on our English-language homepage, we didn’t have a place where people could go to read content only in Portuguese,” Reed said. “Also, we weren’t able to produce content aimed only at those readers, who are clearly very eager for it, which we will be able to do now.”

Greenwald hopes that The Intercept Brasil will offer perspectives that are often ignored by Brazil’s dominant media outlets, which are all owned by a small group of wealthy families and tend to be both homogenous and politically conservative.

“They’re all owned by these extremely rich, oligarchical families,” he said. “They have a long history. They supported the 1964 coup [which deposed a democratically-elected, left-wing president]. They were also very close to the military dictatorship.”

Greenwald is particularly critical of the Brazilian media’s coverage of the impeachment process against Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff.

Rousseff, a member of the center-left party PT, was accused of using a budgetary trick to mask the true size of the country’s deficit while running for re-election. She was impeached in May, suspended from the presidency and will face a trial before Brazil’s senate later this month. Meanwhile, many of the legislators who led the impeachment process against her have been accused of far more egregious corruption.

After Rousseff was suspended from the presidency in May, her vice-president Michel Temer took over as acting president and named a new cabinet. Rousseff and Temer are from different political parties; while Rousseff belongs to PT, an established center-left party, Temer belongs to the older, centrist PMDB. Many members of both PT and PMDB, including Temer, have been accused of corruption, and three members of Temer’s new cabinet have been forced to resign over corruption allegations.

Greenwald has described the impeachment as essentially an anti-democratic “coup” aimed at removing an elected center-left president in order to install a more conservative government, which is favored by Brazil’s elite and middle class but lacks the popular support among the rural poor to win national elections.

For Greenwald, the Brazilian mainstream media has been a key instigator of the impeachment process, repeatedly encouraging people to take to the streets to protest Rousseff.

International media watchdog Reporters Without Borders reported earlier this year that Brazil’s leading media organizations had encouraged mass street protests against Rousseff’s government.

“In a barely veiled manner, the leading national media have urged the public to help bring down President Dilma Rousseff. The journalists working for these media groups are clearly subject to the influence of private and partisan interests, and these permanent conflicts of interests are clearly very detrimental to the quality of their reporting,” Reporters Without Borders stated.

Greenwald offered an analogy to the Tea Party movement in the U.S.

“It’s kind of like Fox News was to the Tea Party,” he said. “But instead of just Fox News, you had CNN and The New York Times and NBC inciting the protests.”

With the largest media organizations in the country generally in favor of Rousseff’s impeachment, The Intercept was one of few news outlets offering a different perspective.

“Brazil’s media landscape is dominated by a few big conglomerates, which have a history of colluding with corrupt elites, rather than subjecting them to aggressive coverage, so that leaves an opening for independent journalism,” Reed said. “There is a huge swath of the population underserved by those media institutions, and some of these readers have been consuming our content in Portuguese.”

Throughout the impeachment scandal, Greenwald published articles, in both English and Portuguese, highlighting the corruption allegations against Temer and the legislators leading the drive to impeach Rousseff. He also called out mainstream Brazilian media organizations for supporting the impeachment.

Two weeks ago, Greenwald reported that “Folha de Sao Paulo,” the largest newspaper in Brazil, had manipulated polling data to suggest that a majority of Brazilians support Temer — when in fact the poll showed the opposite.

The Intercept’s aggressive coverage of the Rousseff impeachment scandal raised its profile in Brazil. After Rousseff was suspended from the presidency, she gave her first post-presidency interview to The Intercept. Brazil’s traditional media organizations are also taking notice of The Intercept. The Brazilian newspaper “O Estado de S. Paulo” ran an editorial accusing Greenwald and The Intercept of being foreign agents conspiring to damage Brazil’s reputation.

Greenwald said that he is not concerned that The Intercept Brasil will be viewed as biased in favor of PT, Rousseff’s party.

“We are very critical of PT. PT is a party full of corruption,” he said. “We’re not defending PT. We’ve been defending democracy.”

Going forward, The Intercept Brasil plans to continue covering Rousseff’s impeachment trial and to report on issues related to Brazil’s hosting of the Olympics — in particular the controversial anti-terrorism measures that Brazil is implementing ahead of the games and the police response to mass protests that are sure to accompany Olympic events.