ABC World News Tonight (10/30/22)

This week on CounterSpin: ABC World News Tonight told viewers what it thought they needed to know: “Bolsonaro Loses Brazilian Election, Leftist Former President Wins by Narrow Margin.”

The victor of Brazil’s consequential presidential race has an actual name; it’s not “leftist former president”…or “former shoeshine boy,” as the New York Times had it–or even “savior,” as CNN suggests supporters view him. He’s a person, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, a popularly supported former president, whose program had, and has, more to do with helping poor people in Brazil than with securing the kind of extractive, profit-over-all, devil-take-the-hindmost international relationships that elite US media applaud. So just, get ready, is all we’re saying. For a Latin American president taking steps to protect the human life–supporting Amazon to be presented in the press as a flawed, corrupt self-server, which maybe suggests that uplifting the poor and saving humanity might just be too expensive a proposition.

It’s hard not to imagine the use that a differently focused press corps might make of Brazil’s change of direction. We’ll talk about it with Brian Mier, of Brasil Wire and TeleSur‘s From the South, as well as co-author/editor, with Daniel Hunt, of Year of Lead: Washington, Wall Street and the New Imperialism in Brazil.

Transcript: “‘Lula’s Victory Is One of the Most Impressive Political Comebacks of the Last 100 Years'”