The series of measures that have lately affected the structure of the Brazilian public broadcaster will now have an impact on the content it produces.

Under the governments of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, the Empresa Brasileira de Comunicação (EBC) was set to expand, develop and improve the production of its own content in order to strengthen the role of public service media in the country.

Now that Michel Temer is in power, things will take a different turn. The EBC director Laerte Rimoli said that the EBC will go back to buying content produced by the Globo Network because it is “cheaper and of a higher quality”, the newspaper Estadao reported last week.

“If a public company buys content from the private system, it denies the need for its existence and contradicts everything that justifies its existence. But this is what this government thinks, this is the spirit,” said the journalist Venicio Artur de Lima, also former member of the ex-Board of Trustees.

Globo also supported Temer’s controversial rise to power which significantly influenced the broadcaster through a series of measures that saw, in a short amount of time, the exoneration of the previous CEO, Ricardo Melo, the dismantling of the Board of Trustees and the cancellation of several programmes.

Now, a move towards private sources will most likely influence the content the EBC will produce, as private content might not necessarily guarantee the same relevancy and space for the communities public media seeks to include and work for.

“The EBC plays an important role in the democratization of media, since it leads its actions towards the inclusion of you, blacks, indigenous communities, LGBT+ and more,” said the newspaper Vermelho. “These groups have been historically forgotten by private vehicles.”

The Brazilian broadcaster might then need even more strength and effort to keep on giving a voice to the different segments of society and working as a public service for its citizens.

Header Image: Tv Tower in Brasilia. Credits: Alexandre Ferro/Creative Commons