Brazil's Dilma Rousseff is popular, but not among news media

[ocpagu]

2. But they are outright lying.

And I'm talking about barefaced lies.

Prior to the 2010 elections, the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo published in their front page a false "criminal record" of Dilma Rousseff. They intended to strengthen José Serra's candidacy by scaring the voters, attributing to Dilma several crimes, such as murder, kidnapping and thefts. Other newspapers said that if Dilma won the elections she could not leave the country, because she was wanted as a "terrorist" by Interpol after a request made by the United States, for taking part in the kidnapping of a former US diplomat.

Here's the criminal record:



After seeing it, Dilma wrote to the newspaper saying that the criminal record was not authentic. In fact, Dilma had never been accused of such crimes and the criminal record does not exist in public and military archives. But Folha ignored her and continued to insist in their fraud.

Dilma then hired two experts from the State University of Campinas, one of the most prestigious universities of Latin America, to produce two independent technical reports about the authenticity of the criminal record. Both reports described it as a "gross digital manipulation". Folha insisted in the authenticity of the document and hired other experts to try to prove it was not a fraud. But the best Folha got was an expert saying that "the authenticity of the document can not be confirmed or discarded".

Later, Folha admitted that it didn't find the criminal record in any public archive and that it was sent to the newspaper by e-mail. The source of the "document" was a extremist right wing Brazilian website called "Ternuma".

Just one example. I could quote at least 5 other lies produced by Folha only this year. Not to mention Veja magazine...