Бразилияның "Folha de S. Paulo" газеті

Brazilian newspaper

Folha de S. Paulo (sometimes spelled Folha de São Paulo), also known as simply Folha (ˈfoʎɐ, Sheet), is a Brazilian daily newspaper founded in 1921 under the name Folha da Noite and published in São Paulo by the Folha da Manhã company. The newspaper is the centerpiece for Grupo Folha, a conglomerate that also controls UOL (Universo Online), the leading Internet portal in Brazil; polling institute Datafolha; publishing house Publifolha; book imprint Três Estrelas; printing company Plural; and, in a joint venture with the Globo group, the business daily Valor, among other enterprises. It has gone through several phases and has targeted different audiences, such as urban middle classes, rural landowners, and the civil society, but political independence has always been one of its editorial cornerstones. Ever since 1986, Folha has had the biggest circulation among the largest Brazilian newspapers – according to data by IVC (Instituto Verificador de Circulação), in January 2010, circulation was 279,000 copies on weekdays and 329,000 on Sundays. In company with O Estado de S. Paulo and O Globo, Folha is regarded as a newspaper of record in Brazil. Among daily newspapers, Folha has also the news website with the largest number of visitors.

Folha was founded on 19 February 1921, by a group of journalists led by Olival Costa and Pedro Cunha, under the name Folha da Noite. It was an evening newspaper, with a project that privileged shorter, clearer articles, focusing more on news than on opinion, and a positioning closer to the themes that affected the daily life of the paulistanos (São Paulo city dwellers), particularly the working classes. The paper was competing against O Estado de S. Paulo the leading newspaper in the city, which represented rural moneyed interests and took on a conservative, traditional and rigid posture; Folha was always more responsive to societal needs. Business flourished, and the controlling partners decided to buy a building to serve as headquarters, a printing press and then, in 1925, to create a second newspaper, Folha da Manhã. Also in 1925, Folha da Manhã premiered Juca Pato, a cartoon character drawn by Benedito Carneiro Bastos Barreto (1896 1947), better known as Belmonte. Juca Pato was supposed to represent the Average Joe, and served as a vehicle for ironic criticism of political and economic problems, always repeating the tagline "it could have been worse". The two Folha newspapers criticized mainly the Republican parties that monopolized power back then; the newspapers campaigned for social improvement. The company was involved in founding the Democratic Party, an opposition group. However, in 1929, Olival Costa, by then sole proprietor of the Folhas, mended his fences with the São Paulo Republicans, and broke his links to opposition groups connected to Getúlio Vargas and his Aliança Liberal. In October 1930, when Vargas led a victorious revolution, newspapers that opposed him were attacked by Aliança Liberal supporters. Folha's premises were destroyed, and Costa sold the company to Octaviano Alves de Lima, a businessman whose main activity was coffee production and trade.

On 5 April 2009, Folha ran an article about a supposed plan by guerrilla group Vanguarda Armada Revolucionária Palmares to kidnap Antonio Delfim Netto, who was the Finance minister during the military rule, in the early 1970s, and alongside printed a criminal file about Dilma Rousseff, who was already the Brazilian President. The authenticity of the police record was contested. On 25 April of the same year, the newspaper stated in a report that it was impossible to guarantee that Rousseff's police record was authentic: 'Folha was twice mistaken on its 5 April issue, when reproducing a supposed police record that tracked Minister Rousseff's (chief of staff to the President) participation in plotting or carrying out armed actions against the military dictatorship (1964 1985)". "The first mistake was claiming in a first page article that the police record was part of the 'Dops archive'. Actually, Folha received it as part of an e mail message. The second mistake was to consider as authentic a police record that cannot be verified, or disproven, with the information currently available". Ombudsman Carlos Eduardo Lins da Silva wrote about the case stating, in his Folha column, that "after the Minister contested the authenticity of the police record, the newspaper admitted to not having verified its accuracy. I found insufficient the justifications offered to explain this error, and suggested that an independent panel should be empowered to find out what happened and recommend new procedures to avoid any repetition. However, the newsroom officials decided that there was no need for further inquiry". The police record is available on the Website of the radical Ternuma group and is not included in the São Paulo State Archives, that hold all files pertaining to the former Department for Social and Political Order.

On 27 November 2010, Folha published an article by former Workers' Party member César Benjamin accusing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of having told Benjamin, during a meeting for Lula's 1994 presidential campaign, that Lula had attempted to rape another inmate while he was being held as a political prisoner in São Paulo. According to filmmaker Sílvio Tendler, who was at the meeting, Lula's account was merely a joke. Advertiser Paulo de Tarso Santos, also present at the meeting, stated that he does not remember such talk ever taking place. The accusation was also denied by José Maria de Almeida, who had been incarcerated alongside Lula in 1980. He declared to "have reasons to attack Lula. His government is a tragedy for the working class. But what was written never happened". Folha was criticized by media analysts, notably Alberto Dines, for publishing the article without checking its factuality first.

On 29 June 2010, Folha mistakenly published an ad by Extra Hipermercados (owned by Grupo Pão de Açúcar, one of the sponsors of the Brazil national football team), which read: "A I qembu le sizwe sai do Mundial. Não do coração da gente" (The I qembu le sizwe leaves the Cup. But not our hearts). The ad suggested Brazil was out of the World Cup, when it had actually defeated Chile 3 0 and advanced to the next stage. According to Folha, there was a mistake during the selection of the material to be published. She also commented the reactions of readers on Twitter, where the hash tag #DilmaFactsByFolha – that held jokes about and criticism of Folha by users of the microblogging service – reached the top of the list among the 26 most commented topics. A survey by the Institute for Social and Political Studies, Rio de Janeiro State University, however, found out that among the mainstream media vehicles, Folha presented the most critical coverage about both main contenders, and that its coverage of candidate José Serra (PSDB) was even more critical than its posture towards Rousseff. The survey, carried out in September and October 2010, shows that, in contrasting positive, negative and neutral reports, Folha held a positive balance of three percent. In the 2006 presidential election, Folha also had "the more balanced and less biased" coverage among daily newspapers, and was the vehicle that expressed more diversified opinions, according to Doxa (the Public Opinion and Political Communication Lab, IUPERJ). Those surveys notwithstanding, Folha was criticized for its "false impartiality" by website Falha de S. Paulo, created to spoof the newspaper for its supposedly biased coverage that favored José Serra and opposed the Lula administration. Folha went to court appealing for closure of the Website, claiming that its usage of a logo identical to the newspaper's, with the change of just one letter in the name, was not only confusing readers but also represented a trademark violation. The legal issue was to determine whether free speech should get higher protection than the rights of property. On 30 September 2010, a judge in São Paulo granted an injunction that blocked Website Falha de S. Paulo. "Independent media" bloggers and the website owners saw the injunction was a form of censorship. However, the judge in charge of the case claimed that his decision was not due to "the satirical aspect, which our current laws would allow, but to the use of a brand extremely similar to the plaintiff's (Folha)", thus accepting the newspaper's argument. The case was highlighted in the website of the American technology magazine Wired. It was also commented by Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, during an interview to Folhas main competitor, O Estado de S. Paulo, on 23 December 2010. "The blog is not intended to be the newspaper and I think it must be released", he said.