Empresa Brasil de Comunicação (EBC)

The Empresa Brasil de Comunicação (EBC) is Brazil’s federal public-media company, established in 2007 to run the country’s national public broadcasting and news services. Its portfolio spans the television channel TV Brasil (and its international signal) and the government channel Canal Gov; a national radio network including Rádio Nacional and Rádio MEC; and two news services, the news agency Agência Brasil and Radioagência Nacional. It also coordinates the Rede Nacional de Comunicação Pública (RNCP), a network of affiliated public TV and radio stations, and supports the production and distribution of the mandatory official radio programme A Voz do Brasil, including the Executive-branch segment.

Media assets

Television: TV Brasil (including TV Brasil Internacional) and Canal Gov, the dedicated government channel.

Radio: Rádio Nacional, whose network currently comprises eight own stations — Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Nacional AM and FM Brasília, Recife, São Luís, Nacional da Amazônia and Nacional do Alto Solimões, and Rádio MEC, operating MEC FM and MEC AM. EBC also supports the production and distribution of A Voz do Brasil, the mandatory official radio programme retransmitted by radio stations across the country, including its Executive-branch segment.

News agency: Agência Brasil and Radioagência Nacional.

Ownership and governance

EBC is a federal public company created in 2007 (authorised by Provisional Measure 398 and converted into Law 11.652 of 2008), formed by merging the assets and staff of the former Radiobrás and public broadcasting assets under ACERP. It operates under the Secretaria de Comunicação Social (SECOM) of the Presidency of the Republic. Its governance structure comprises a Board of Administration (Conselho de Administração), an Executive Board (Diretoria Executiva), a Fiscal Council and internal oversight bodies. Under the current Social Statute, the Board of Administration has nine members: three indicated by SECOM (including the chair and two members classified as independent); the Director-President; one member each indicated by the Ministries of Education, Culture, Management and Innovation, and Communications; and one employee representative. The Executive Board is composed of a Director-President, a Director-General and four directors, all appointed and removed by the President of the Republic. This gives the executive decisive influence over EBC’s leadership and governance, and is the core of its State-Controlled classification.

Leadership has turned over repeatedly under the current government: after Hélio Doyle, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva named Jean Lima in December 2023; in August 2025 the Secretaria de Comunicação Social announced the journalist André Basbaum as Director-President; and in April 2026, after Basbaum left for the private broadcaster Grupo Record, SECOM appointed Antonia Pellegrino, previously EBC’s Director of Content and Programming, as the current director-president, the fourth to hold the post under the Lula government.

A note on privatisation: under the previous government, EBC was placed in the federal Investment Partnerships Programme (PPI) in 2020 as a step toward possible desestatização (privatisation). The Lula government reversed that course in January 2023, removing EBC from the privatisation programme, so the privatisation track that shaped the company’s recent history is no longer active.

Source of funding and budget

EBC relies primarily on state funding, delivered through direct budget appropriations, revenue from government advertising, and payment for services rendered to public bodies; by law its resources may also come from the sale and licensing of content, sponsorships and donations, and state advertising airtime is capped at 15% of its overall programming.

Reported figures put the EBC budget at around BRL 840.9m in 2023 and BRL 898.9m in 2024. That predominant reliance on public money, in the absence of a substantial independent commercial base, ties the company structurally to the government.

Editorial independence

Although EBC’s legal framework states a principle of editorial and programming autonomy from the federal government, its governance model does not provide a robust arm’s-length firewall from the executive, and the government’s control of its governing bodies gives it considerable leverage over the company’s editorial direction. Board members are named by the President, the Executive Board is appointed and dismissed by the President, and the company remains structurally tied to the federal government.

The company employs respected professional journalists and its public-service mandate formally requires it to prioritise “pluralism,” and it maintains internal accountability mechanisms: a Code of Ethics, an Ombudsman and an Editorial and Programming Committee. Under the current statute, that committee is a body of institutionalised social participation with consultative and deliberative functions, composed of 11 members indicated by representative civil-society entities through triple lists and designated by the President of the Republic. These mechanisms provide participation and internal oversight, but they do not create an arm’s-length governing body, protected editorial leadership, or a binding firewall between the executive and editorial direction.

The record across recent governments illustrates the pattern. Under President Jair Bolsonaro, EBC’s outlets were widely reported to shifted toward government-aligned coverage of the president: a content analysis conducted for the earlier SMM review found Agência Brasil coverage of Bolsonaro heavily positive, and employee testimonies compiled in 2020-2021 documented scores of alleged censorship incidents and complaints of “governmentisation” of the broadcaster.

After Lula returned to office in 2023, having pledged to protect EBC’s editorial independence, journalists and media analysts interviewed in 2024 nonetheless voiced concern that the company had intensified its focus on covering government activity, at odds with those commitments, and further reports of internal censorship surfaced.

In 2023, EBC formalised the separation between public-service broadcasting and direct government communication by launching Canal Gov as a dedicated government-communication channel, while TV Brasil was presented as reassuming its public-service role. In practice, Canal Gov institutionalised, in a single EBC-run channel, an explicitly promotional government-communication function; by late 2024 Canal Gov’s social-media profiles were among the most engaged federal-government accounts, built substantially on content featuring President Lula and government policy.

AI and digital policy

Brazil has been among Latin America’s most active jurisdictions on AI regulation: the comprehensive AI bill PL 2338/2023 was approved by the Senate in December 2024 and sent to the Chamber of Deputies, where it remained under consideration in 2026, so no single AI law was fully enacted as of mid-2026. SMM found no dedicated editorial AI-governance policy specific to EBC. However, EBC’s March 2026 cooperation agreement with China Media Group, the Chinese state media conglomerate whose president also sits in the Communist Party’s Publicity Department, explicitly included the use of AI tools applied to communication, alongside journalism cooperation, a correspondent exchange and content-sharing. That operational adoption of AI makes the absence of a published editorial AI framework more relevant rather than less. More broadly, EBC’s digital orientation is pronounced: it has invested heavily in digital and social-media distribution across TV Brasil, Canal Gov, Agência Brasil, Rádio Nacional and Rádio MEC, and its digital strategy has made several of its platforms (Canal Gov in particular) among the most engaged federal-government accounts on social media.

Classification rationale

EBC is classified State-Controlled because it is a federal public company operating within the Presidency’s communications structure, with a governing board and a Director-President appointed by the executive, predominant dependence on public funding, and a governance design that provides no arm’s-length firewall from the executive despite a stated principle of editorial autonomy, and because its output has, across successive governments, foregrounded the activities of the incumbent administration, a tendency institutionalised further by the government channel Canal Gov. It is not an autonomous public-service broadcaster insulated from the government of the day.

The classification does not turn on which party is in power. EBC served the Bolsonaro government and now serves the Lula government; the reversal of the privatisation track in 2023 and the repeated leadership changes in 2023, 2025 and 2026 are executive decisions that reflect, rather than reduce, the company’s subordination to the Presidency. Its State-Controlled status is unchanged for 2026.

July 2026