BAT paid Brazilian newsrooms to argue for vapes — Joio counted the receipts

Between November 2021 and December 2023, BAT Brasil — formerly Souza Cruz — paid for 37 content pieces across eight major Brazilian newsrooms: 26 sponsored articles, three seminars and a podcast, in titles including Folha de S.Paulo, O Globo, Veja, CNN Brasil and Poder360. All of it argued for legalizing electronic cigarettes, which are banned from sale in Brazil. More than R$1.4 million went to four full-page ads in Folha alone, and over 85% of the content ran in the second half of 2023, timed to ANVISA's regulatory deliberation.

The pieces presented BAT executives and consultants as independent experts without disclosing the tie, and recycled the '95% less harmful' claim from a contested study while the WHO consensus said otherwise. In April 2024 O Joio e o Trigo published the full map of the campaign; complaints had already gone to CONAR and Senacon, and rulings identified parts of the output as product advertising disguised as information. That same month ANVISA kept the sales ban in place.

The campaign bought reach, not the outcome it was built for: the money is now public, the format is now a case study, and the ban survived. Paid journalism is measured twice — once when it runs, again when the receipts surface.