Newspapers live on good stories, and they are becoming increasingly rare on their pages. It’s not that they don’t happen, but they are not always captured.
Folha this week carried a great story. Reporter Guilherme Roseguini in the sports section told the saga of Polyvios Kossyvas of Greece.
Kossyvas was the man with a grey beard and shorts who saved Brazilian Vanderlei Cordeiro de Lima from the hands of Irishman Cornelius Horan, who grabbed the runner during the marathon that ended the Athens Olympics.
Pictures of the attack on the marathon runner who was leading the race went around the world and made the victim and attacker famous. Vanderlei, thanks to the immediate reaction of Kossyvas, was rescued, stayed in front and got the bronze medal; Horan was jailed.
The man, however, remained anonymous until Tuesday, when his identity and story were finally reported by Folha, two weeks after the end of the Olympics, in the story “Vanderlei’s angel asks only for a handshake.” For anyone who missed it, the story of Kossyvas can be found at www.folha.com.br/042601.
Finding that person was, without a doubt, the objective and obligation of every Brazilian newspaper. What is curious is how the reporter found him. After exhausting normal channels, through Greek authorities, he sought the help of a sports newspaper in Athens, “Goal News.” The newspaper published a photograph of the assault scene and an appeal for the anonymous hero to identify himself. And that’s what happened.
As I said at the start, newspapers live on good stories. Many times, we leaf through the pages and end up with the feeling that there is nothing to read. That is not what we had here. There was, but they were quotation marks (discussions, statements, accusations, phrases for effect, promises) and numbers (polls, surveys, indicators).
They lacked stories, the good stories. From there, there is a feeling of emptiness, a lack of pleasure from reading.
Folha got it right by investing in and insisting on this story. Maybe by habit, maybe from distraction, however, it lost the perfect opportunity to give the story about Kossyvas the VIP treatment on the front page of the newspaper – the same treatment that it gave in that edition to the story of the Englishman dressed as Batman who invaded Buckingham Palace in England.
Suplicy and Alckmin
In the column last Sunday, for the second time, I dealt with coverage of municipal elections done by Folha. Like the first time last May, I concluded that there is a clear imbalance in coverage of So Paulo City Hall.
I used as support the survey taken every 15 days by the Doxa Laboratory (Research Laboratory in Political Communication and Public Opinion) at Rio de Janeiro University Institute of Research (Iuperj). In the latest 15-day period analyzed, from Aug. 19 to Sept. 1, the stories and references about the administration of (So Paulo Mayor) Marta Suplicy in Folha were mostly (61%) negative.
I asked the newsroom and published the response that I received from the editor for national news, Fernando de Barros e Silva (“A little beyond the numbers”). I agree with various observations he made. I am in agreement, and made it clear in my column, that evaluation of coverage, whatever it is, can’t be based only on statistics. But there is a point in his thinking that I would like to bring back for reflection by the newspaper and its readers. According to the editor, “The ombudsman’s analysis might not consider the way it should the fact that the PT is in power in So Paulo.”
It’s not that I did not consider it. I did consider it, and I believe, by professional conviction, that we should treat public administrations with maximum rigor. Not because they are all corrupt or incompetent, but because one of the functions of journalism is to examine the use of public resources and the efficiency of policies adopted. Even more so in a country such as Brazil, which lacks resources and has too much misery.
My question is not the rigor that the newspaper imposes on coverage of (So Paulo Mayor) Marta Suplicy’s administration, but the lack of the same effort and regularity toward the administration of (So Paulo) Gov. Geraldo Alckmin.
That is what I wrote in my last column, and maybe it was not explained well enough: “Critical coverage is the nature of journalism and it is part of the tradition at Folha. The ideal is to find a point of equilibrium which allows readers to understand that the newspaper is being equally rigorous toward all the candidates and administrations without privilege or persecution.”
Why should Folha cover the state government well? In the first place, because it is the government. Secondly, because it is also involved in the race for mayor. While the governor’s office is not directly in play, the governor’s party, PSDB (Brazilian Social Democracy Party), is competing for leadership in the campaign and its candidate, Jos Serra, has the Alckmin administration as his principal trump card. The governor and his term are, furthermore, riding high.
Does Folha cover the state government well? It does not, either in the amount of stories or in a critical way. Almost all the well done stories which sensibly question the municipal government identify the person responsible as Marta Suplicy. Those which deal with blemishes in the state, besides being fewer in number, rarely point to Gov. Alckmin.
This does not even take into account the stories without any critical sense, such as the one published Friday in the daily news section with the results of a survey by the Seade Foundation about the rate of criminality in So Paulo.
The newspaper highlighted the 17 0rop in homicides in four years, attributing this decline, ingenuously, to “policies to fight against violence” and ignored two important aspects: the statistics about criminality in Brazil still are unreliable and, more shocking data, in the city of So Paulo, even with the decline registered, 47.2 homicides were counted in 2003 for every 100,000 inhabitants.
In some neighborhoods, such as Brs and Guaianazes, these numbers neared 90 homicides for 100,000 inhabitants. They are scandalous and unacceptable numbers which question the state security police.
It is in the reader’s interest that the state government receive from Folha the same attention that it gives to City Hall.
Eye on the press
There is one note about the intention to follow journalistic coverage of the municipal election: On Wednesday at So Paulo University (USP), the Brazilian Media Observer is being launched. It is another welcome initiative to monitor newspapers.
In the evaluation that we have today toward the press, there are two phenomena that should not be confused. On the one side is pressure, unduly, in my opinion, by governments for regulation and control. On the other is pressure, which I consider healthy, from society for more balance, quality of information and plurality (of topics, focus, analysis and opinion).
One of the roads that this social pressure has taken is monitoring the news media. They are initiatives such as the Press Observatory, Andi, (the Children’s Rights News Agency), Transparency Brazil and the Doxa Laboratory.
The Brazil Media Observatory is an initiative by the Comparative Journalism Nucleus at the ECA (School of Communications and Arts at USP), Social Observatory Institute (created by the CUT union federation and other labor organizations) and by Media Watch Global (created by the World Social Forum with headquarters in France).
The first work by the new observatory is following the end of the electoral campaign. Besides analyzing the contents of stories and classifying them as negative, positive or neutral, the survey will evaluate the emphasis given to each story in the edition.
The first survey, about the coverage in Folha and “O Estado de So Paulo,” is partial and does not differ much from the results of the Doxa Laboratory that I disclosed last week: more positive references for the Serra candidacy and more negative references for Suplicy’s candidacy. The imbalance is bigger in “Estado.”
As for the monitoring initiatives, the ombudsman has an interest in receiving information about other entities which have their eye on the press.
Translation by John Wright
