The British daily The Independent created and Folha reproduced on Thursday a list of 18 questions and answers about the occupation of Iraq by the Anglo-American coalition and its consequences (see to the side).
There are questions of a speculative nature (Has the U.N. stopped being irrelevant? for example) but there were others about the limits in journalistic coverage (How many died in the war? or What happened to the human shields?).
What calls the most attention is the number of questions that remain up in the air, despite the conflict having practically ended and the fact that such a high presence of media horizontally and vertically in the theater of operations did not exist in previous confrontations.
Its natural that the elucidation of many of the events of war takes time. News organizations, in this case, still have a lot of work ahead of them. As the saying goes, however, the hole is much deeper.
As the ombudsman for the Washington Post, Michael Getler, wrote recently, many theses and studies will be carried out to evaluate the performance of journalism in the conflict, especially the Pentagon program to embed about 600 correspondents among the troops.
From the start, however, it seemed unquestionable that the traditional independence of the U.S. media was clearly shaken by the support (more or less open) that it gave to the U.S. government, even among its most solid bastions (such as the Post and New York Times).
And the role of the embedded (who often identify with the sweat of the troops they accompany) in other words, in the news and not just the editorials of institutional opinion certainly was not secondary.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, seemed to be taken by surprise, aside from the military victory, by something else: transforming war correspondents into allies. The price of this to journalism in the United States and internationally still needs to be determined.
As for the engagements, by the way, I point out the curious case related to me by Yavuz Baidar, ombudsman of the Turkish daily Millyet, about a correspondent from that newspaper who was called back by his editors for having infiltrated as a human shield alongside the Iraqi forces at the same time he was filing reports that were supposedly balanced.
As for Folha, it did not reach the same journalistic exuberance in its coverage as during the attacks on Sept. 11 in the United States, but on balance, while not excellent, was positive.
Despite its editorial position against the policy adopted by the Bush government in my opinion, mistakenly reflected by the tagline The empire attacks, which provoked complaints by many readers despite the anti-U.S. tendency in the formation of articles about the topic in the op-ed section and by its columnists, the newspaper maintained overall balance in the news.
The effort to publish both sides in columns, interviews and analyses on the page dedicated to the war seems obvious to me, such as showing contradictions between the information about battles put out by Washington as well as Baghdad.
Its necessary to emphasize once more, however, that Folhas real difference was having stayed in the Iraqi capital with two special correspondents reporter Srgio Dvila and photographer Juca Varella during the major part of events, producing exclusive stories and photographs.
Unfortunately, without this heavy investment in money, editorial daring and personal courage the newspaper would not have managed to differentiate itself clearly, in hits and misses, from its two competing dailies.
Rules and criteria
There are delicate decisions for journalists. One of them concerns revealing the name of a person in a situation in which the person is put at risk. On Wednesday, a story about the supposed scheme of corruption in the Finance Ministry in Rio involving auditors and inspectors (the Silverinha case), Folha published only the initials of a former wife of one of them; her testimony to prosecutors the previous day was decisive enough to lead to the arrest of those investigated.
The story asserted that Federal Police asked that the name of the ex-wife … be kept secret for reasons of security. On Thursday, however, the newspaper gave her whole name. Why the difference in attitude?
According to the managing editors office, the request for secrecy the first day was made informally by a police official to the reporter. The newspaper preferred to heed the request while it evaluated the case more closely. It also considered that the preservation of identity did not compromise the contents of the complaint.
Later, as the judge in the case did not make a similar request and the Federal Police also did not formalize it, and because the testimony was made publicly, with the name already used by other news organizations besides her protection by special security agents the newspaper decided that it had no further reason to hide her identity.
The name is not the determining factor in this matter, but the newspapers fluctuating performance about it brings up questions of procedures that merit discussion.
The first was in not treating its own attitude transparently. Readers were told, imprecisely, that the initial request was from the Federal Police in other words, the institution and not by a police agent, informally. Afterward, in the following edition, the newspaper did not mention the change in attitude adopted.
I believe that there was also an unjustified omission of information, created by excessive prudence. As was read in a story published that same Wednesday, the witness had already been under special protection by police for days. Those involved know the ex-wife of one of the accused; nothing indicates that publishing her name would elevate the risk. There was no formal petition by the police or the judge.
Such data were on the table from the start. Therefore, the decision to use the name could have been made in the first story.
Caution is always praiseworthy, but it should not hide the existence of such imprecisions or holes in the criteria which guide decisions that involve recurring questions such as this one.
Its the nature of journalism to risk making delicate choices in haste. It cant run away from that. For this reason, the more objective rules there are upon which to base such decisions, the less chance the newspaper will have to commit mistakes or fluctuations from the start.
Numbers helped
The box to the side shows a summary of service by the ombudsmans department in the first quarter. There were 2,007 messages, which signifies an increase of 28
