The front page of the main section on the Saturday before last seemed on the face of things very strange, showing someone with long hair looking like Jesus surrounded by a half dozen men and women on each side, appearing a lot like The Last Supper painted by Leonardo da Vinci.
The photograph was about Christmas when you dont say the birth of Christ is celebrated. The symbolism of the supper with the 12 apostles, to the contrary, is the farewell. A reader pointed out the serious conceptual error.
The front page, while strange but not surprising, preserved blessed independence from the church. Folha incorporates sometimes questionable taste for freedom and weird provocations of faith.
Also not surprising was the light skin of the 13 models portrayed in the image produced by the newspaper. The white people with long robes (linen?) and a wall in the background were apparently not posed for a Brazilian publication but, who knows, perhaps European.
There was not even one black person in sight. The photo did not depict the racial melting pot of the country where Folha is published nor the diversity of its readers. This was also a good time for coverage of consumerism in general and fashion in particular. I did not notice if sometimes it was not.
The Dec. 14 edition of the magazine Moda (Fashion), which circulates with the newspaper in parts of Brazil, dedicated its cover to New Years Eve. On it were four white models, stars of the newsroom (from what I understood, a type of photographic rehearsal for fashion) handled by a film maker at Folhas invitation.
In a set about bikinis, one-piece swimsuits and mens swim trunks, the three models were all white. The same for a girl dressed in a sporting outfit. It also profiled top models as well as athletes and models who appeared in a story about sporting style. The exception which reaffirmed the rule was found in another set about summer, Fashion Sport Club: the soccer player model was white, as was the cyclist, tennis player and yoga practitioner the runner had African features.
She was nearly alone on the pages, including ads. Among the 22 people in the ads, 21 were light-skinned. There was a top model from Paran state in the campaign for fashion in So Paulo. The model from the Amazon is among the few that you see without Caucasian features.
The phenomenon is worldwide. In October, the Spanish daily El Pas pointed to the anomalous representation of racial diversity.
The newspaper cited a survey of the 101 most important fashion shows during the 2008 spring-summer season. In 31 of them there was not one black woman. These were in Milan, Paris, London and New York. In a land of mixed race such as Brazil, it is even more absurd.
With the distortion shown here, Folha should have run stories and stimulated debate about them. It was lamentable to produce monochromatic shades in the photographs shown.
I sought the editor at Moda, Alcino Leite Neto, one of the most talented journalists I have known at Folha.
Concerning the latest edition, he said: The magazine was only able to partially implement its policy objective to show in all editions the full range of ethnicity in the country. In edition 19 of Moda (October 2006) this objective was reached better when we photographed Juliana Imai of Japanese extraction (one of the rarest models of this origin in fashion) and three of the main black models in Brazil at the time: Rojane, Carmelita and Akotirenee Juliana.
It is something to do better over the next year at the magazine, which will not be an easy task. It would be less complicated if good models of other non-Caucasian races were employed more frequently by the modeling agencies and were used by fashion designers, regularly and in large numbers, on the runways. The magazine is not an isolated case.
And it is nothing new: in October 2005, then-ombudsman Marcelo Beraba agreed with an observation by a reader about the absence of blacks in Moda.
In 2008, there is a renewed opportunity to change. A Happy New Year to all.
… Without drama and suffering
Imagine the desperation of hundreds of patients and employees who about 10 p.m. Monday, Christmas Eve, ran out of the Clinics Hospital in So Paulo after a fire that was extinguished quickly, but the smoke caused a panic.
All readers could do after the first day of Folhas story, on Wednesday (the edition the day before was concluded before this event) was imagine. They did not have the opportunity to know the drama of those who were at the biggest hospital in Latin America.
In coverage that was bureaucratic and cold, the newspaper did not publish eyewitness accounts about those saved and who saved them. Its not that it was not told well. It did not tell anything. You did not see the accounts of anyone who escaped from the fire.
The dreary pages were already laid out earlier, when the fire and its consequences for thousands of people whose assistance did not merit more than a one-column headline out of six vertical columns, far from a banner headline.
Inside, they did not follow the fear, tears and relief. There were only pallid stories, without blood or soul.
I sought the managing editor, who said: There was a mistake in judgment by those on duty in the early morning, who did not consider it necessary to go to the location or even advise the bosses. This hurt coverage.
In effect, arriving late on the scene harmed the journalistic work, as shown by the photographs (in photojournalism, there is no way to reconstitute scenes from the voices of those who lived them).
But the delay in the early morning did not impede Folha on Tuesday morning when it confirmed that many more people were affected than initially believed. It would have been enough to be willing to seek those who had something to say and recognize the journalistic relevance of the stories.
If not contacted right away, they could be sought out in the afternoon or even at night (the So Paulo/Braslia edition was finished at 12:35 a.m.). Vacillation during the early morning shift happens, and no journalist has not committed it.
It is worse when the newspaper is not moved by the pain of those who spend Christmas Eve on the sidewalks at the hospital and deprives readers from knowing about them.
Translation by John Wright
