Changing the facts
By Bernardo Ajzenberg
February 15, 2004
The main headline in Folha on Wednesday read: So Paulo residents have more fear than confidence in police.
The headline on a story on an inside page of the national edition read: So Paulo residents confidence in police increases. In the So Paulo edition it was: So Paulo residents lack of confidence in police decreases.
The difference between the two headlines, both referring to the same Datafolha survey about the image of the military police in So Paulo prompted a reader in Lorena, So Paulo state, to contact me Friday with the following message:
The conflict between headlines should not be examined from the standpoint of a mere mistake. Truthfully, they are a clear example that headlines vary in relation to the contents of the news, able to stand out from their most negative or most positive aspect, in terms, for example, of editorial tendencies, political interests and convenience of making spectacles out of facts.
The rationale is perfect and says a great deal about the distortion achieved by Folha, in my opinion, in the interpretation of what is the most important indicator from the data in that survey.
What were these data? They said 540f So Paulo residents have more fear than confidence in the police, while 41 0.000000e+00xpressed the contrary opinion and 5% were undecided.
Seen in a statistical light, as a profile, the percentages authorize the formulation of the headline on the front page (So Paulo residents fear most …).
It just so happens that this same survey was already done by Datafolha, with identical methodology, on three other occasions. The first, in 1995, more fear than confidence got 51%; in 1997, the opinion rose to 74%; in 1999, it fell to 66%; and now (Nov/Dec 2003) it is at 54%.
First conclusion: There was always more fear than confidence. Second conclusion: From 1997 and onward, this fear/lack of confidence has only decreased, falling 20 percentage points.
Forget the difference between the inside headlines on the So Paulo and national editions (it seems clear that the second is conceptually more precise and that, for this reason, it was used in the later edition in place of the other one). So we have arrived at the essence.
What is the information that is journalistically most relevant: the statistical portrait or the movement in the sense of a reduction of the negative opinions about police?
Dynamic
Questioned by the ombudsman, the managing editor at the newspaper sent me the following evaluation: Even though the lack of confidence has been declining, what is scary in this news is that So Paulo residents still have more fear than confidence in police. The police exist to give citizens confidence. If, instead of this, they arouse fear and lack of confidence, that is news.
Precisely because there has been relevant information that this lack of confidence has been falling, it highlighted the fine line between the headline that the editors (of daily news) were oriented to present the material this way, complementing the newspapers headline, the managing editor concluded.
I respect the argument, but in it I see an inversion of importance.
In my opinion, given the heat of the explosive news referring to the murder of innocent dentist Flvio Ferreira SantAna by police in a way that obviously makes the police look negative Folha let itself be carried by an interpretation distorted by the essence of the survey (done two months before the episode) which permitted it to produce a hot bombastic headline on the front page besides corroborating the critical evaluation that the newspaper has (and clearly has the right to have) toward the governments policy concerning security.
Now, it is one thing to produce incisive editorials and investigative coverage that would be profound and critical of the two concrete cases presented and that, eventually, would incriminate police; this is what the newspaper customarily does and what it should do.
Another thing, however, as I believe occurred here, is to explore an actual case to bash the police, when the fact (the survey) shows, above all, like it or not, a relative improvement in the image of this organization.
Analogous to this would be if, during an electoral campaign, it always had headlines that candidate X was in the front, even when adversary Y was showing obvious growth, almost catching up with the leader.
Would that be a factual error? Not necessarily. But, certainly, the most important thing, in journalistic terms, is to highlight the dynamic expressed by the numbers.
Cases of adaptation of facts to a newspapers letter of intentions this is true for all media dont occur only in surveys. And, when a headline lands on the front page, it acquires an even more influential role.
A reasonable number of people believe they were informed only by reading the headlines of the two newspapers shown. Those people were not only badly informed, but they were misinformed by this manipulation of headlines, the reader from Lorena wisely concluded.
More corrections
The corrections section on page A3 registered a 15 0ncrease in 2003 related to 2002 in terms of corrections per page in the news.
There were 1,125 corrections for 17,243 pages, compared against 1,039 corrections on 18,375 pages the previous year. There were three corrections per day, against 2.8 in 2002.
The question: Does the newspaper make more mistakes, or is it doing a better job of recognizing its errors?
In the opinion of Roberto Ortega, responsible for the editorial quality program (PQ in Portuguese) it is worth a second assertion: There is more efficiency from the PQ in detecting mistakes and greater willingness by the editors to correct them.
The PQ checks information in about 20 stories per day, with priority given to those on the front page.
Ortega also points out that, contrary to what existed previously, There is no automatic relationship between the publication of a note in the corrections section and evaluation by the editors. They are analyzed case by case.
After highlighting the action in the PQ, Managing Editor Paula Cesarino Costa added:
It could be that the editors, due to demands by the PQ and ombudsman, are being more insistent, but it is difficult to be sure.
In fact, it is difficult to arrive at a precise conclusion. You could say, however, that constant pressure for quality could be able, through the years, to do two things: recognize the maximum amount of mistakes possible and, at the same time, decrease them
