Decoy
By Bernardo Ajzenberg
October 19, 2003
Praise for the newspaper from readers through the ombudsman is, naturally, quite rare. The e-mail from a journalism student on Oct. 8, however, included the following commentary:
I found it interesting that Folha on Friday (Oct. 10) came out with a headline from years ago, especially at a time when I am doing a project on the history of newspapers in Brazil.
He was referring to the extra front page on that days edition, which supposedly reproduced the original front page of Folha from Oct. 3, 1953, with a story about the formation of state-run oil company Petrleo Brasileiro (Petrobras).
Whats most appropriate to tell this student today is: Forget it, dont use this page in your project because contrary to what you and almost all of Folhas readers think, it was not an edition from a half century ago. A comparison between the real front page from that day and this front page (an ad by Petrobras) makes it clear.
In the box to the side, readers can compare and verify the significant number of differences. Ill point out some examples:
1) The real page was composed of eight vertical columns of text (as were used at that time period), while the ad only had six columns;
2) The photograph accentuated in the original upper right-hand corner was reduced and knocked down to the lower part of the page;
3) The headline, in the new version, occupies the whole upper part, which was not what happened in reality;
4) An ad by the So Jorge flour company, emphasized in three columns at the bottom of the page, practically disappeared in the reproduction;
5) The story about the formation of Petrobras, from one small box with only one column (among eight) in the middle of the page, became a dominant story, occupying two of the six columns on the new page.
Adulteration
Another reader, from Belo Horizonte, called my attention to this manipulation after noticing the difference in a commemorative ad by the So Jorge flour company published on the front page of the business section on Saturday, Oct. 4. This ad also reproduced the Folha page from Oct. 3, 1953, but it was more faithful to the original edition.
The reader said: One of the front pages does not reflect the truth. Which one of them? If it were used as an ad (by the flour company), how can Folha accept this kind of manipulation, an adulteration we could say, of its front page?
After finding in the newspapers archives that the Petrobras piece was a hoax, I mentioned the problem in an internal critique: For ads, in theory, it might be OK; I dont know. But for the newspaper and its historic record, it is strange at the very least.
Consulted about the topic for this column, the managing editor observed that the newspaper does not have responsibility for ads and passed along the commentary to the head of advertising sales at the company, Antonio Carlos Moura:
Enlarging the story about the formation of Petrobras was done by an advertising agency and, since it was treated as an ad, that is a normal resource of communication.
I respect this viewpoint, but in my opinion, there is only one way to accept the poetic license regarding the creation of ads or to see as inevitable the occasional concessions that they make, up to the point that they dont mock or hurt readers as occurred openly to the renown of the newspaper itself.
Transparency
That, however, is not the main issue. Even the journalism student who imagined the front page as useful for his project said that he was disappointed to learn afterward that it was a paid ad. He thought that it should have been labeled as such by the newspaper on the same day (Oct. 3) and not just in an editors note that was published the day before.
The complaints go on, but the bigger problem is another and it belongs under the direct responsibility of the newsroom. The editors note to which he referred was the following advisory on the newspapers front page on Oct. 2: Folha will circulate tomorrow with a first page covered by an advertisement that reproduces an edition of the newspaper from 1953.
Its relevant to ask whether this is really a reproduction from an edition in 1953. In a way, it was, but the original was clearly distorted to favor the advertiser. That way, the commendable transparency adopted by the newspaper to advise its readers one day in advance that something could confuse them in the following edition should at least be applied now under the form of a correction: That advertisement was in reality an artificially deformed replica and not a faithful reproduction of an edition from the newspaper in 1953.
The newsrooms attitude along the lines of simply cleaning its hands does not seem to me, especially in this specific case, a good sign.
For experts
One of the pillars supporting Folhas journalism is the idea that it should save time and avoid work for readers by getting rid of any doubts up in the air. Some examples from the past week, however, show the difficulty that the newspaper encounters when applying this principle.
On Monday, reporting another victory by the Cruzeiro soccer team in the Brazilian championship, a story in the sports section mentioned that an athlete suffered a fracture of the cheekbone, without explaining what this signifies (I saw later in the dictionary that it is something related to the cheek).
The next day the business page reported that the government submitted its public-private partnership project to public scrutiny starting that day. What was the result of this? How does it work? There was no explanation.
Incidentally, the treatment given to coverage of this project left a lot to be desired in the following days. On Wednesday, the newspaper gave prominence to the headline and on the inside carried details about how it should function.
Despite all this attention, however, the topic complete with obscure points, controversies and complexities simply disappeared from the pages of the newspaper on Thursday and Friday.
Also on Tuesday, the arts and entertainment section showed an undesirable hermetic attitude with its language. It was about a show of the work of a cyber-artist from So Paulo in three interactive electronic panels that showed messages from people and whose proposal is to transform each message up to 60 characters sent in a message written in non-phonetic fonts, which creates a new meaning for the initial text.
As I wrote in my internal critique that day, Sincerely, I just dont get it.
The same sensation befell me in a story on Wednesday in the national news section in which the limit of debt in So Paulo … was fixed at 1200f the value of current tax receipts for the amount of consolidated liquid debt. Do you understand this?
Here, from Friday, is the last example: An interesting story with data about the presence of carriers of a physical or mental deficiency in relation to the total population in each state did not have any definition of this concept, in other words, about who is considered deficient, for inclusion in the formal or official study.
It is my opinion that in these cases the newspaper, instead of facilitating the lives of readers, filled their minds with questions.
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Correction: The total number of readers who contacted the ombudsman from January to September 2002 was 5,992 and not 5,922, as published in the box accompanying the item numbers served in my column on Oct. 5.
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The ombudsmans page in Folhas online version has been redesigned. It has a cleaner visual presentation and is easier to navigate. The URL address is in the box below.
