Reading Folha on Wednesday, I noticed an unpleasant spelling mistake. It was in a story in which Finance Minister Pedro Malan commented about the Letter to the Brazilian people put out by Luiz Incio Lula da Silva, the presidential candidate of the left-leaning Workers Party (PT). It attributed the following statement to the finance minister: I can only settle this (Lulas position) as something positive …
I noticed the mistake the correct word would have been welcome, as I pointed out in my internal critique. (The Portuguese word saldar, meaning settle, was used incorrectly; in its place should have been saudar, which means welcome.) A short time later a fax arrived and, in it, a subscriber to the newspaper said that he was dismayed. Thats really bad, he complained. After suggesting a class in Portuguese for the responsible party, he concluded: Ive been a Folha reader for half a century and it makes me sad to see these blunders.
Watching for mistakes in Portuguese is not one of the main duties of the ombudsman. The newspaper has a specific program for this. That fax, however, made it clear that errors of grammar, typing and language can be as irritating and aggressive for readers as what are described as errors of content (mistaken information, for example).
The problem assumed a larger dimension in the last week due to other blunders. On Monday, a story giving investment advice began this way: Dont be on impulse, mistaking similar words which mean be and act.
On Tuesday was another flub, in the mouth of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat: Israel, with these continued attacks, is showing the world its real intentions, using an s where a silent c was the right choice in the Portuguese equivalent for the word intentions.
I spoke with Professor Pasquale Cipro Neto, a columnist in the newspaper, about these matters. He believes that errors of this type arent necessarily the result of ignorance. They might come from a phenomenon of conditioning in the journalists mind, which, in the rush of finishing the story, goes on automatic pilot concerning the use of a word more commonly seen.
In the case of be, for example: As people are accustomed to using the word be more frequently than act, the automatic pilot of hurried writing ends up giving (incorrect) preference to the wrong word. The same is true with other similar words that get mixed up.
The third case is different because there is a word similar to the one meaning intentions in the dictionary, even though it is almost never used.
Quality
After pointing out that the newspaper eliminated the position of proofreader in the 1980s, the coordinator of Folhas quality program, Rogrio Ortega, explained that company position is that journalists have to take responsibility for correcting information and language and not delegate these responsibilities to others.
He said that the activities of the quality program have a strongly preventive character. Here is a summary of them: Mistakes are passed along to the editing desk; everyone has deadlines to meet; journalists are evaluated and given awards based on this; there is a mural in the newsroom filled with serious mistakes; a professor is there to offer help seven hours per day; the electronic version dictionary, with a spell checker, and reference books are available.
According to Ortega, the newspaper had its best results so far this year in June (the average number of mistakes per column fell from 0.62 in March to 0.50).
How is it possible that, even with all this help, such crass mistakes are still made? The head of quality control believes that this results from a mixture of inattention to the task of finishing the newspaper and basic educational deficiencies in some journalists.
The evaluation makes sense, but its not enough to explain everything. The cases that I mentioned (see the box above), coming one after the other, expose a deeper vulnerability.
More than individualizing the mistakes which is necessary it tries to recover a culture of excellence and greater expectations to be incorporated by the teams and each staff member.
How do you explain that these three mistakes, for example, in the national edition (which closes around 8 p.m.) managed to survive in the So Paulo edition (that closed about 11 p.m.)?
In other words: Even though the causes were the result of automatic pilot or time pressure, and not basic educational deficiencies, there were three hours to reread the material and make corrections, and that didnt happen.
Its necessary to ask up to what point that so-called automatic pilot was an individual lapse by only the person who wrote the story or if it was part of the requirements (or a lack of them) administered collectively in a wider scope in the newsroom.
Even though this might be an isolated case or some consider it to be less important, for many readers crass mistakes in the use of Portuguese are like a fly in the soup: They ruin the whole experience of reading the newspaper that day.
Prejudice
The caption to the side was published on the front page of the newspaper in Mondays edition. It called attention to a story in the arts and entertainment section about a commemorative exposition to mark the centennial of the birth of French-African-Brazilian itinerant photographer Pierre Verger (1902-1996).
The image is beautiful, and the story (Black woman in Benin photographed …), noticed at first glance, looks innocent enough and nothing more.
Analyzing it deeper, however, shows a serious problem, as an e-mail to the ombudsman from Erlon Campos of So Paulo emphasized: Curiously, we dont have any memory of the same newspaper making references to race when people of other ethnic groups are found in photographs on the front page, such as A white woman was killed by seven gunshots in a slum, A yellow woman is elected mayor of Pontal, Red woman is highlighted at the So Paulo Biennial art exhibition, etc.
Unfortunately, I concluded in my message to Mr. Campos, the rush of putting the newspaper together let this slip through the hands due to ingrained undisguisable prejudice in our society.
In a case such as this, I am in complete agreement with the reader.
