Folha recognized in Friday’s editions at the top of its front page that it had carried a mistaken headline. It is not unusual for the newspaper to make a mistake, but it is uncommon to recognize the error so prominently. The news was published June 11, based on a report put out by the International Labor Organization (ILO) about child labor around the world that included data about Brazil. The story was written based on information from international news agencies.
The story reported, among other numbers, that 559,000 Brazilian children and youths between 10 and 17 years old are exploited as domestic servants. “Brazil has a half a million enslaved youths,” Folha’s headline said.
The first warning sign came from journalist Andr Petry, Braslia bureau chief for the weekly news magazine Veja. He wrote an article, “International blunder,” in which he questioned the numbers in the ILO article concerning Brazil. He discovered that the report did not tell about the methodology of the survey and that the numbers concerning Brazil came from old studies by Unicef and the ILO.
Folha decided to check the data published, and three journalists were assigned to the task. The results were published the day before yesterday, high on the front page: “Data about child slavery were wrong.” Inside, under a similar headline, the newspaper said: “For U.N. agency, it is impossible to quantify child slave labor; Folha corrects its June 11 story.”
The ILO study did not tell about half a million enslaved children, rather about children working as household servants. It discovered that besides this, the ILO numbers also were outdated: According to the Brazilian statistical agency, IBGE, Brazil had 482,000 children and youth working as household help in 2000.
More than 400,000 boys and girls working as domestic servants are startling any way you look at it. It is probable that a good part of them live in circumstances similar to slavery. But incorrect data ruin the credibility of those who produce and report the data.
The newspaper owed up to the mistake: “Failures in checking out the information by Folha, badly interpreted by an international news agency (AP) and imprecision in information from the ILO to the press contributed to the publication of mistaken information.”
Readers complain, and rightly so, that newspapers have a hard time recognizing mistakes and do so timidly. I also believe that is the case, but this time Folha acted quickly. While it was one of the first newspapers in Brazil to set aside space for corrections (the corrections section on page A3), it is common for the newspaper to delay recognition of mistaken information.
It was not the first time that Folha put an admission on the front page, but is rare. A survey of the newspaper’s archives showed six other cases since 1992. The most explicit case was the recognition of a mistake I remember from Aug. 4, 2000, when the Braslia daily Correio Braziliense admitted in a headline: “Correio erred.” The day before it had published a story with complaints against Eduardo Jorge, a top adviser to then-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Writing the correction, which was not evasive at all, was the then-executive editor of the newspaper, Andr Petry, the same one who now discovered mistakes in the ILO report and in Folha’s headline.
Crazy for numbers
Folha’s mistake provokes some reflection. First and foremost: Newspapers and journalists love stories with numbers. If they are from international agencies, they don’t even check them. That is what happened in this case. Surveys, studies and statistics are big allies of journalism. It helps to move them away from impressionism and blind acceptance of what they find. But they should be used sparingly, with criteria that otherwise would cause indigestion.
An excessive number of surveys and reports end up in newspapers. They are rarely treated with the necessary caution. They should be seen as prime material to be chiseled, but frequently they go straight on the pages as they arrived.
From Sunday through Friday, I counted 27 stories in Folha based on surveys or reports. Some were headlines, such as the one last Sunday which said that “250f children of elites drink too much.” In this count, I did not include basic economic indicators.
Uneasiness with numbers is also evident in stories about crowds. Because the newspaper no longer has at its disposal, as it did in other times, the statistical services of Datafolha, it is subject to imprecise calculations but still uses them prominently.
That was also the case involving the Gay Parade in So Paulo which the police said brought together 1.5 million participants. Nobody knows how they arrived at that number. All the newspapers reproduced it, and it was final. My opinion is that it was just a guess, just like various estimates that fill stories we read are guesses. The problem is not the reports, but we journalists, who use the reports without questioning them.
This week, Folha published another report that grabbed my attention. Written by the U.S. State Department, it said that Brazil does not punish human trafficking, the real kind. But it carried some questionable numbers. According to the report, 75,000 Brazilian women and adolescents work in prostitution rings in Europe and 5,000 in Latin America.
Where do they find these numbers? Because the report did not say, I sought help from Folha’s correspondent in Washington, Fernando Canzian, who got the data. According to the U.S. State Department, the numbers for Brazilian prostitutes in Europe came from the United Nations and the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights. Numbers for prostitutes in Latin America were from the Reference Center for Studies and Action in Favor of Children and Adolescents in Braslia.
The coordinator of that group, Neide Castanha, said: “We would very much like to quantify this. Unfortunately, we don’t have any. We don’t have any numbers, not even estimates. We never quantify.”
And now?
INTERVIEW: “We don’t have official data”
Leila Paiva is a lawyer and coordinator of the global program in the Justice Ministry to prevent human trafficking.
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Ombudsman – The United States this week released a report which estimated that 75,000 Brazilian women and adolescents are involved in prostitution rings in Europe and 5,000 in Latin America. Are these official data?
Leila Paiva – No, they are not. We don’t have official data for Brazilians, and for this reason we are developing an information system. It is one of the projects in my program.
Ombudsman – Do believe that these numbers are reliable?
Paiva – I believe it is a very high number, but because we don’t have precise data, it could be even higher. I don’t know if all the women are involved in prostitution. When I was out there, I observed many women who might have been approached by trafficking rings, but they ended up finding something in the labor market. The numbers must be estimates because many of these people are clandestine. We know that there is a very large number of women who go and are hostages of prostitution rings. This is true, but we don’t have any way of verifying it.
Ombudsman – The report estimates that 25,000 is the number of Brazilians who are forced to work in this area. Is that the case?
Paiva – In this case Brazil does not have any numbers. There isn’t even a law against this crime. We want legislation in accord with the Palermo Protocol, which makes it a crime to traffic to enslave people. Then we will have the numbers.
Translation by John Wright
