Obscurity in the media
By Bernardo Ajzenberg
November 2, 2003
When dealing with investigating the crises in civil aviation, electric energy companies, telecommunications or any other economic sector in difficulty, the media are implacable.
Newspapers compete among themselves on a daily basis to see what they can report first and who gets the most details about the status of debt, negotiations, stock moves, mergers, analyses by experts, loans or financing plans, firings, and fraud in earnings reports.
Something different occurs, however, when stories about the media are in the news. In that case, superficiality, generic assertions, or simply total omissions reign supreme. It was as if the sector felt the necessity to hide its own situation from society and the public.
On Sept. 30, representatives of newspapers, magazines and radio/TV released a communique saying that a consulting firm was starting to prepare a study about the sector with the intention of formulating a proposal for specific financing by the government-run development bank, BNDES, for media organizations. Some news outlets, Folha among them, reported the information discreetly and succinctly.
One month later, last Tuesday, Oct. 28, media representatives participated in a meeting in Braslia with BNDES directors, during which they presented studies of the sector with the suggestion that it have access, for example, to programs to finance solutions for companies and the usual programs of financing investments.
The meeting was reported in newspapers the next day only by Folha, the financial daily Valor Econmico and the Rio daily O Globo. Even in these newspapers that had the news, however, the transparency was partial and had curious differences.
Principles
Folha, after saying that the meeting involved managers of three business organizations and the bank, only reproduced the official statement of the associations in its entirety. O Globo did not make it clear who participated in the meeting, but it also structured its story based on the same statement.
Valor Econmico began the story saying that owners of newspapers, TV stations and magazines and representatives of Brazilian media associations in general in a retinue of about 12 people participated in the meeting.
It nominally mentioned the presence of a representative from the Globo TV network, one from Folha and one from the Bandeirantes TV network.
The communique from the entities cited by all the news reports is quite generic. It showed the importance of the sector in social, political, educational and economic terms; suggested the formulation of an aid policy; and it reiterated the principles of autonomy of opinion and independence that orient a press committed exclusively to the truth, freedom of expression, right to inform and respect for the right of citizens to be informed.
Omission
What the media seek from BNDES to survive and/or advance is a controversial question relative to the real ability of a debtor to always maintain itself truly critical and independent in relation to its own creditor. The differences there are natural, speculative, and only practice, in reality, will be able to resolve it.
But things got complicated after that, concretely, as for the last point, quoted in that statement.
What are the numbers presented in the studies given to BNDES? What are the dimensions of the crisis in the sector? How did it get that way? How much are the debts? What type of debts are they? What types of financing are suggested? What was the initial reaction of BNDES?
The communique and the stories without even mentioning the total omission in other newspapers did not respond to any of these questions, elementary in the news about the crisis of any other group of companies relevant to the economy. The only concrete data mentioned are that the sector is responsible for more than 280,000 jobs directly and indirectly. Thats it.
How is that respect for the right of citizens to be informed at a time when the media themselves omit from the public basic information about themselves?
Folha made a point of reporting the meeting. But it did less than the minimum. It did not report anything besides the generic communique, and, worse, omitted that one of its representatives participated in the session in Braslia.
Such behavior, of halfway transparency, at the base of the obscurity, calls even more attention, negatively, for occurring a few days after an interview on the site AOL News on Oct. 24, in which Folha Publisher Octavio Frias de Oliveira defended the total independence of media, showed itself to be critical in relation to total official help, and assembled arguments contrary to a policy specified to help the media sector. In these circumstances, besides being badly informed, the newspaper reader has every right to feel at least confused.
Dry story about the chaos
Florianpolis is the state capital with the best quality of life, where residents spend more years in school and with the lowest rate of infant mortality in Brazil. People with higher purchasing power from various places have moved there. Flights are full Mondays and Fridays with people who work in So Paulo but live in the Santa Catarina state capital by choice.
Folha knows all this because it published less than a month ago (Oct. 3) a special section with all these facts. But what did the newspaper do when this city, considered a tourist paradise, was hit by a historic blackout starting Wednesday afternoon? Much less than what something of this magnitude merited.
What called attention, from the start, was the lack of images able to express the chaos that befell the city. The national edition published only photographs from up high, of workers repairing cables and another, which looked like it was from archives, of two bridges connecting the island to the mainland. In the So Paulo edition, it was only the first and last.
The chaos began in the first hours. Gas stations closed; public transportation was affected; schools let students go home; congestion spread; all the stores closed at the biggest shopping center. There was a shortage of water. Vaccines were collected at health facilities. Cell phones did not work. Inside homes, refrigerators had to be emptied. In hotels, which were full with two big events, one sports and another business, people got stuck in elevators.
Folha devoted less than half a page to the news on the first day (Thursday), with only a descriptive, almost staccato, story. On the second day (Friday), there was more space, along with eyewitness accounts about concrete cases; and an illustrative box about the accident that caused the traumatic situation.
Still, besides the absence of photographs, nothing spoke about relevant and useful aspects for readers (including those in other states), such as, for example, the situation at the airport or about tourists who were there.
Maybe on the first day, the newspaper was carried away by the (always doubtful) official statements that everything would return to normal in a few hours, and it mistakenly did not give necessary attention to the matter.
On Friday, it is probable that space had been reduced due to the story about the action by federal police against judges, lawyers, police and business leaders in the Anaconda Operation. This does not justify, however, the absence of at least an expressive photograph of the dramatic situation nor the holes in the story pointed out above.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the newspaper underplayed the chaos in Florianpolis, which persists through the time column was finished. At the very least, it lost the chance to offer coverage at the level that this unprecedented event for a city with its image, starting now, will never be the same.
