The Gallup Institute published its most recent poll about the credibility of the media in the United States on May 30, the first since the Jayson Blair scandal came to light.
Nothing about it came out here in Brazil except for a mention by the Globo broadcasting network (Brazils biggest), but the data are explosive: 620f people in the United States believe that the press carries inexact information, against only 36% who think the facts are relayed in an appropriate way.
It was the second-biggest negative showing since the start of the poll, in 1985 (when the numbers were almost the opposite: 55 0.000000avorable, 340nfavorable, and 11% with no opinion). The current numbers lose only to 2000 amid confusion over the vote count in the election of George W. Bush (65 0id not believe, 32% had confidence).
It would be unfair, however, to attribute the growth in the rejection rate only to the Blair case. Curiously, the same poll reveals that 390f the public simply ignored what happened involving the reporter-inventor at The New York Times. Besides this, it was the first poll since the occupation of Iraq, a period that holds little glory for the traditional independence of the media in the United States.
The sequels in the Blair case, however, continue to cause damage and on Thursday produced the biggest bombshell in international journalism in decades: the resignations of the two top editors at the Times, Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald M. Boyd.
They headed the newsroom at the most-prestigious newspaper in the world, in the hierarchy below only the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., who a few weeks earlier publicly denied the possibility that his subordinates would fall.
Blairs dismissal (at the beginning of May) was followed by the creation of a committee to review procedures in the newsroom and the resignation of a reporter who put his byline on a story that was mostly written by a free-lancer. In the words of a top editor at a big U.S. newspaper quoted by The Financial Times, Sulzberger acknowledged a series of facts until then ignored about the style of Raines management.
Bombarded for weeks with irony and ferocity by its competitors, the Times on Friday received the harshest and most direct criticism from the sober Wall Street Journal. The influential financial daily said that the Raines-Boyd era gave special treatment to biased journalism that mixed opinion with news and placed its traditional credibility into question. Blair was no more than a symptom of a wider problem. The editorial accused the Times of proclaiming impartial journalism and practicing the opposite, creating confusion for readers and young susceptible reporters such as Blair.
Besides the issues raised by the Journal, the turbulence at the Times prompts other questions: Up to what point can a newspaper retain its credibility with so much off-the-record material on its pages as the Times has done? Does it stand to reason that a policy which considers ethnic criteria in recruitment and promotions could be distorted into lenience for such serious mistakes by a journalist (Blair, in this case, who is black) over months and years? Is it worth risking a tradition of seriousness in the name of quotations or spectacular facts, sacrificing precision in the rush of deadline pressure?
Still, the wave of bad news for journalism did not end last week.
On Monday (between the Gallup polls and the changes at the Times), the Federal Communications Commission, controlled by the Republican Party, approved deregulation that will allow mega-mergers and acquisitions, allowing even more concentration of media ownership.
In an obvious retrogression for freedom of expression, it opens the doors for even greater reduction of diversity of content on TV, newspapers and Internet.
O Estado de So Paulo on Wednesday published a chart with examples of probable mergers involving the Times itself, Disney, AOL Time Warner, Gannett, NBC, etc.
A gloomy tempest is hanging over the media, whose measurable intensity and consequences in other countries including Brazil are inevitable. Even worse, the ability that it must have to get through this serious crisis is not known.
Dangerous example
Its common for a well-known face to simultaneously occupy the covers of different womens or celebrity magazines. Its rare, however, when this happens on weekly news magazines even in hot cases which involve authorities. But it happened last week with poca and Veja So Paulo.
In the examples shown in the box to the side, both dedicated their covers to a story about personal security and illustrated them with the singer Wanessa Camargo. Was this a mere coincidence? Not really.
Apart from celebrity, Wanessa is from a family that has already suffered from violence (an uncle, brother and her father, Zez di Camargo) and lives her life in a type of moveable cage.
Her choice makes sense, but it does not explain the coincidence. Trying to understand how two magazines came out so much the same, I found out that the topic (safety) had not come from the singers aides, but from the magazines themselves (Veja So Paulo first).
The aides accepted the first request and afterward encountered the second, while assuming that the two stories would be published on different dates.
Its easy to suppose, meanwhile, that one of the publications, knowing the schedule of the other, did not want its nearly equal story to come out a week later. Whatever the details of this inside information, however, the root problem is that journalism itself was victimized here.
The simultaneous choice of two publications for Wanessa corresponds to a much wider phenomenon: growing pressure and competence by the entertainment industry concerning topics being covered in the press (with its acquiescence) to turn into free publicity.
This is about celebrity and commercially, a new product on the rise. The rare coincidence of these front covers shows the progression of a romance (between journalism and entertainment) in which news is not always the driving factor.
