Some formulas for journalistic coverage are worn out. They are repetitive, predicable and don’t add anything to understanding the facts.
An example is the coverage of political campaigns. In general, it is boring because it gives a lot of emphasis to inside gossip and maneuvers by the administration, placing value on quotes and information without identified sources and follows the agenda of the political world, which rarely coincides with voters’ interests.
It is unusual for newspapers to break with these tired formulas. We had an example all week, unfortunately not at Folha but one of its competitors, the Rio daily O Globo. Since Sunday, that newspaper has published a series about the evolution of the assets of 113 members of Congress in the Rio state Legislative Assembly since 1996. While this has been a time of economic crisis and loss of purchasing power, 800f them have gotten richer.
To escape routine and the commonplace, newspapers need initiatives and well-prepared staffs
It is one thing to show the common belief that one of the easiest ways to get rich in Brazil today is to obtain a parliamentary seat. It is something else to prove it with documentation.
Over these four months, seven reporters at the newspaper analyzed income tax statements that candidates are required to provide to electoral officials when they run for office. Furthermore, they are official public documents. The stories do not reveal illicit enrichment, theft or corruption. But they show how public office helps in the growth of personal wealth.
This type of study is not new. Folha has already done this before, as have other newspapers and magazines. One of the most important initiatives by newspaper in this area is the Public Control website (www.controlepublico.com.br), organized by reporter Fernando Rodrigues, which consists of a data bank with more than 10,000 pieces of official information about Brazilian politicians.
What differentiates the work in O Globo in this case is its reach to all state legislators. Newspapers need to escape the traps that the daily news sets for them and seek new ways of coverage. For this reason, three requirements are necessary but not always available: initiative, time and well-prepared journalists.
It is possible that stories such as the one by O Globo, if they are not well done, would seem only moralistic. But, well documented, they are a service that newspapers provide to their readers because they help them reflect on the vote. And this is the right moment, with the
upcoming election of mayors and council members.
The deaths at Benfica
Coverage of the police beat at newspapers must take more initiative. They rarely manage to escape from descriptions of crimes and violence, based only on anonymous, manipulative police sources.
A good example of the initiative to jump this fence was taken by Folha in the June 3 edition, when it continued to follow the massacre which occurred in the Benfica Prison in Rio. The rebellion ended with a death toll of 30.
The predominant version was that this was settling scores between criminal factions, the Red Command, which took over the prison during the rebellion, and the Third Command, which was overrun and massacred.
Folha’s story managed to carry information about two of the deaths identified at the time and showed that neither one should even have been in prison. One of them was sentenced for attempted escape, and the other, a street person, for damage to public property. Folha’s investigation showed distortions in the sentencing system that had not been aired.
I hoped that the newspaper would stay on this trail and further explore what it had discovered. Learning about the deaths and their stories was a possible way to escape routine and provide new information. But that was not what happened. The newspaper simply abandoned the case.
O Globo did not. Its reporters continued the patient work of delving into each one of the 20 identified victims and the newspaper published, 15 days after Folha, the story about those deaths: 17 had committed minor offenses, two were accused of homicide and one, armed robbery; three had lived in the streets and three had been arrested with small amounts of marijuana and accused of trafficking. From the photos, they were all black or mulatto. It is quite possible that most of them had become members of the Third Command while in prison.
In this case, the old soccer adage would have been appropriate for Folha: If you don’t do something right, it might come back to haunt you.
Balance and criticism
Folha’s electoral coverage has been more balanced over the past month. It is a fact demonstrated by the decrease of complaints received by the ombudsman and by the survey done every 15 days by the Doxa Laboratory of Research in Political Communication and Public Opinion at Rio de Janeiro University Institute of Research (Iuperj).
The first studies done by the institute at the start of the electoral campaign, published in this column on May 30, showed the predominance of negative coverage about So Paulo Mayor Marta Suplicy. This has changed, as I show in the graph above.
The monitoring, every 15 days, distinguished the stories about her actions as mayor distinct from her candidacy for reelection for the left-leaning Workers Party (PT). That way, the negative stories about her administration fell from 62% to 40% and, in the most recent period, through Wednesday, to 22%. In this period, the neutral stories went up from 15% to 40% and 39%. The positive ones were 23%, went from 20% and are at 39%. The same occurred with the stories about the mayor’s candidacy.
News about Jos Serra, a candidate for mayor for the centrist Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), was quite balanced, according to Doxa. Neutral stories predominated, and there was balance between those seen as positive and negative.
Coverage of mayoral candidate Paulo Maluf of the conservative Progressive Party, still involved reports about bank accounts outside the country and has not changed: Most stories are unfavorable toward the former mayor, and I don’t see how it could be different. What is important in this case is the guarantee, like the newspaper has done, of the candidate’s right to present his own version.
As for the mayor, what I fear now is that this necessary search for balance could affect the newspaper’s critical spirit. I also felt this on Friday in the coverage of the evaluation by the press of the mayor’s last three and a half years. I believe that the newspaper did not ask enough tough questions during her term.
Translation by John Wright
