Here is a rare and curious matter. On Wednesday, Folha published on the first page of its arts and entertainment section an exclusive story with unprecedented numbers measuring TV audiences by a new institute, Datanexus, the result of a partnership between the Brazilian Television System (SBT) and a political scientists company. Here is a historic fact: For the first time in decades, there was ample comparison to counterweight the traditional dominance by the Ibope polling company in this area.
The story, titled SBT survey threatens Globo (Brazils biggest network) audience, compared numbers by the institutes and announced right from the start: Financed by SBT, Datanexus, a new research institution for TV audiences, will debut today …
On the same day, in the daily news section, another story carried this headline: Impasse cancels new audience measurement company. It said that the partnership had imploded due to the frustrated negotiations between the parties and that the debut of Datanexus, announced in advance by the arts and entertainment section, was cancelled.
Up to then, everything was very strange, but not necessarily absurd: Information about the cancellation only arrived at the newspaper early Tuesday evening (6:40 p.m.) while the arts and entertainment section closes early in the afternoon and cant be changed.
In this case, journalists, who complain so much and rightfully so about the difficulties sometimes imposed by deadlines required by the technical demands of printing the newspaper, end up enjoying the fruits of them to fix, in the same edition, a mistake that is already in print.
In effect, its better to announce the update of the matter in another section than to only fix it in the arts and entertainment section the next day. The correct approach, however, should not hide the occurrence of two serious problems.
The first is readers who, for some reason, read about the debut in the arts and entertainment section but didnt read the other story that day in Folhas daily news section. As I commented in an internal critique, mention of the matter was left off the front page, as was a correction to clarify the imbroglio. Such measures helped to attenuate the confusion created.
But there is another lesson at the heart of this episode to be learned from it. The original story in the arts and entertainment section was based on just one side of the partnership, political scientist Carlos Novaes, president of Datanexus.
SBT, the partner that bankrolled the project, invested 4 million reals (US $1.4 million at the current exchange rate), was not contacted to confirm the story. SBT is owned by Silvio Santos who is known, for good or bad, to be in the habit of making abrupt changes in management at the network without advising anybody.
Reading the story in the daily news, in an attempt to uncover the crisis, however, revealed a succession of disagreements. Differences between the parties, aroused by proposals that SBT made and that Novaes rejected, emerged Monday afternoon (the arts and entertainment section closed at 1:40 p.m. on Tuesday).
The story made clear that SBT clearly had already sought pretexts to drop the debut. The impasses, even having apparently been overcome in a momentous way, should have appeared already in the story in the arts and entertainment section or at least use them to announce the debut in a conditional way (should occur, is predicted, etc.).
Is this the reason is was not done, simply because the section had not been informed about friction by the only source that it heard? That is the problem.
Did this source deliberately manipulate the newspaper or omit information? That would be a serious accusation to make without proof. Was this a journalistic scoop? Yes, and evidently it was meritorious. The newspaper staff struggled to get the story; it did not fall from the sky.
Were the data in the audience survey useful? Discussion about reliability (or lack thereof) of the stillborn institute does not fit in this space. That is clear, even in speculative terms.
But all this ended up being stained by the facts and by the blunder in announcing exclusively the supposed debut of material so relevant and so explosive that was spoon-fed by a single source.
No correction, imprecision, omission
The following examples reveal that Folha had difficulties during the week with a correction and precision in information published.
The most relevant refers to an episode about a woman who got through security and managed to get near President Luiz Incio Lula da Silva at an event to launch a new national mental health policy on Wednesday at the presidential palace. She then make a speech while standing only one meter away from the president.
The newspaper mentioned the fact in two paragraphs grafted into the middle of the story about the ceremony. In photographs, it chose to highlight two actors who spoke there.
As for the speech by the woman, it reported only that she spoke the Gospel and told about the importance of Christ in the treatment of mentally ill people.
The competition, however, not only published a photo of her face to face with a visibly uncomfortable Lula and also emphasized that, in her speech, the woman made an open defense of imprisoned drug trafficker Fernandinho Beira-Mar. These things, by the way, have been shown since Wednesday night on the nightly news.
Where were the Folha reporters who had to catch up with this material on Friday?
In the other matter, the newspaper on Tuesday told about events in Argentina surrounding the inauguration of President Nestor Kirchner. Folha reported under the headline Kirchners first trip should be to Brazil that the previous night, a group of students at the Law School of Buenos Aires University had protested against Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, whose speech was suspended after protests.
A reader and an adviser at the Cuban Embassy in Brazil sent an e-mail to the ombudsman saying that the speech took place with thousands of people present, a fact reported by some newspapers.
Folhas correspondent in Buenos Aires asserted that the story reported that the speech had been delayed, not cancelled. He also said that it was scheduled for 6 p.m., postponed by protests, so it began at 10:30 p.m.
Thats fine. Still, it is hard to understand why information that the speech took place in the end was not reported by the newspaper, whose final edition is closed about 11 p.m. (There is no difference in time zones between here and the Argentine capital).
Cuba, by the way, was also involved in another problematic story, small but full of holes.
Thursdays editions carried material about the report by Amnesty International about human rights in diverse parts of the world. Folha reported that the Brazilian Senate had approved a motion against the recent wave of repression by the Havana government against dissidents.
However, it did not say anything about when this happened nor how the vote went, frustrating any elementary curiosity by readers interested in the topic about, for example, how Lulas allies in the left-leaning Workers Party (PT) voted on the measure.
The dollar neither rose nor fell because of these omissions, but the newspaper should not underestimate them. They denote contempt for the facts, lack of vitality in the reporting and editing, as well as lapses at keeping attuned to the basic interests of readers.
