Journalists at Folha appear willing to use any datum, statistic or “study” that falls into their hands, with little or no questioning. A debate starts only if a specialist outside the newsroom seeks the newspaper or a well-prepared columnist ventures into the field. This blemish shows up, for example, in the discussion of the two main topics of the day, unemployment and the social security system.
At its best, the newspaper — I’m referring to its most meaningful part, reporting — places conflicting information side by side to present all sides of the question. Presenting these various sides is its role, for sure, but not its only one.
The press should also analyze and interpret what is offered, assessed and discussed. It should chase after its quarry, or at least point at it, and not put its tail between the legs, leaving the reader lost in a thicket of abbreviations (IBGE, Seade, Fipe, Dieese, Ipea, etc.).
What happens in the case of unemployment is that newspapers don’t succeed — if they even try — in showing the whole picture. Folha frequently highlights on its front page the loss of industrial jobs in Sao Paulo state. The president underscores the supposedly tranquilizing data by IGBE for all of Brazil. The readers remain clueless, without knowing whether or not or how the Real Plan affects employment. It’s up to the newspaper to inform them.
Discussing these things signifies going into their merit, something that journalists increasingly shy away from, due to incompetence or opportunism. More attention is paid to the debate than consensus or its preparation. It’s more comfortable to abuse the masks and labels of neo-liberals and statists.
The country faces a unique opportunity to debate unemployment in a truly representative forum, which could be the seed for a Moncloan pact, as in Spain, but nobody is bothering to formulate the necessary common denominator: a common statistical language. Nobody, period. Luckily, Folha has its contributors.
The best analysis of unemployment figures was by Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr. and published in the Economic Op-Ed page on Thursday, as usual for articles by this professor at the Getzlio Vargas Foundation. I pored through his article to reproduce a section which very well describes the journalistic flaw that interests the ombudsman:
“As is known, we Brazilians have a congenital aversion to numbers and we are, for this reason, frequent victims of more peculiar statistical confusions, often sponsored by the government of the moment.
“We also have a certain reverence for authority. Our democracy, for example, with its limitations on permanent vigilance regarding the precision and reliability of information that those in authority disseminate, is still crawling.”
I cited the same portion in my critique of the edition that same day, with the following commentary:
“In terms of progress, this would be (crawling) backward, because to the aversion and reverence must be added an ideological agreeing with the economic policy that makes the president show numbers precisely in the way he shows them. What readers have is the independent analysis of contributors such as Batista Jr. and Delfim Netto” (which dissected on Wednesday in his column the government mythology about cheap poultry).
Insecurity
The topic of the past two weeks was the surprising agreement on social security. But what was seen in the newspapers was a chronicle of conflict, not of agreement (all it takes is looking at various Folha headlines on the topic).
Very few figures are clear, which contributed to making the whole clamor more barren. Many writers in recent days seemed ready to deify or crucify labor leader Vicentinho, but there was little to read about the predictable effects of the agreement on pensions.
Contributors such as Elio Gaspari, in “O Estado de Sao Paulo,” nettled president of the CUT labor federation, in the name of 20 million workers without regular jobs, but few critics defined their positions on the central question — must the retirement system be self-supporting or not?
They don’t do this because, if they did, they would be morally obligated to present or discuss alternatives, based on numbers and projections, not just principles and slogans. That was what another Folha contributor, Lums Nassif, wrote on Jan. 18 — again, in an opinion piece:
“To try to put some order into the discussion, one basic question should be answered initially: the way it currently is, is the retirement system actuarially viable? If it’s not, I politely ask all the debaters to focus the discussion on how to make it viable.”
It’s obvious that there is no place for a reporter to write this in regular news stories, because it would be overcharged with opinion. But it’s this type of attitude and rationale that should inspire his or her questions. Unfortunately, the majority of them are still commanded by the “what he said about what the other one said” mentality.
It is not in the role of a go-between for the powerful that Folha could contribute to the formation of public opinion. Provided that the paper itself, if anyone, still believes in such a chimera.
With the goose’s hand
Reader Geraldo Anhaia Mello wrote to the ombudsman accusing pastor Jaime Wright of plagiarizing American writer Milton Olson in an article for Folha, “Geese, Partners and Christmas” published on December 22. The text went through the “V” formation used by these birds during migrations to illustrate the interdependence and solidarity among people.
Wright justified himself to the Op-Ed editor, responsible for accepting the article, by showing the source of the fact he used, a magazine for Irish Catholic missionaries (IMU Report). According to the pastor, the publication authorized reproduction of its material freely.
It doesn’t matter whether or not the magazine granted permission (even less if it was the one to first plagiarize the writer). By leaving out the source of those ideas, Wright implicitly said they were his own, original, which was untrue and ethically unacceptable. The practice is prohibited by the Folha Stylebook:
“To use text, ideas or studies by a person or institution and not attributing it as the correct source is an unacceptable practice at Folha.”
On the tip of the tongue
For months Folha has repeated an irritating, unacceptable, avoidable mistake: the separation of syllables with accents. In one of those mysteries of computer graphics, the machines leave the accent on the line above, over the hyphen, leaving the poor vowel alone below. It’s difficult to get through a page without this kind of dust flying into the reader’s eye (with a little bit of luck, or misfortune, one of the 14 polysyllables accented in this paragraph could be the next victim).
It’s a detail, but its repetition represents — objectively — disrespect for those who buy the newspaper. The interim assistant editor, Renata Lo Prete, explained that the problem arises in two situations while using computers:
- “When the material is sent from the writing terminal to the paginator without being justified (justified material is that which already has the right measurement for the column in which it will appear in the newspaper);
- “When it’s necessary to make a change in the text directly on the paginator.”
In the first case, a solution has already been found: “redouble the caution in editing.” In the second case, it’s a bit more complicated: “We’re dealing with a limitation of paginators that the computer department at the newspaper is studying ways to correct….However much changes in the paginator are discouraged, this is a way to solve emergencies which we can’t give up,” said Lo Prete.
In other words, the problem can’t be solved. At least not by the Folha newsroom.
