This week Folha lost a great opportunity to highlight a drama that should elicit disapproval and indignation by everyone. I’m referring to the death in Dourados, Mato Grosso do Sul state, of an Indian girl three years, 11 months old due to malnutrition.
It’s unbelievable that in a country with obesity and a Zero Hunger program, in a state rich in agriculture and livestock production, that a child would die of hunger. It is unbelievable that this event did not provoke a national outcry. Only a constant series of daily scandalous events can explain the apparent lethargy that overcomes us occasionally.
Folha foretold the girl’s death, but it did not know how to give it the right exposure.
The newspaper’s correspondent in Campo Grande, Hudson Corra, did the first story, published on Jan. 25. His story reported that “270f the indigenous children in Mato Grosso do Sul up to age 5 are malnourished and that in 2004 infant mortality reached 60 per 1,000 live births, almost triple the verified rate among the Brazilian population.” Folha gave substantial play to the story.
On Saturday, Feb. 5, the newspaper put out a new story by the same journalist, “Zero Hunger funds for Indians stalled.” The story showed that the government of Mato Grosso do Sul had failed to use the nearly 1 million reals (about US $325,000 at the current exchange rate) it had received from the federal government for the Zero Hunger program in indigenous areas. We were, therefore, facing a huge tragedy: malnourished children without help.
On Tuesday, Feb. 8, the girl Caiu died at 3 years, 11 months old. The newspaper published only a brief piece lost in the middle of political stories. It was the second anonymous indigenous child to die this year, according to the correspondent’s story. The other, 8 months old, died in January. Fifteen children died in 2004.
The newspaper had the obligation to take its readers into the middle of this tragedy, to transform numbers into faces and names, to abandon the cold facts of the death for a local story that shows the living conditions of the families that are losing children due to lack of food in the 21st Century.
The newspaper now has a duty to begin a serious investigation: where do the funds go that are used by many social programs by the federal, state and local governments? If the National Indian Foundation (Funai) and the governments have known about the problem for a long time, that the problem is limited to a social group and a demarcated region, why can’t they manage to prevent deaths?
This, sadly, is a big deal for newspapers. Folha’s correspondent in Campo Grande had the sensibility to understand the relevance of the drama. The newsroom in So Paulo, however, did not know how to give the case the space that it deserved.
I asked the newspaper and received the following statement from the editor for national news, Fernando de Barros e Silva: “It is difficult to say that the matter was slighted. We reported the girl’s death in Thursday’s edition with reasonable play. And on Friday, we returned to show that the government acted too late regarding the problem, increasing food aid after the event already occurred. We even showed that entities tied to Indians see the measure as a ‘cynical palliative’ and criticized the lack of structural measures to at least solve the problem over the medium term.
“Now I believe that it is not only legitimate but reasonable that the ombudsman view the episode as a journalistic opportunity that was badly used. I don’t see it that way, but the discussion is relevant. The social scandals are so numerous and frequent that we all end up, in some way or at some moment, reacting in an apathetic way or anesthetized to many intolerable things.”
The new company
I was on vacation when Folha announced Jan. 4 the business reorganization of the Folha Group. I did not have the opportunity to comment on the event until now.
Just remember: the news, published in the business section, reported that Folha and Universe Online (UOL) merged “to issue stock.” Excerpts from the text: “Folha and UOL merged into the same company, the Folha-UOL ‘holding.’ With the merger of the two companies, the group becomes in practice the second-biggest media conglomerate in Brazil, with revenues estimated at 1.3 billion reals (about US $525 million).”
The controller of UOL as well as the company Folha da Manh, which publishes Folha, the Frias family, will maintain control of Folha-UOL. Its financial stake in the new company is 79%. The remaining 21 0s held by Portugal Telecom, a Portuguese company that is in the cellular telephone business in Brazil, in association with Telefnica of Spain … The president of Folha-UOL, Lus Frias, asserted that the consolidation plans for a stock offering in the near future. “We are working to offer the best opportunity to the market: the second-biggest company in the sector, leader in its area, with its debt liquidated by the end of 2005 and the company professionalized.”
The story recalls, “Founded in 1921, Folha is the biggest-circulation newspaper in Brazil and one of the most influential newspapers in the country.”
I will summarize some information that I obtained that was not in Folha’s official announcement. No new money entered the operation. The restructuring of the group had as its main objective the combination of assets of the big companies in the group, Folha and UOL, and allowed the gates to open to rescue the indebted newspaper. The assets of UOL with the results of Folha in 2004 liquidated the newspaper’s debts to banks, leaving only paper suppliers. The new agreement signed between the group and Portugal Telecom has a clause establishing that the telecom company will have no influence over the newspaper’s editorial policy.
I will highlight two aspects of this new company formation.
First, the reaction of Folha. As I already wrote on other occasions, the company is experiencing hard times because of the debt accumulated in recent years. This situation led to cuts at the newspaper that resulted in the loss of journalists, a shortage of resources and lack of investment. In my opinion, the combined effects of these problems affected the newspaper’s quality. The clear advantage that it had in other times against “O Estado de So Paulo” and the Rio daily “O Globo,” its two direct national competitors, no longer exists. The three newspapers today are about equal in terms of hits and misses.
From the viewpoint of readers and journalists at the newspaper, it is in their interest that the newspaper recover its financial health and its ability to invest as soon as possible and return to pursue the production of a distinct newspaper. Its credibility and prestige are tied to the period in which it invested in quality and creativity.
The second aspect is the introduction of a foreign partner in the telecom sector, Portugal Telecom, with the newspaper. The presence of telecom companies in the news media is something new in Brazil, but it is already a reality in various countries in the world and points out a serious problem, the formation of big conglomerate producers of content (newspapers in the Folha Group), with a gateway to the Internet (UOL) and the telecom network.
The entry of non-journalistic companies in the area of news and the arrival of foreign partners should bring a new scenario to a market where ownership of news organizations is already characterized by concentration. It is still too early to say what will happen with news organizations in Brazil in the coming years, but it is certain that journalistic companies molded in the past three decades of the last century are falling behind.
Folha did a good job of covering the opening and privatization of the telecom sector since the start of the 1990s and is a critical reference in this area. What it should observe starting now is how the association with a telecom company will affect the regularity and quality of its coverage.
Translation by John Wright
