Last week I commented (“The press’ weapons”) about journalistic coverage of the referendum from the point of view of impartiality. In summary, it is my opinion that the press, mostly favoring a ban on the sale of firearms and ammunition, did not manage to hide its preference in the stories that have been done.
There is another aspect to this coverage that merits reflection: the difficulty that newspapers and magazines have (TV and radio even more so) with coverage that demands technical ability and specialization. The situation becomes critical when news organizations are obligated to follow and clarify for readers various complex topics simultaneously – as is occurring at this moment with the referendum (which opens a debate on public safety), changing the course of the So Francisco River, the drought in the Amazon and hoof and mouth disease – amid coverage of a lengthy and serious political crisis.
What real effects could the referendum have on public safety? After all, is changing the course of the river good or bad? Will the Northwest improve or not when this is done? How do you explain a drought in a region covered by forests and sliced by huge rivers? What really caused the resurgence of hoof and mouth disease in the best cared-for cattle in the world? People are confused, and the press does not always help to clarify.
The causes
I attribute the difficulty to understand and explain complex topics to various reasons. The first, structural, is the insufficient training of journalists themselves, which is not exclusive to this profession.
The other reason is the resistance of companies to the specialization of journalists. Journalism values the ability to improvise, the conviction that we should be prepared to face any situation or topic and that we are generalists. These are indispensable attributes, but the best journalists are those who, besides this, have one or another area of specialization, which implies mastery of concepts, legislation, studies, public policy and sources of information.
Specialization in newsrooms has been occurring in an irregular way. Some areas are well advanced, principally in economic and science journalism. There are islands of specialization in this culture, in areas such as health, education and the environment for example. But, at times like now, the holes in newsrooms are gaping. We have excellent reporters in the street covering violence and criminality, but few are prepared to understand the social, political, economic and judicial aspects of violence and criminality. We have courageous reporters, but few who know how to work with statistics and able to follow specialized studies. We know how to describe an event but we are not prepared to efficiently cover police in technical procedures and intelligence.
In the case of the referendum, readers and viewers are going crazy. The laws, experiences and statistics of countries like the United States, Switzerland and Australia serve as arguments of the two currents that compete for the popular vote, used informally, and newspapers and magazines have difficulties evaluating what is fact and what is manipulation. Folha announced for this Sunday a special section about the referendum. I hope it proves me wrong.
Another problem is shrinking newsrooms through the financial crisis in news organizations in recent years. The staffs are smaller, and, in the case of Folha, less specialized.
The focus of the hoof and mouth disease on a ranch in Mato Grosso do Sul state was covered from a distance. Folha’s correspondent in Campo Grande, Hudson Corra, knows the topic well, but he is in Braslia reinforcing the team following the political crisis. His absence was filled in by a freelancer that turned out well, but through Friday the coverage has been done totally from Campo Grande and Braslia. The newspaper still has not managed to send a journalist to Eldorado, 446 kilometers from Campo Grande, where the event occurred.
The case of the drought in the Amazon is different. The reporter in Manaus, Ktia Brasil, has been following the lack of rain since September and has taken an approach that it is the biggest drought in the past 30 years in the region. The newspaper, however, did not give it much play. Since Oct. 8 it has shown almost daily the evolution of the drought and its consequences, but there is no investment by the newspaper to understand the apparent paradox of the phenomenon. The reporter left Manaus and penetrated the isolated towns that were most affected, but use by the newspaper was frustrating. On Thursday, it even gave a page to stories about her trip, but without analysis. On Friday, those stories were not highlighted.
A lack of continuity also marked coverage of the project involving diversion of the So Francisco River, another topic that few people are able to understand. How do you position yourself for or against the project when confronting arguments that are essentially technical?
At the start of a hunger strike on Sept. 26, Bishop Luiz Flvio Cappio resuscitated the topic in the press. Folha even published a special section, “The trail of water.” The topic, however, remains controversial, as editorials in the newspaper have pointed out and columns that Lus Nassif has been publishing since Tuesday in an effort to untangle the project. The stories disappeared and probably will only reappear in a new crisis. But it would not be sufficient to clarify the doubts, only covering the beat.
SPECIALIZATION
“Newspapers are not the worse”
The managing editor at Folha, Vinicius Torres Freire, comments about the difficulties in specialized coverage:
“Very few newspapers in the world have enough money to cover a diversity of topics. These few are the big newspapers in the United States and Japan.
“The growing diversification of interests by the reading public and segmentation of readership calls for increased specialization. The swift diffusion and greater availability of information present increasingly more topics for the reader and, therefore, for newspapers. The Internet and technology, enormous topics on their own, create increasingly more supply and demand for information: readers know increasingly more things, and more quickly.
“Even facing this scenario, teams of journalists are increasingly smaller, at least at newspapers in the United States, Brazil and Western Europe. Instead of having more resources to follow the growing complexity and amount of news, there are fewer people and less money, since there are relatively fewer ads and readers.
“And yes, it is hard to demand so many important and complex topics at the same time. What somewhat alleviates so much difficulty is that journalists in the media are more qualified, get more training, dominate more topics more deeply, as incredible as that may seem. But jumping from one topic to the next, from one week to the next, or even from one day to the next, have to follow various complex matters at the same time, is difficult and a waste of manpower.
“There will never be enough specialists at newspapers. It was never possible and will be increasingly difficult to have specialists to cover everything. The crisis at newspapers, and those in Brazil in particular, has shrunk newsrooms since the past century. Meanwhile, newspapers don’t seem worse to me, since they are more judicious, journalists are better prepared and are working more.”
Translation by John Wright
