Folha paid little attention to the topic this week, but the fact is that, since Sunday, journalism, especially in the United States, suffered a brutal blow to the stomach.
It was the result of an extensive story in The New York Times that day about mistakes, fraud, plagiarism and inventions contained in stories produced over a five-month period by one of its reporters, Jayson Blair, 27, who left the newspaper on the first of the month.
The investigation, done by reporters, editors and researchers at the Times itself, began with confirming that a story by Blair which ran on April 26 about the family of a soldier missing in Iraq plagiarized a story that appeared eight days earlier in the San Antonio Express-News in Texas.
They verified at least 36 instances of fraud in the 73 stories he wrote between October 2002 and last April, laid out in detail on the four pages that the Times devoted to the case on Sunday.
Blair pretended to send stories from places where he did not go, using photographs to forge details that he did not witness, and invented quotations. Close to 600 stories under his byline published since 1998 are being checked.
Crisis
The New York Times, in existence for 152 years, is considered the most influential newspaper in the United States and one of the most important in the world. It is one of the institutions that structure democracy in that country. It publishes a daily corrections section and enjoys a tradition of independence and credibility.
The disclosure of the matter causing all the uproar, in an evident tone of mea culpa, counts in its favor. The story and transparency, however, did not answer the main question: How was it possible for so much fraud to go on for so long at such a newspaper?
On Wednesday, about 500 of its journalists met for two hours with executives in a New York movie theater to discuss the problem. While the meeting was held behind closed doors, stories in the U.S. press said that the climate there was tense and a crisis was declared, with open questioning related to the mechanisms that control the newspaper, criteria for recruitment and promotions, and the underestimation of internal communications.
They even questioned whether or not there was excessive tolerance at the top for Blair about whom warnings have circulated since the start of 2002 regarding mistakes and questionable behavior due to the fact that he is black and the newspaper follows a recruitment policy that values affirmative action.
Since October, for example, the journalist supposedly sent stories from 20 cities in six states without submitting to managers even one receipt for expense accounts.
On a CNN program, Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz even cast doubts on the procedures the Times used to check out Blairs mistakes.
I believe that this is a classic example in which the newspaper could use an ombudsman with an independent view, since, in the end, the editors that are involved in the case are the same ones who supervised this investigation, the journalist said.
Kurtz argues that someone outside the power structure at the newspaper could, for example, question Howell Raines (executive editor) about the fact that he had congratulated Blair in an e-mail for his coverage of the Washington D.C.-area sniper story last year.
Delicate moment
Cases of this type have occurred before in the United States, but not for so long at such a reputable newspaper with such a huge impact nor at such a delicate moment, in which, besides suffering from a powerful economic crisis, the media are being questioned for their near-unanimous subservience to George W. Bushs patriotism.
Folha, however, gave the topic only a small note at the bottom of the page on Monday, different from competitors, who were more sensitive about capturing the historic magnitude. On Tuesday, it recovered a little by reporting, with a photograph of Blair, that The Boston Globe, where he worked for a few months, started its own investigation. There was an editorial in Wednesdays edition and that was all, at least up until this column was written.
Furthermore, the ombudsman at the Globe, Christine Chinlund, with whom I exchanged e-mails, lamented what happened in a simple way:
The tale of Jayson Blair is, above all, a very sad story. It serves as a reminder to all journalists and editors of the necessity for extreme vigilance in precision. We can never give up on this.
The Times, Globe and other newspapers in the United States announced a revision in their internal procedures for checking and control.
In Brazil, few cases of fraud or plagiarism have been revealed up to now. The sad tale about Jayson Blair should serve, at least, as an enormous yellow light.
P.S.: Having the right to reprint stories from the Times, Folha has done so 170 times since last October. None were by Blair. Prior to that, at least one of the stories (On-line magazines create printed versions to survive on March 11, 2001) carried the reporters byline.
Mistake hidden
A story on the first page of the business section, with a teaser on the front page, reported on Thursday that Ambassador lvaro Alencar would become undersecretary at the Foreign Ministry, in place of Clodoaldo Hugueney Filho, to integrate foreign commerce issues. It even used the formulation Folha has verified.
It carried a profile of Alencar and judgment that the appointment implies a harder line in the negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
On Friday, Folha and other newspapers carried information that denied that story. Its true that there were changes, but they were different.
Errors are part of the game (a correction came out about it yesterday), but the bigger problem, in Fridays edition, was another: lack of transparency about the matter for readers. So the story, besides coming out in a less-important part of the newspaper, simply ignored the previous one, on Thursday, as if the newspaper were trying to play dead.
The editor of the business section, Marcio Aith, explained that the initial information came from 10 sources (five in the Foreign Ministry), but that Alencar gave up the job between Tuesday and Wednesday, without the newspaper checking out the change. As for the case on Friday, Aith asserted: It lacked sensitivity to understand that the absence (of mentioning the previous information) could be interpreted as a deliberate attempt to hide an error of information.
News, ads
Many mistakes can be attributed to Folha, but among them is not the habit to allow interests from the business side to mix with the news.
On Monday, however, there was an unpleasant blunder when the announcement by a bank, in an inverted U format, boxed in and totally isolated a news story that at first glance could easily have been mistaken for an ad.
The same announcement came out in the Rio daily O Globo, with an identical problem, and in O Estado de So Paulo, which in the latter, the boxed story pretended to look like a news story but was an ad by a bank.
It must be understood that publicists look for creative ways to be able in terms of readers who complain about this disrespect in the boxed stories to jazz up newspaper pages. They do their job.
But it is not desirable, despite the current economic difficulties in news organizations, to make concessions that could cause a crumbling of the traditional and indispensable separation between publicity and news.
