Brazil is among those countries where respondents tended to feel very strongly that their news media are lacking in accuracy and impartiality. Most Brazilian media reporting on the BBC-Synovate survey failed to mention that fact. QED. Click to zoom.
I head over to the blog of Zé Dirceu, the controversial former government minister and lobbyist, to see if I can verify my idle hypothesis:
That the second round of the municipal elections in São Paulo are going to be down and dirty, like a USC student election when Donald Segretti was going to law school there.
Signs are that it will, after last night’s first mayor debate on TV Bandeirantes. The local press is pretty clearly just cutting and pasting the political marketing of one candidate, while the other candidate’s Web site appears to have been hacked, or at least is currently off the air for more than 24 hours now.
The other candidate, a leading advocate of gay rights (campaign color: pink), now seems to be insinuating that the candidate preferred by the local press (who has some of the slickest and most expensive-looking political marketing I have even seen) is, well, gay … and a fascist, to boot.
And she is already calling him a crook, too, by pointing out he was Secretary of Planning under (the jailed, for corruption and money-laundering) Celso “Just Another Harvard-Educated Victim of Political Persecution” Pitta.
But leave that for another time.
You can say what you like about Dirceu (can I have your client list, please, sir?) but the guy is undeniably a good source of political Kremlinology, and very smart in the way he uses his personal blog to do politics (and defend himself against four fairly minor criminal counts he faces in the Supreme Court, in a politically-charged case that will not be judged until 2010, it seems).
And one thing Dirceu the political operator is particularly good at is slagging the Brazilian press for being viciously slanted, stupid and corrupt (which, in many cases, as a political talking point, has the advantage of having a great deal of truthiness to it.)
His target today: O Globo, print flagship of that perpetual font of gabbling disinformation run by the Marinho clan.
Não posso deixar de cobrar de O Globo, responsabilidade com o que publica – responsabilidade com o público e com o país. Numa crise como essa, de dimensões ainda incertas, mas com repercussão em todo o mundo, não pode ser alarmista, nem sensacionalista, muito menos enganar o leitor.
I cannot refrain from demanding from O Globo more responsibility to the public — to the public and to Brazil. In a financial crisis like this one, whose dimensions are still uncertain, but which will affect everyone, one cannot be alarmist, or sensationalist, and in any case cannot deceive the reader.
Mas é o que fez o jornal no fim de semana (domingo) com a reportagem sob o título “Governo pode cortar gastos e adiar programas sociais.” Depois desse título, lendo-se a matéria, percebe-se, já na abertura, que o texto desmente a manchete.
But that is precisely what the newspaper did on Sunday with a story headlined “Government may cut costs and delay social programs.” After reading that headline, the reader who goes on to read the article sees in the lead paragraph that the article contradicts the headline.
Ecce Globo.
“O ministro do Planejamento, Paulo Bernardo, não tem dúvida: se a crise atingir a arrecadação, o governo vai cortar gastos. Apenas PAC e programas sociais já implantados serão preservados. ‘Vamos preservar o que for essencial. Se precisar enfiar a faca para equilibrar o orçamento, nós vamos fazer’, disse Paulo Bernardo a Sergio Fadul e Geralda Doca”, afirma o texto de O Globo.
“Planning minister Bernardo is emphatic: if the crisis affects revenue, the government will cut costs. Only the PAC (economic growth acceleration plan) and social programs already implanted will be spared. “We are going to preserve the essential. If we have to use the knife to balance the budget, we will,” said Bernardo to Fadul and Doca [...] ,” said the Globo article.
Como você vê, leitor, tem uma série de “se”, de condicionantes para os cortes que o jornal puxa para o título e o ministro deixa muito claro que o PAC, maior programa de investimentos do governo será preservado.
As you can see, dear reader, there is a series of “if” statements, of conditions for these cuts, that the newspaper strains to get into the headline. But the Minister makes it clear that the PAC, the government’s major investment plan, will be spared.
And existing (but not necessarily new, if any) social programs, too.
Com uma matéria dessas, o objetivo parece ser levar pânico à sociedade e desgastar o governo, fazer – no caso, publicar – de tudo para que o governo Lula não dê certo.
With a story like this, the objective seems to be to cause panic among society and undermine the government, doing — or publishing — anything to make sure the Lula government does not succeed.
Well, maybe.
“May cut costs and delay implementation of NEW social programs” might be clearer. The real point of the story is that core programs will be protected, according to Mr. Bernardo.
But still, this is not the most egregiously slanted nonsense I have ever seen in the pages of O Globo (which would be the chronically factually-challenged, logic-chopping, Red-baiting, fascistoid op-eds of Ali Kamel, the most intellectually dishonest self-styled public intellectual in the Southern Hemisphere, probably).
A tempest in a teapot, probably. But it does serve to illustrate one point: Bashing the Brazilian press works, which is why politicians here do it so much.
And unfortunately, bashing the press works because in so many cases, the press here is eaten through with gibbering, viciously slanted nonsense, and therefore has only itself to blame. See, for example
- Brazilian News Media Garbles Survey Data on the Question, “Does Your News Media Report Honestly and Accurately?”
- “Info-Ential Brazilians Trust Their News Media!”
(Solution: Promote competent rank and file journalists to management. Fire current editorial management. Let them go and blog or something.)
As for me, I have no right to vote here, and am not an especially huge fan of the “Communist TV sexologist with the soap-opera love-life,” as Larry Rohter once called her — Larry likes to think of himself as a player rather than a play-by-play man — but if I were the underdog candidate, my campaign advertising would all feature the following image of the Great Smoking Hole (see São Paulo No-Brainer: “Subway Smoking Hole Was An Engineering Failure!”) …
The Great Smoking Hole of December 2006. Those ain’t Tonka trucks, Bubba. Amazing this has not become a campaign issue yet. After all, the incumbent mayor named his brother head of new projects at the Metrô authority around the same time. Work that “nepotism and watered concrete leads to hot, smoking death” angle. Source: G1/Globo
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