Reinaldo Azevedo of Veja (left) and Márcio Chaer of Consultor Jurídico and Original123 Public Relations (right)
Reinaldo Azevedo and Márcio Chaer, in their attempt to misuse the program as a personal platform in the face of such delicate issues and such a controversial interviewee, conspired against the journalistic quality and balance of this edition of Roda Viva. The program’s directors should reflect on their criteria for selecting interviewers in the future.
Consultor Jurídico editor Márcio Chaer was last seen on the interview panel of TV Cultura’s Roda Viva interviewing Brazilian Supreme Court Chief Justice Gilmar Mendes. See
Now, in an article published in ConJur on December 23, Chaer finally produces a riposte to an article critical of his publication that appeared in the pages of Observatório da Imprensa a month or so back, written by an e-commerce entrepreneur and former Daniel Dantas business partner named Luís Roberto Demarco. See
Rather than rebutting the factual allegations Demarco made against him — that his publication provides journalistic coverage of persons that Chaer is paid to represent through his public relations agency, which constitutes a sleazy conflict of interest — he prefers to resort to a tu quoque argument:
a Latin term used to mean a type of logical fallacy. The argument states that a certain position is false or wrong and/or should be disregarded because its proponent fails to act consistently in accordance with that position; it attempts to show that a criticism or objection applies equally to the person making it. It is considered an ad hominem argument, since it focuses on the party itself, rather than its positions.
The headline puns on the term “McCarthyism” and the name of the publisher of CartaCapital magazine, Mino Carta — founder in his day of the newsweeklies Veja and IstoÉ, among others, and a journalist whose magazine has, indeed, closely covered the criminal cases against Daniel Dantas over the years.
The pun suggests a running theme of Dantas’ defense team: That the banker is a victim of political persecution. Chaer is picking up the thread of a campaign begun by Veja according to which Carta and the like are chapa brancas — journalists secretly paid off to ratfink and slander the enemies of their political sponsors.
I personally do not believe this.
It is a public issue at the moment, however, because the federal indictment against Daniel Dantas includes allegations that Dantas paid off journalists to conduct smear campaigns on his his behalf. See, most recently,
The bulk of the article, however, consists of personal attacks against and charges of alleged conflicts of interest on the part of journalist Luis Nassif, who, Chaer claims, is secretly on the payroll of this Demarco, himself portrayed as yet another omnipotent, politically connected member of the conspiracy to persecute Dantas.
Since this journalistic debate interests me, I am going to translate it to my notes, and then present Nassif’s rebuttal.
Most of the misconduct alleged here is recycled from old attacks by Veja magazine on Nassif, which Nassif has already written detailed, factual rebuttals to.
The adjective-laden style and the copious use of insinuation, labeling, guilt by association, and facts not in evidence are remarkably reminiscent of the journalistic style of the old Tribuna de Imprensa, edited by Carlos Lacerda.
I have been reading a book recently about Lacerda’s battles with Samuel Wainer of the pro-Vargas Última Hora over the years leading up to the coup of 1964.
Indeed, this is a historical parallel Chaer would like us to believe applies here: That neither party to the dispute is disinterested or impartial.
That CartaCapital and Nassif, for example, are chapa brancas, as Wainer was for the Vargas government of the 1950s (when the vast majority of the press was rabidly anti-Varguist).
This is a recurring theme in yellow-press smear campaigns against journalists who have crossed Daniel Dantas in the past.
At any rate, draft-quality translated, Chaer writes:
Minocarthismo
Ideology is the wrapping paper in dispute among journalists
A thunderous epic is now appearing on certain stages in the Brazilian press: the great battle of good against evil. On the side of “good” are federal police investigator Protógenes Queiroz; Judge Fausto De Sanctis; persons suspended from their posts, such as Paulo Lacerda, the former judge Walter Maierovitch and former attorney Dalmo Dallari and a bunch of other fundamentalists lost on the Interner. On the side of “evil” are the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and colleagues of his; Judge Ali Mazloum; sectors of the government and Congress; TV Globo and the Editora Abril and, among others, this Web site. …
The banner of the crusaders for good, they say, is the elimination of white-collar corruption in Brazil. Judging from their insist preaching, this will happen when banker Daniel Dantas is retired from circulation. According to these neo-idealists, this has not happened yet because Daniel Dantas is “the man who owns Brazil.” That is to say: he uses perfidious means to bend the forces of evil to his will — which would explain his continuing success in business, in politics, in the press and in the courts.
Spy vs. Spy
The screenwriter of this epic is a man named Luís Roberto Demarco, a man of many talents. He has scripted cases for the federal police, edited lawsuits filed by the Public ministry and the finance committee of the federal Chamber of Deputies; and dictated articles published by his partners in the press. A former partner in Opportunity, Demarco now sells both technology and an antidote to the poisons of Dantas to his competitors and adversaries.
Another characteristic of Demarco is his firm support for well-known journalists whose careers are on the skids and who, despite their talent and their curriculum, can no longer find a place in the job market. According to Paulo Henrique Amorim, together they created the NGO “Brasil Limpo” to harbor professional journalists who want to write for them.
This struggle of good against evil, in real life, is, of course, a mere struggle among economic interests.. The prize in this dispute is a slice of a Brazilian telecommunications market valued at 30 billion reais per year. The rules are “anything goes.”
Inversion of values
It could be that Demarco and his partners Mino Carta, Paulo Henrique Amorim, Luís Nassif and other, lesser known figures have turned against Dantas for humanistic reasons. For idealistic reasons. In the case of Judge De Sanctis, at least, this caveat is essential to make. He and the legion of his admirers sincerely want Dantas out of circulation, and for very different motives than Demarco and his apostles. For this reason, it is essential to understand certain coincidences, and why the forces of “Minocartism” decided to dedicate themselves almost exclusively to this crusade.
Carta Capital magazine, published by Mino Carta, got its start with financial support from a man who would later become CEO of the Telemar consortium— Carlos Jereissati. He was accused in 1998 by former Infrastructure Minister Luiz Carlos Mendonça de Barros of heading a “telemob” that bought the telephony operator with the heaviest market penetration in Brazil from the government with the government’s own money. Mendonça de Barros lost his job after the publication of an illegal wiretap. The bug caught the confidential conversations of half the Cardoso government, including conversations with Cardoso himself.
On the background to which see also
At the time, scandal-mongers used those illegal wiretap excerpts to suggest that Mendonça de Barros and BNDES president Lara Resende had attempted, but failed, to “steer” the auction to Dantas and his consortium.
Elvira Lobato of the Folha reported recently that Mendonça de Barros — Reinaldo Azevedo’s boss at Primeira Leitura magazine and owner of Análise Editorial, whose guide to listed Brazilian corporates is pretty useful — still faces an official misconduct probe over the “steering” allegations, but that ten years later, the probe has gone nowhere — partly because the prosecutor cannot use the bug evidence, which was illegally obtained.
In the nearly ten years that the dispute raged, Jereissati and Dantas went head to head for the same prize. Jereissati won the day by making common cause with Sérgio Andrade, one of the owners of Andrade Gutierrez, which was on of the largest contributors to the Lula campaign in 2006.
A lower court has already found Diogo Mainardi of Veja guilty on two occasions for having stated that Mino Carta was controlled by Jereissati in the diry job of blasting Dantas. The truth is that Jereissati merely underwrote the launching of the magazine with an advertising contract for the first two years of its publication. The two partners, both of them strong-willed, wound up having a falling out. That is when Luís Roberto Demarco went into action.
He guaranteed the survival of the magazine with money from Telecom Italia and the PT faction in the pension funds — the same funds that now control Brasil Telecom and, as a result, iG, the ISP that hosts Carta Capital magazine. Paulo Henrique Amorim was also on iG, then left it. According to the portal, he was fired because his project was not working out as expected. He relocated his site to a new URL in a virtual domain belonging to Demarco. Luís Nassif was called on to replace him. What Dantas and the sponsors of Mino Carta had in common was their goal: control the two major telephone companies. To winner would go the spoils of the enemy.
iG hosts the magazine’s Web site, but as to the business arrangements between it and the independent publisher that puts the magazine out, I have no solid information. The insinuation is that this business relationship clouds the magazine’s editorial independence. I tend to doubt that.
When the Telecom Italia shareholders learned that a mountain of money was being spent in Brazil without the expected returns, a search began there for the treasure lost here. Affidavits in that case suggested the existence of a bribery scheme here that involved police, federal lawmakers, politicians and, of course, Demarco’s orchestra in the press.
Theoretically, their fates were sealed. Poor Daniel Dantas, the neutral press reported, would receive something like R$2 billion for the “defeat” (sale of his stakes in Telemar and Brasil Telecom). We still do not know what the owners of BrT and iG will get for leaving their current board seats, but we do know the portal will be closed or sold by the new management. The dispute among Lula campaign donors and the pension funds is not over yet. But we do know that Operation Satiagraha strengthened the bargaining power of the pension funds.
Demarco’s orchestra plays a loud fanfare in order to drown out the uncomfortable noise of accusations, which were almost certainly unjust, according to which its musicians rented their talents in order to help one business owner engulf and devour another.
Chaer sincerely thinks the accusations have no substance to them? Or is he co-authoring the piece with his libel lawyer?
Greta Garbo in Irajá
Such is the case with Luís Nassif. His sudden appearance on the scene calls attention because of the reasons for his firing by the Folha de S.Paulo. It fell to Veja magazine to publish the first disheartening reports about the self-proclaimed man who introduced service and electronic journalism to Brazil. Nassif had published at least one article written by Demarco under his own byline. The article, which blasted Daniel Dantas, was offered to various journalists, but only Nassif’s column in the Folha published it. Without disclosing that it was a press release written by someone else.
Nassif denies he committed plagiarism. See
The second blow came with the revelation that the journalist’s sudden and eloquent support for the government had a motive that had nothing to do with ideology: a R$4 million loan from BNDES that, when it was not repaid, was partially forgiven and partial refinanced over a ten-year period.
There’s more. Another bit of news — confirmed by Folha owner Otavio Frias Filho — is that Nassif sold the space alloted to his Folha column, but it was Dinheiro Vivo, a company belonging to the journalist, that wound up with the money. The example given involved then state public security secretary Saulo de Castro.
A cross-check of the Folha de S.Paulo’s database with the federal disbursements database (Siafi) shows a succession of payments from the federal government. Coincidentally, the government agencies buying ads from the Folha were praised, and their interests defended, by Nassif in the Folha.
There were innumerable hymns of praise to BNDES. But this was not the only case. On Janujary 27, 2006, the Folha columnist ran a panegyric to the Minister of Science and Technology (URL) and mounted a frenzied, most unusual defense of the role the ministry plays. According to Siafi, the Dinheiro Vivo information agency received R$15,930.00 from the same ministry (click to check). and another R$16,130.00 from the National Petroleum Agency (click to check).
On two dates in 2004 (March 30 and June 15), Nassif, writing in the Folha, displayed special enthusiasm for Inmetro. He suggested the government expand Inmetro’s role to include R&D, transforming it into a “Brazilian NIST”, referring to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States. The columnist was alarmed that the government might create an agency that would diminish the powers of Inmetro and starting raving when he wrote that it is “one of the principal competitive weapons Brazil has” (Click to read). Coincidentally, Inmetro would pay Dinheiro Vivo Consultoria Ltda. R$15,000.00 (click to check), along with another R$7,910.00 from the Ministry of the Cities (Click to check). The “government action” used to justify the payment to Nassif’s firm is not one usually offered by journalists: “measurement quality control.”
Luís Nassif has written to propose that journalists for hire who use their profession to influence business disputes should be tried for criminal conspiracy (click to read). Nassif made the proposal on April 29, 2008 — three days before the scoop published by Andrea Michael in Folha de S.Paulo, the report that federal investigator Queiroz used to criminalize news reporting. Nassif’s clairvoyant suggestion, in Mino Carta’s view, comes from someone who understands a thing or two about criminal conspiracy. And the policeman, as we saw, liked the idea.
Journalists need not be impartial. But they ought to be honest. It is impossible to prevent the exchange of favors or loyalty to sources. Money is not a strange new element in the relations between newspapers, blogs and magazines — starting from the moment the news media receive money from persons in the news through their ad sales department. What is desirable is that publicity not be mixed with journalistic reporting. When a publication starts working in favor of or against a given business or political interest, its reasons for doing so should be fully disclosed. The Folha de S.Paulo, years ago, instituted the practice of accepting invitations from event sponsors, but disclosing the sponsorship.
In the case of Carta Capital, Nassif, Paulo Henrique Amorim and other journalists coordinated by Demarco, this is not done. They play a clearly defined role, saying they believe they are combating a unwholesome person and defending the institutional integrity of Brazil. But they do so without informing their readers that they are getting paid to preach the gospel.
To come (possibly only after the holidays; Chaer’s hit piece was well-timed): Replies from Nassif and Carta.
The tu quoque element of this argument is that Chaer attributes to others a defect attributed to him, namely (from the Demarco article in OI):
… by far the least committed to journalistic ethics is Márcio Chaer. No one knows whether he is a journalist, a businessman, or a public relations professional. He identifies himself now as one, now as another. He owns Dublê Editorial Ltda., which publishes the Consultor Juridico legal affairs magazine. On the magazine’s Web site, it defines itself as “an independent publication on law and justice,” lists Márcio Chaer as publisher and member of the editorial board, and reports that it operates at Rua Wisard 23, in the Vila Madalena neighbohood of São Paulo. … The same address houses Chaer’s public relations firm, Original123. The Web site shows that Chaer is the head of that PR firm. That is to say, the same person who writes articles as a journalist has the persons he writes about as paying PR clients.
Nice work if you can get it.
When accused of ethical lapses, deliver a long, finger-wagging lecture on ethics rather than denying that you committed the allegedly unethical acts in question.
I call this “changing the subject while filibustering,” or, more directly, “the banana republican guilty plea.”
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Brazil, carlos lacerda, daniel dantas, ethics, Journalism, Márcio Chaer, Mino Carta, reinaldo azevedo, Samuel Wainer, veja, yellow journalism
