Above: “Rise Up, Brazil! Unconditional support for our armed forces!” Arnaldo Jabor of O Globo writes: «”The average Brazilian has a sense of solidarity.,” Lie! The average Brazilian is an asshole! Electing a guy who lacks the schooling to be a garbageman to the top office in the land proves it …»
In my Portuguese-language blog, I have been publishing a bunch of notes from an ongoing data-mining study of campaign advertising in this year’s elections in Brazil.
The study was motivated by two questions that interested me.
- The influence and efficacy of “the neocon style” in Brazilian political marketing — the phrase was coined by Brazilian journalism Luis Nassif to describe the journalism practiced by the country’s leading newsweekly, a perpetual fountain of gabbling Doubleplus Untruth — and
- The influence and efficacy of cutting-edge digital marketing in general as praticed in the world-famous Brazilian advertising and media sector.
After practicing on the media and ad sectors, I am now moving on to proprietary mining expeditions in other sectors of the economy, possibly even leading to the making of money. I hope.
One of the more significant findings was a wealth of institutional ties between the Brazilian “freedom of expression” lobby and the labyrinthine world of neoconservative-anarchocapitalist think tanks.
Not much of an effort has been made to conceal these ties, in fact.
Another is the remarkable extent to which major advertisers ch0wn and pwn the Brazilian press.
If you watch the Brazilian boob tube, you will find that the only major sector of the Brazilian economy whose advertising buys do not directly reflect this general trend toward market concentration is the auto industry.
A key bone of contention in the public policy area has turned out to be the regulation of stealth marketing and payola — an area in which Brazil continues to figure as a “regulatory Wild West,” as local one observer said recently.
When a major Brazilian media organization “updated its code of conduct to reflect international standards” a year or so ago, it heroically limited gifts from coverage subjects and advertisers to “only R$100 per gift.”
The global trend is converging on R$0 — which is the rule I have always worked with.
Conversations with the Índio Tupi
For the benefit of Portuguese-speaking readers — who tend to receive distorted information depicting the Land of Uncle Sam as a libertarian utopia — I wound up translating and gisting quite a bit of material on the history of payola legislation and arguments in favor of regulating “stealth marketing” on the same basis.
The plot to pollute the minds of youth with the music of Elvis was discussed in some depth. And had some appeal, since a lot of Brazilians do not differentiate sharply between Elvis and Sinatra.
I also tried to organize as much information as I could on U.S. “public diplomacy” and the marketing of Brand America in support of foreign trade policy.
Central factoid: heading the Public Diplomacy office under Obama is the former CEO of the Discovery Channel — who spent 20 years planning and executing the internationalization of MTV.
Brand U.S.A.
Abd so I wound up focusing closely on CIMA, the “exportation of free and independent media” arm of the National Endowment for Democracy.
Detailed information on the progressive and progressively formal coordination of efforts in this general area — among NED, State, USAID and, increasingly, the Pentagon — is quite freely available, as it turns out.
The strategy of “outsourced message promotion” — practiced and honed over decades by such legendary political consultants as George Wirthlin of Wirthlin Worldwide — is discussed extensively, if euphemistically, in these reports and in related studies by bodies like the GAO and the RAND Corporation.
Quite a few RAND reports warn strongly of the inherent risks of blowback.
We pay these guys the big bucks to think deep thoughts and then we fail to listen to them.
Upon its founding, CIMA, for example, produced four really excellent, highly informative reports on public and private sector media development programs abroad, with matching federal funds and “soft money” contributions through NED.
An easy scrape of USAID.GOV, in turn, provided a detailed account of the strategizing behind the PROMEDIA campaign deployed in the former Yugoslavia during the Clinton era — one of whose primary goals was to minimize the fingerprints of USAID on the doings of local civil society groups while maintaining their alignment with U.S. trade policy goals.
This turned out to be a pretty good overall blueprint for civil society organizing in Brazil this year, mutatis mutandis.
I coined the Portuguese acronym “MOSCOU” to describe this model.
Media Ochestrated by the Society, Civil of Oligarchs, United.
As a modest gift to my Brazilian hosts — I am a legal resident alien of the country now — I decided to try to undisambiguate some of the public policy debates back home, focusing on areas where the local media tends to promote the notion of consensus where, in fact, there remains signficant controversy.
“That’s the way the gringos do it” is a major theme of bald-faced lying by the Brazilian media.
I figured that since NED gives fair warning of its intentions I could not be faulted for antipatriotic tendencies if I simply portuguesed it for the benefit of our fellow New World small-d democrats.
I also concluded that no punches should be pulled on this topic, either.
The Brazilian news media engages in bald-faced and systematic lying and half-truiths on topics of interest to its ownership.
Mexico Mexico Mexico Mexico Linduuu
I discovered many substantial points of comparison between this year’s campaign in Brazil and the massive lobbying media effort in support of a specific candidacy in Mexico in 2006
Recall that the first act of the government elected that year was to send down the so-called “Televisa Law” making broadcast concessions automatically renewable in perpetuity.
Right down to a repeition of the campaign coined by Rob Allyn and Dick Morris: “Candidate X is a danger to Nation Y.” In Brazil this year, however, this campaign was unleashed only on election eve. In Mexico, it had run for weeks on every channel under the watchful eye of Brazil’s IBOPE — hired by Mexican authorities to police radio and TV campaign spots. It failed in its mission.
When a situation senator denounced crooked dealings in the passage of the Televisa bill — Santiago Creel of the PAN — he was targeted by a massive corruption scandal promoted by Televisa — which controls 75% of the domestic market.
The allegations were utterly bogus. But oh, what a crazy scandal it was! It featured what had to have been the world’s largest Mountain of Money photo op ever –$250 million in cash discovered in the Mexico city home of a reputed Sino-Mexican methampetamine inputs smuggler.
Anyway, I think it is fair to say that the Brazilian mass media continues to take political sides, and does not hedge its bets. Much.
The trend was somewhat attenuated this year by the emergence of an antagonism between the two major national networks, Record and Globo — a tension that tends to recapitulate the European Wars of Religion.
Globo has launched a massive TV campaign to the effect that its journalism is of world-class quality.
This is simply not true, although certainly Globo journalists have shown themselves capable of fine journalism when not squirming under the thumb of Ali Kamel.
According to Azenha, the Globo coverage of the Unidentified Flying Attack of the Fascist Hordes was openly booed by staffers at its São Paulo affiliate. Someone will eventually come out with an essay on that in the Observatório, I imagine.
Lies, Damned Lies and the Legacy of Col. Golbery
The dominant Brazilian media outlets employ extremely crude propagandistic methods, taking advantage of the fact that, for historical reasons — Col. Golbery had a hand in the founding of the Superior School of Propaganda and Marketing — propaganda is not the dirty word in Portuguese that is in American English.
So I tried to wise the Brazilian up to projects like Open Secrets and the DISCLOSE Act, passed by the last Congress with an eye to tightening disclosure requirements for campaign spending after the Citizens United case.
One of my general findings — after using the WIRE Web crawler* and Pajek to explore the social networks and use of social media by Brazilian political interentidades — was an adoption gap in the use of the multiplier effect by the two major political tendencies.
* C. Castillo, et al., University of Chile
Both national campaigns leveraged the “social platform” in their online marketing, but one alliance tended to explicitly celebrate the role of “multiplier” — the citizen journalism of Ctl-C, Ctl-V — in its messaging.
The other tended to centralize its messaging and focus its branding strategy on think tanks and partisan Web sites identified with singular URLs, centtrally edited.
This fact tends to track divergent models of internal democracy adopted by the parties in question, I found.
I tried to organize these digital strategies in terms of the Mall of Innovation network model, above. Still working on that.
After the first round, for example, the opposition PSDB-DEM-PPS alliance hired a new marketing guru — the Turban Power guy from Microsoft’s Election Mall, weirdly — who rolled out a new slogan
“The time for the turnaround — virada — is now.”
Opinion polling produced at the time promoted the idea of a snowballing tendency toward an upset victory — a tendency called into question by later polling and the ultimate result.
In tandem with this favorable trend, and in keeping with a powerful appeal to religious sentiment, the antisituation campaign quite literally promoted the Netroots as the impending locus of a modern-day “miracle of the loaves and fishes.”
On a liiterary level, the exploitation of magical thinking is a big old jackhammer in the toolchest of Brazilian “narrative journalism.”
I coined the phrase «bloco de eu sozinho» — “I am a one-man Carnaval mob,”from a famous Carnival march — to describe a number of these efforts at «multiplication», which tended to use start of the art automated search engine optimization techiques.
I introduced the Brazilian reader to to the tactics of the LM Group — for Living Marxism — as described by SourceWatch.
The use of pseudonyms by associates of the LM group and the Revolutionary Communist Party is extensive. The primary function of this would seem to be to allow the group to promote its ideas widely in the media without being recognised as a relatively small ideological clique. Nom de guerres can also compartmentalise areas of a life, protecting an individual and their career. Fiona Fox is now head of the Sense about Science. One can only presume her current colleagues are unaware of her writings as Fiona Foster, denying genocide in Rwanda.
Using readily available DNS tools, I identified a good number of specific cases of such tactics as employed by political marketers in the opposition camp.
Few, thought not none, in the situation camp, which hired the Pepper agency to run its Internet ops.
An attempt was made earlier on in the campaign to scandalize the connections between U.S. political marketers and the situation campaign — through the Sambodian version of Campus Party — but collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity.
Two modern political parties in a quite developed developing nation hired professional marketing expertise. Stop the presses!
From my extensive sample of political interenties — crawled from three separate starting points on different dates, a month apart, 150.000 Web sites deep — I have come to this general conclusion about the “adoption gap.”
I think it is fair to say that the situation campaign was far less oriented toward the “Netroots” than its opponents — an orientation that, as far as I can tell, quite correctly refused to accept exaggerated claims about the importance of the Internet to the campaign.
Unimaginably huge tracts of Brazil are still dominated by the transistor radio.
I exaggerate, of course. But only for effect.
A future task is to try to put together the comparative data on New Media spending by the two campaigns in order to check whether this money-mouth correlation really holds. (The disclosure of this data by elections authorities is embarassingly primitive.)
Some preliminary perusals suggest it does.
What else?
I explained to Brazilian friends who James Zogby is and tried to figure out whether the Portuguese language, tropical variant, already has a serviceable term for “plausible deniability” or not.
Policies in Play
Decartelization of the media sector is high on the agenda of the regional left, and could lead to a closing of this “adoption gap” in years to come.
As the leftist news agency Carta Maior reports today, for example:
The [Trade Unionist Confederation of the Americas] (CSA) has decided to create a continent-wide network of union information to strengthen its campaign for democratization of the media. A conference held in Montevideo, Uruguay gathered trade unions and social movements to discuss media democracy in the region. Media manipulation of a supposed assault on Brazilian presidential candidate José Serra — the weapon was a wadded-up piece of paper — and racist attacks on Bolivian president Evo Morales were cited as examples of why “battle fronts Nos. 1, 2 and 3 are the media and media control of public opinion,” in the words of Basque journalist Unai Aranzadi.
I did evaluate the internationalism of the Brazilian labor movement — its ties to NED’s Solidarity Center and the New Labour’s Global Labor University, for example — and found these to be rather cautious.
Source: Archive.org
I educated myself a little bit about possible historical reasons for this caution — above.
Tropical Media-Bashing: A Quick Primer
I had attended the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, in January 2003 — one of my first solo flights as a gringo vagabond.
The issue of the Venezuelan media’s role in the failed April coup against Hugo Chávez was hot, hot, hot at the time.
Chávez even came to Brazil, but was refused access to the Forum on the grounds that only social movements, and not governments, are eligible.
The Lula government-elect was granted an exception due to its “-elect” status.
It was my first glimpse of a Brazilian Military Police force in action, among other things. The behavior of a PM colonel during a bogus bomb threat to the event was eye-opening.
I met Frei Betto — the liberation theologian who has drifted greenward over the past eight years.
I missed the Cházev presser because it conflicted with my token reporting duties and my getting to the free Jorge Ben Jor concert on time. Fantastic show.
The episode of “the assault by fascist thugs on José Serra” this year was in point of factoid so glaringly absurd as to yield ready ammunition to this movement. See
- “Facing Down The Fascist Horde”: Factoid of the Sambodian Year
- The Ballad of the Unidentified Sambodian Flying Object, Continued
A House Divided Cannot Stand
Little reported in the national press — busy as it has been promoting the meme “a Brazil divided” in chorus, complete with “Blue State-Red State” infographics — was the fact that the leading opposition parties lost considerable ground in the National Congress in the first round of the elections.
According to Idelber Avelar — a talented Tupi expat blogger at Tulane University — the three principal parties of the coalition — PSDB-DEM-PPS — now represent only 25% of Congress.
It was interesting to see Brazil’s two small Communist parties — the PCdoB and the PPS, heir to the old PCB — on opposite sides of the national question.
The People’s Front of Judea and the Judean Popular Front.
As per its historical usual, the nation’s largest party, the PMDB, functioned as an ambiguous and opportunistic mass, but in general was defeated roundly in regional contests where it aligned with the opposition, against the situational orientation of the national party.
Says Idelber. I believe him.
In the most visible regional contest, in Rio de Janeiro, the PSDB-Green candidate for governor was pretty well creamed by the situation-oriented PDMB incumbent.
Oopposition Senate candidates in the state, including the de facto national thought leader of the DEM-PFL, former Rio mayor César Maia — an old Trotskyite in the classic neocon mold — were also creamed.
The takeaway?
Probably that the capacity of the opposition for parliamentary obstructionism has been visibly weakened — as has its capacity to leverage media scandals in support of such obstructionism.
Reforming the tax and civil codes and the molding of pointy dentures for the consumer- and competition-defense agencies are high on the list of priorities.
Unlike Venezuela — where the people in their wisdom elected a Bolivarian blowhard who has thrived on playing Punch and Judy with Uribe — the tendency of public policy for the media sector here in Brazil has been to foment competition rather than launching frontal assaults on hereditary latifúndios.
The federal government has altered its official advertising budget, in recent years for example, decentralizing its ad spend in favor of a growing, entrepreneurial regional press.
Former Globo journalist Luis Carlos Azenha says this is the biggest stealth trend around.
He makes a good case.
In recent years, this has led to the grotesque spectacle of Cato-parroting champions of the free market pissing and moaning about their reduced access to the public trough.
As it happens, the man put in charge of this policy shift was a former senior Globo political commentator who was summarily booted for ideological incompatibility. Or so it is said.
In 2006, a petition was circulated by Globo management asking employees to vouch for the objectivity of its political coverage that year. While the network denies it targeted those who refused to sign for summary dismissal, most of those summarily dismissed have disclosed that they refused to sign it.
The Sambodian Capone Lobby
Crooked politicians and other authorities were busted by the federal police at record rates between 2003 and 2010.
It is unfortunately tempting to conclude as follows from this fact.
That campaigns to undermine the “Untouchables” myth that has arisen around the Federal Police — something of a media-driven exaggeration — tend to be identifiable with one particular political tendency — even as campaigns to discredit the opposite tendency as endemically corrupt have proven resoundingly unconvincing.
Globo has an exclusive contract with a historically racketeering-influenced and corrupt organization — LIESA — to take my favorite example.
A potential collateral outcome of the Rio elections is the question of whether this exclusivity is legal. The victorious political tendency in the state has long said it is black-letter illegal.
Globo was recently ordered to end a big-rigging arrangement guaranteeing its exclusive coverage of the Brazilian national football championship.
In general, here in Sambodia, mobsters tend to get hagiographed into libertarian demigods by tropical Ayn Rand readers.
Also, the local press is terrified of criminal cops with political clout — but cannot say so.
The Two Jakes
It is remarkable testimony to the power of political marketing and concerted media action that the opposition did not lose more ground in the face of the scandal involving its early favorite son for the vice-presidential spot — the DEM-PFL governor of the Federal District.
Lionized as a champion of the New Public Management in the “yellow pages” of Veja magazine, the man was subsequently outed on national TV doing deals with Tony Soprano-like garbage contractors — a genuinely old-school corruption scheme.
The disappearance of this public relations debacle for the “buy one bald man and get another free ticket” from national political newsflow was another remarkable negative fact of the campaign season.
I continue to insist on the exemplary character of one aspect of that episode: the national daily that received that $60 million ad spend from the federal district government in a year in which it reported profits of $5 million.
Bonuses all around.
The Postscientific Nondescript
Here is something no one will say, either locally or to the correspondent of the New York Times:
I submit to you that the Brazilian news media is in many cases unambiguously corrupt — in a strict technical sense, not in some vague theoretical one.
The only study that was ever done on the subject of press bribery — a 2003 survey by the World Bank based on the content of ethics codes rather than the actual theory in practice — found Brazil relatively free of this scourge.
I submit to you it was entirely wrong.
By those simple-minded gringo standards of editorial independence we all learned in junior high school civics, the level of incest in the Brazilian media makes Oedipus Rex look like The Dating Game.
Anway, as I cautiously insist from time to time with Brazilian friends: “Hey, have you guys ever considered just doing away with huge government propaganda budgets altogether?”
Eventually, I suspect, the state will wither in this area.
In the meantime, I have not yet found any reason to challenge the insight whispered to me by an Argentine foreign correspondent in 2006: “Veja magazine lies.”
It does.
It really, really does!
For the reality-based conservative community’s take on Sambodian life, you are much better off taking your bifocals to the Estado de S. Paulo and Valor.
Filed under: Accounting, Agribusiness |
The New World Lusophone Sousaphone 