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“We
lived in a time when the press of Rio de Janeiro was one of the most
original and dynamic off all, not only in Brazil but in the whole
Latin America”, said the journalist Stefan Baciou about the press of
the first decade of the 20th. Century. At that time, there
was neither journal ethics nor journalism courses in universities. The
professional learned the reportage technics in everyday routine of the
press office. The checking of the facts was made mostly in the place
and in the exact moment they happened, what led the reader to trust
the reporter. Nowadays, with the news agencies and the releases, the
journalist many times writes about something he did not see, only
developing a narrative of the texts sent to the press office. The
consequence can be observed everyday: the daily newspaper publish the
same news under the same point of view, with the establishment of a
certain partnership.
The
uniformity that controls
Such
uniformity is also guaranteed for the use of the writting guides in
Brazil by the newspaper “Diário Carioca” in 1950. Such guides
mould the professional way of acting according to the proposal of the
company. They can be identified as a disciplinary power, a reference
of the modern society as described by Michel Foucault as a panoptical
world, ie, the one under constant exam, control and surveillance.
“The
perpetual penalization that touches all points and controls every
moments of the disciplinary institutions compares, distinguishes,
homogenizes and excludes, in a word, it normalizes”, Foucault says
on page 153 of his book “Wath and Punish”.
Besides,
the newspapers were expressions of political and ideological fights,
so essentially of opinion. Only in Rio de Janeiro there were 30,
morning and evening newspapers, with different government and
political positions. During the campaign “The oil is ours”, taken
into effect between 1947 and 1953, they split into two groups. One
supported the stat monopoly (Diário de Notícias and O Radical). The
other (O Jornal, O Globo and Jornal do Brasil) defended the free
iniciative in the matter with the participation of foreing finance and
had the Standard Oil as advertiser, the oil international industry
belonging to John Rockfeller. The result was that no nationalist
newspaper lived up to the present days. All ended by failing or
gathering the mass media corporations. The ones depending of
“alien” money are, in the present time, among the main newspapers
in Rio de Janeiro.
To
establish a comparison between the changes in th eeditorial lines of
the newspapers and their advertisers, some Annual Advertisement
Reports were analysed. In the one of 1953-1954, the Companhia Antártica
Paulista appears as the main advertiser, whereas in the 1959-1960 a
substantial change can be noticed: the biggest sponsors are Lever,
Nestlé and Gessy. In a list of 10 names, there isn’t any national
industry.
So,
it is natural that, to fulfill all this advertising demand, the
communication companies adopt the dominating model. And this way we
come to our present journalism, represented by a mass media which,
wearing a mask of the ideals of impartiality and objectivity,
cooperates to alienate the brazilian people. And who, nowadays, would
assume their subjectivity in public as Nelson Rodrigues did? “I
speak too much of the stupid objectivity. It is just the one that
lives of the facts, depends of the facts, would drown without the
facts. And, if someone tells me the facts are not exactly as I tell
them, I answer: too bad for the facts”.
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