|
Politicians
and even media corporation owners criticized the government attitude.
Arthur Virgílio, a PSDB leader in the Senate, told “Jornal do
Brasil” that the BNDES financing would limit the liberty of mass
media. Octavio Frias de Oliveira, property of the “Grupo Folha”,
in na interview published by AOL on October, 23, said that, with such
attitude, “the government wants the media on their knees”.
Considering
such statements, you could think brazilian media has not any kind of
link with the official power and, in opposition to what some theoric
authors of media say, that media is not part of that power.
Selling
the public
Ignacio
Ramonet, director of the french newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique,
thinks the opposite. In a seminary during the 3rd. World
Social Forum, in january, 2003, in Porto Alegre, Ramonet affirmed that
the idea of the media acting as 4th. Power, deffending
society of being abused by the other powers, is no more valid. To him,
the major part of media groups nowadays joins up with the executive
power to opress the citizen. Ramonet believes that, with the
globalization process and the consequent formation of media
corporations, the objective of informing has been mixed within other
interests.
In
fact, the logic that rules those companies is the market value.
Factors as quality, cultural diversity and artistic creation are
subjugated by the merchant character of the information and of the
communication. Not by chance, the quotation of the media corporations
in the stock market is the determining factor of their success and the
currency exchange used in the expansion of the corporations. Ramonet,
in the article “Masters of the Networks”, published in june, 2002,
in the newspaper “Correio Braziliense”, affirms that the total
gains of the media corporations in 2002 represented 10% of the world
finance (something around 1,3 trillions of dollars).
If
the major concern of those corporations is the quotation of their
papers, it is not difficult to infer their interest is to attract the
greatest possible number of consumers of their products (newspapers,
magazines, TV channels, etc.), in a process that transforms the very
consumer into a product. After all, the media corporations stopped
selling communication to the public a long time ago and, instead, are
selling the public to their advertisers.
Scaring
picture
The
evil effects of the media corporations power concerning the
democratization of information and of society are know and pointed
since years ago by media theoric writers. In the article “The TV
networks and the masters of the global village”, published in 1991,
Argemiro Ferreira mentions a study of the north american journalist
Ben H. Bagdikian: “the giants of the media (...) have two huge
advantages: they control the public image of the national leaders who,
because of that, fear and favour the media magnate’s pretensions;
and these control the information and the entertainment that help to
establish the social, political and cultural attitudes of each time
more and more people”.
The
concentration of communication vehicles in the hands of a small number
of companies, that are at the same time competitors and allied, leads
to unilateral speechs, standardization of information, ideas and
culture and, worst of all, disinformation, since the public only gets
to know what interests to the big corporations. Argemiro Ferreira
points the existence of a dangerous censorship in the mass media, and
that’s because, as we live in a supposedly democratic society, such
censorship configurates in an informal way, almost imperceptible. The
objective of each corporation is to become the only interlocutor of
the citizens, and to get that, they measure no efforts in the attmpt
to monopolize the whole process of producing and publishing.
Nevertheless, the recent crises of the national and international
companies – as the case of Vivendi, a french group that in 2002 sold
part of its companies to pay debts – have prooved that the
intentions of monopolization are quite intensive.
Even
so, the picture of the media concentration in Brazil scares. The
report “Owners of th emedia”, published last year by the
coordinator of the National Forum for Democratization of Communication,
Daniel Herz, reveals that six private national networks include 667
vehicles, among TV channels, radios and newspapers. A reality that is
still far distant of the one the defenders of a democratic
communication wish.
Agony
in an empty street
“We
have to begin to understend that the airwaves, the airtime in radio
and in TV, are a precious resource. They belong to the people, that do
not know that because in the last eighty years they were taken by the
merchant colonists. Both television and radio have great potential to
education and to enrich democracy”, Steve Rendall says, who is
senior analyst of the group Fair (Justice and Precision in Reportage),
in the article “One Only Voice”, of Glauco Faria, published in
april, in the magazine “Fórum”.
It’s
necessary to understand that democratizing the communication is to
guarantee to all citizens not only the right to access but also to
produce the content of the media, even with the help of a professional
of the area. The important is that many social groups are heard and
have, at their disposal, vehicles in which they can expose their ideas
and have their specific needs fulfilled.
By
the law, the access to the communication is a right of all people. But
the same law makes difficult, for example, the process of legalizing
and maintaining community radios and TVs for the community. The few
ones who get legalization hardly sustain themselves as to the legal
impositions. For those, there is no helps from the BNDES. The result
of this process is the proliferation of illegal vehicles which are
constantly persecuted and closed by justice. In other words, what is
oberved each day in Brazil is the increasing of the abyss between the
owners and the consumers of the mass media. It is the democracy
agonizing in a desert and dark street.
|
|
|
