|
 The tragedy involving the Legacy jet and the Boeing 737 over the Brazilian Amazon once again aroused old nationalistic animosities. On the Brazilian side, we have the Anti-Americanism shown in the premature condemnation of pilot Joseph Lepore and copilot Jan Paul Paladin. On the American side, there is this fear that a cucaracha circus is on the making to lock the duo behind bars.
It was enough for the New York Times journalist Joe Sharkey, one of the passengers of the Legacy, to write his report on what he saw and lived through during that fateful flight to get a shower of aggressions poured by Brazilian readers in the American newspaper's forum. All because Sharkey made a point to say that he feared for his fellow Americans' fate, maybe abandoned to their own luck before a tribunal formed by cannibal Indians. Was Mr. Sharkey biased? Pretending to Be Tom Wolfe This feeling of I accuse that has become pervasive in Brazil doesn't do anyone any good, although we can understand the consternation climate due to the 154 killed in the disaster. It's quite distressing, however, to realize that the drive to accuse comes from those who should never use this prerogative: the media. After all, an official investigation is still going on, despite evidences of human error. Some articles published in the Brazilian press come close to a disaster, so obvious is the Tupinikim haste to explore sensationalism and sell the idea that it was the first to find an answer. Case in point: Isto É magazine - a weekly newsmagazine that would be the Newsweek's counterpart in Brazil - and its cover story under the headline "Flight 1907's true story." This would be already exceedingly pretentious and crass, if it weren't for the lines right below: "Two young American pilots. A new aircraft. A flight over the Amazon on a sunny afternoon. They thought they could do anything. And then tragedy came". The headline is revealing enough of the magazine's intention, while trying to anticipate the results of an investigation still going on. More serious is the idea expressed in the assertion: "They thought they could do anything". Now, since when are journalists experts in aerial accidents? Right in the article's first paragraph we find this pearl: "He and his copilot, also an American by the name of Jan Paul Paladin, 34, pilot since 1996 with 6,400 flight hours, looked like two kids who had just got a new toy". The reporter who wrote the story seems to have turned off the common-sense's transponder and decided to fly in the perfect blue skies of his own reveries. But the next paragraph sounds as a definitive spiral dive into La-La Land: All indicates that the Americans behaved as if they were the only ones up there and tried to push to the limit all the resources that a jet like that can offer. Fast climbs, thrilling maneuvers. Experts believe that, to be more at ease to do their aerial mischiefs, the pilots may have turned off the transponder, equipment that sends to the flight controllers the data on the plane and its course." There is nothing, however, that can be compared to this next passage: "In the Gol's Boeing the situation reached gradual levels of despair. The airplane's 154 passengers lived through moments of horror after being struck down in mid air." You can't have both ways: either the reporter was inside the Boeing and was able to eject on time, or he wants to pretend he is Tom Wolfe, getting inside the characters mind, in this case the Gol's passengers, according to the new journalism primer. After all, Mr. Wolfe has done this a lot, hasn't he?, imagining what was going on inside the minds of those foolish pilots in his classical reportage "The Right Stuff". Total Lunacy Joe Sharkey's declaration stirred a kind of public quarrel among some Brazilian journalists on who is right and who is not. That's the case with Carlos Drummond, who signed the article "The Far West's American Journalism", published in Terra Magazine. Drummond wrote: "The fact that there were no conclusions on the tragedy's cause at that moment didn't keep Sharkey from furthering a reasoning that takes us to the American expansionism ideology. Beyond the United States, according to this vision, there is nothing but primitivism. And the only salvation would be the hegemony or the domination by this country". Drummond chastises Joe Sharkey's xenophobia using Anti-Americanism. It seems like a zero-sum game, although, in fact, for a veteran as Sharkey, perhaps the more prudent would have been to keep quiet while waiting the investigations results. In another article, on the same magazine, economist Luiz Gonzaga Belluzzo, although admitting not knowing a thing about planes or aviation, refutes Joe Sharkey clearly criticizing the American xenophobia: "There is nothing to do with planes, radars or transponders, but with perceptions and convictions that run rampant in the social imaginary of a considerable fraction of the people from the North and their leaders. I am going to put the words in the mouth of an old and good representative of the American conservatism, someone who appreciates civil liberties and fundamental rights, Kevin Phillips". And then he quotes the conservative Phillips: "For centuries Americans have believed themselves special, a people and nation chosen by God to play a unique and even redemptive role in the world. Elected leaders tend to proselytize and promote this exceptionalism - presidential inaugural addresses are a frequent venue - without appending the necessary historical cautions." Xenophobia or Anti-Americanism apart, it wouldn't be a bad idea if reporters as the one from Isto É and from the New York Times didn't try to add their own viewpoint to the story and softened a little their lunacy. The advice is also useful to all columnists on duty be they journalists or not. Paulo Lima is journalist and this article was published originally in the Observatório da Imprensa's website. Translated by from the Portuguese by Arlindo Silva.
| 
Subscribe to this comment's feed
I want everyone to chill out, make a nice caipirinha and listen to some good music... 
and don't argue with me. I don't want to have to come back here and leave another "angry" emoticon..fazemos as pazes
In the opposite direction is a Brasilian airliner flown by an American flight-crew trying to meet their daily schedules. And then as luck would have it, the shining American plane scrapes the Brasilian aircraft as the latter plunges to earth killing 154 innocent Americans, but the Brasilian crew lands safely somewhere in the US. That Brasilian crew would be sent faster to Guantanamo they you can say PECKERWOOD!
Moral of the story: Americans like to dish it out but don’t like to take it in…. The essence of hypocrisy, an American way of life. I rest my case!
Peace