The most recent press-hunt season started Wednesday (August 3), when President Lula went for a visit to his home state and duly energized by his fellow citizens, in a fiery improv, accused the press of crucifying innocent people. The tone of the catilinarian and, above all, the threat that he let dangling in the air raised the temperature a few degrees.

And as these things do not happen by chance, in the next weekend the National Directorate of the PT got the fever and released a note that brought even bigger cause for concern (after all, we are talking here about the government's party). They denounced the "opportunistic strategies of the right" and the "defamation process now in course in the press".
The diatribe was not by accident, it was part of the reasoning and the logic of a text exhaustively debated by several party factions:

"We are not naïve to the point of thinking that all accusations circulating through the press are intended to fight corruption. Combined with this healthy democratic possibility, it's also in course a defamatory process against the whole of the PT and its leadership and against the government and its representatives, which aims to annihilate it as a democratic route to rescue the population's hopes.

"This process, supported by our mistakes, intends to remove the party from the public scene and obliterate this part of the Brazilian Left that built the Workers' Party. [Excerpt from the PT's National Directorate Resolution reprinted in O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper, Sunday, August 7, p. A-8]

It fell to senator Aloizio Mercadante, next day (August 8), in the "Monday Interview", of Folha de S. Paulo (p. A-12) to advance a little more:

"The press lives of the campaigns criminalization. It does not open space for a qualified, emergential and indispensable discussion. (...) The competition that goes on in the newsrooms lead to articles not being investigated properly. The right to defense is not always respected. Reputations are compromised for good."

Political Disaster

In a five-day period,  there were three attacks with different calibers against the press. Three instances of the same political group unloaded its batteries against an institution largely responsible for its rise to power.

You can't forget this: the PT used the press as much in its "revolutionary" phase as in the petit-bourgeois marketing-led phase. The party's victory in 2002 would not have been possible without relying on the enthusiasm of an important segment of the local press and the fascination of the international media. Without this generous alliance President Lula wouldn't manage to reach the high degree it did.

The "Lula phenomenon" is a media phenomenon: after three defeats he managed to create a set of brilliantly captured expectations during the campaign, inauguration and first year of presidency. The backlash could not be different: the free fall results from the fatigue of the promotional resources - hype alone does not make Zero Hunger viable.

Those who paved Lula's triumphal route to the presidential palace ramp are the President's most demanding critics. It could not be different, they feel cheated. This is what the President, the National Directorate (still orchestrated by former-minister José Dirceu) and senator Aloizio Mercadante would need to understand before undertaking this Kamikaze action against the press.

The ditch started to be dug when a government genius invented that the government should adopt the idea of creating the  Federal Board of Journalism (CFJ, Conselho Federal de Jornalismo). When president Lula - with that lack of serenity disguised as jest so characteristic of him - called coward the journalists who refused to support the proposal for creating the CFJ, the spell broke.

The current series of accusations "stuck" so spontaneously in the media because in these three years neither the government nor the government's party managed to satisfy minimally the expectations they had created.

The President and his team of advisers did not realize that the abuse of metaphors would fatally create  emptiness of substance. Metaphor is mere rhetorical resource, a simplified comparison. From simplification in simplification, the Lula gang got to nothing. Absolute zero.

The economic plan's relative success still is immaterial, abstract, because the administration was not able to translate it in a concrete form into the everyday sphere. Any media phenomenon will soon become a political disaster if it cannot count on a minimum support of administration.

Option for Passivity

The President vociferates against the press but did not realize that if the press truthfully reproduced what happened in his recent overseas jaunts his image would be even more worn down.

The charges against defamation, "criminalization" and snitching of these three antimedia speeches are undeserved. The government and its party keep systematically punishing all the accused and with such readiness that it only furthers the suspicions that there is much more to investigate and to punish.

The media has been wrong (it has harmed Planning Minister, Paulo Bernardo, for example), but the margin of mistakes, lamentable as it might be, is negligible when compared to the obscene picture that the government, voluntarily or involuntarily has been revealing.

It is not the media that slanders. The press simply reproduces the depositions, testimonies, official investigations and their frightening results. Right from the start who is heading the process is the government itself. The video of the graft money that started the sequence of scandals, which was given to Veja magazine, was produced by the Brazilian Agency of Intelligence (ABIN) that, apparently, was part of the government. If the media investigated more, the Parliamentary Enquiry would certainly have many more results to present.

The furor that can be noticed in a number of vehicles (this is the case of Veja mainly in its latest issue) is opinionative and not investigative. Contrary to the old Tribuna da Imprensa from Carlos Lacerda's era, it does not produce facts.  At most it stimulates perceptions that an operating and agile government would have already disabled.

In order to preserve the President's image,  the bulk of the big press simply chose to be passive: it makes do with reproducing and synthesizing the revelations poured in the forums of the electronic media along the week, several hours a day. Brazil has been blessed in the all-news journalism era thanks to the abundant material made available free of charge by the government and its allies.

A Blunder

Perhaps senator Mercadante has hit the nail on the head when he tells that the press "does not open space for a qualified, emergential and indispensable discussion".

The showbiz climate that pleased so much the presidential entourage now works on the opposite direction. It is very short the distance between nice circus and nasty circus. The great reflection called for by the senator from São Paulo does not occur even in the midst of a party famous for its legion of intellectual-militant.

The note from the National Directorate approved Saturday (August, 6) is unfortunate, childish, just sand in the eyes of the ignorant rabble. The intellectual camped elsewhere. They want distance from underwears stuffed with dollars and orgies in five-star hotels. And they won't have anything of Land Rovers. The President badmouths the elites, in the plural, but he lost the most important of all - the intellectual elite.  Including journalists.

The big press only has room in the first Sunday of each month when it increases the number of ads and the editorial space - and that's what happened last Sunday (August 7), reinforced by the proximity of Father's Day (second Sunday in August, in Brazil). And the small press (where this "qualified discussion" should occur) was co-opted by official money. It forgot about its role and when it found it out it was already too late.

The government and the PT majority imagine that tension, paroxysm and limit-situations can calm down frustrations. That's a big mistake. All they do is to increase them. Instead of battling the press in a guerrilla lost in advance, the best would be to incite it to take responsibilities, recognize its attributes. Knocked out, in the corner of the rink, the boxer should not attack the referee.

Alberto Dines, the author, is a journalist, founder and researcher at LABJOR - Laboratório de Estudos Avançados em Jornalismo (Laboratory for Advanced Studies in Journalism) at UNICAMP (University of Campinas) and editor of the Observatório da Imprensa. You can reach him by email at obsimp@ig.com.br.

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