On Friday (August 26), in Quixadá, in the northeastern state of Ceará, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva went up the stand to inaugurate something that was already working for a year and ended up using the occasion to present his whole show: he put aside the speech prepared not to be read and went into the attack with a half-hour improv, sure that he would reap some headlines the next day.

He got it, thanks to a provocation in the first minute of the speech, when he called the participants to be the good news harbingers for "those bad omen birds who do not want to see a thing in front of their nose. (...)

The people who are here need to know, and I make a point of repeating this everywhere, often the press does not write about this anymore since I've mentioned it too many times, but I am going to continue talking, because you do not read the majority of newspapers published in this country".

The sentence is far from being a model of transparency; the callow sequence of parenthetic sentences perhaps intended a subtle, ironic effect, but the distance between the expression "bad omen birds" and the substantive "press" was too far to be understood as direct allusion.

And, however, on that same Friday, some news sites had headlines proclaiming that President Lula had called the press "bad omen bird". The next day (Saturday, August 27), the Estado de S. Paulo wrote in the front page: "Lula says that he is suffering a lot and accuses the press".

The Folha de S. Paulo was more cautious: "Lula suggests that media and politicians are bad omen birds". The Globo avoided the trap and preferred to highlight the speech of Minister Ciro Gomes, who was in charge of offering something similar together with an official mea-culpa.

Unbecoming Procedures

The presidential manifestation was poor as much by what he said as by what he intended to say. There was no reason for the repercussion, mostly because that same Friday the finance market anxiously waited for the weekend trepidations of the weeklies.

The expectations were not confirmed. Veja put its tail between the legs and, for the first time in many weeks, preferred a cover story in a minor key, less sensationalistic. The rest of the weeklies chose to concentrate in less momentous scandals.

The daily media tried to put the cap of bad omen bird to assure a retaliation capable of keeping the high temperature until the next Tuesday, when the depositions in the CPI’s were supposed to resume. It became clear that the media is more interested in the chance of making noise than to make an effort to advance the inquiries.

That is very bad: when the public realizes that the media is trying to heat up the news a saturation process will start and that can be the precursor of a no one is guilty denouement or as they say in Brazil it will all end up in pizza.

The truth is that the press did not prepare itself for the inevitable intermezzos even in a cycle of scandals with such colossal dimensions. It presented itself as the owner of an inexhaustible arsenal capable of keeping the acceleration through the end of the year.

It raised the tone and increased the pressure imagining that that alone would be enough to start the snow ball begun in May rolling. It bet all the chips in the "Buratti effect" (Buratti, is the former aide to Finance Minister Antonio Palocci, who accused the Minister of accepting graft) and the result was disastrous.

Weekly magazine Veja had to swallow Minister Palocci's answers and, in the current issue (nº 1920, of August 31) it not even had an answer, forced into not-honorable-at-all retreat.

The glossy did not have the Folha de S. Paulo's composure, who in two consecutive issues (Friday and Saturday, August 26 and 27) offered the readers meticulous explanations on the methods used by a reporter to force the former wife of Rogério Buratti to show information about his business and/or his relations with Palocci.

The big newspaper transparency in admitting improper procedures (which did not end up producing articles) should be adopted as standard procedure. It's a shame that the action didn't deserve comments in the Sunday column of the paper's ombudsman Marcelo Beraba (August 28 issue).

Professionalism and Persistence

All indicates that phase 1 of the hurricane that devastated the Brazilian political cadre is over. The placid editing of Monday's (August 29) prime news show Jornal Nacional - in spite of the dramatic images from other hurricane, Katrina - shows that we are on the eve of phase 2. This one will obligatorily be more pointed, responsible, with more exacting demands than the present ones.

The 525 types of irregularities found in the Post Office and shown by the Globo daily (Sunday, August 28) reveal that, from now on, foulness will have to be converted into diligence. Indignation tires and only produces indignation in the opposite direction.

The parajournalism identified by journalist Luís Nassif will need to be switched into a metajournalism - more professional, persistent, incapable of being scared by out-of-this-world souls. Or bad omen birds.

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.

Translated from the Portuguese by Arlindo Silva.

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