|
 In the end, sometimes not even a line of the original dispatch
survived.
But the story was published with the signature of "our special envoy".
By Janer Cristaldo
Translation: Tereza Braga
I live in São Paulo due to a circumstance I owe to Saddam Hussein. I'd better explain
that. With the advent of the Gulf War, Folha de São Paulo created a special
section to cover the events in the Middle East. Once the war was over, that section
remained as part of the newspaper. International news got its own space in the paper and
it was in this space that I came to work.
My first war was the Yugoslavian one, during the days of its independence from Croatia.
Our correspondent in charge of Eastern Europe was then sending his stories from Berlin
because this business of covering wars from the front is too risky. Around three in the
afternoon his dispatches started coming in, based on the news featured in the morning
papers. This meant that newspapers were written yesterday, the actual news happened the
day before yesterday and the Brazilian readers would read them tomorrow. The news
agencies, more agile, sent us some others, fresh from the oven.
As editors, our job was to replace the lead of the reporting with hot material. At
around five in the afternoon, those dispatches had already dropped to the bottom of the
story. When Gabeira reported that the Yugoslavs were planning an attack, we already had
the targets destroyed and the airplanes back in their bases. The war coverage was actually
done in the newsroom at Rua Barão de Limeira, in São Paulo, a location that was, in a
way, closer to the facts than our correspondent in Germany. In the end, sometimes not even
a line of the original dispatch survived. But the story was published with the signature
of "our special envoy".
In December 1991, the newspaper got another correspondent in Berlin. On one occasion,
she sent an excited report about the Dubrovnik bombing by the Croatian Navy. The bombs
fell in my hands. I called Berlin and asked the young lady to check her facts. Croatia did
not have a fleet and would not have any reason to bomb its most beautiful city.
"But I can read it right here in front of me, with my very eyes, on television,
the Croatian Navy is bombing the coastal areas". I asked her to check it further,
since we still had an hour to close the section. Twenty minutes later, her tone was
bashful. "Well, it's actually the Yugoslav Navy". The eyes of the brave war
correspondent, as beautiful as they could be, were mistaken.
These memories come back to me on account of a mail from Andrea Gruber, a Brazilian
residing in Vienna, who arrived at a melancholy conclusion: "During my whole life,
following the news was a complete waste of time; I don't believe in anything
anymore". Come on, Andrea, international news is a matter of faith.
In the 1990s, our newspapers used to publish every Monday or Tuesday an update on the
slaughtering going on in South Africa. Every weekend we had about twenty or thirty black
people dead. It became such a routine that the deaths were no longer worth headlines. A
small note, usually nine lines, at the bottom of the page, was enough. With no information
whatsoever about who was doing the slaughtering. Several times, the same sentence followed
the beginning of the story: "Racist leader Eugene Terreblanche has declared
that…" Readers were thrown thirty black corpses right on their faces, plus the
news that a white leader, unfortunate enough to be named Terreblanche at birth, had said
something.
For the reader, it became clear that the whites of South Africa, led by some guy called
Terreblanche, were slaughtering the blacks. What was actually happening was that blacks
were being massacred by blacks as a result of tribal rivalry, instigated by the weekend
booze. This detail was omitted. If in South Africa blacks were wiped out, the murderers
could only be whites. European whites and, therefore, racists. Because an African racist,
by definition, doesn't exist.
One of the most disturbing cases of manipulation of facts took place during the
European summer of 1993, in Holland. At the staff meeting, everyone was excited. A
Moroccan girl, Naima Quaghmiri, nine years old, had died when she fell into a lake in
Rotterdam. Two hundred people were reported to have watched her drowning without offering
to help. The director held the telex up and shook it with fury. The idea was to produce a
headline such as DUTCH RACISTS LET AN IMMIGRANT'S DAUGHTER DIE. Once more, the bomb landed
in my hands. The news was absurd. Two hundred people do not watch passively as a child
drowns. The lake, shown in the picture to be a kind of dam, was shallow. In the middle of
the lake stood a fireman, with water by his waist.
Every piece of copy featured in an online newspaper, even when it doesn't have a
printed signature, has an electronic signature so that the author can eventually be held
responsible. I refused to write that obvious distortion of facts. I tried to show to my
colleagues how incongruent the report was. But it was in vain. The intention was to
denounce European racism. Another editor wrote the piece. Two days later, a new dispatch
rectified the previous one. There had been no girl drowning and no two hundred Dutch
watching. Naima had drowned many hours before. Policemen and firefighters had asked the
vacationers to form a semi-circle, holding hands, and walk the extension of the lake and
look for the corpse. The vacationers refused to do so.
I asked the editor if the report would be rectified. "It's not
necessary"—he said—"Tomorrow nobody will remember this anymore."
But journalism is the recording of the stories and it is in the archives of the past, I
argued, that the researchers of the alleged tomorrow will search for information for their
essays. "We only get to find out what really happened"—the editor
said—"months later. That's the way journalism is".
When they start rummaging through newspaper archives, future researchers will learn
that Holland was a small European country inhabited during the last century by white
racists cruel enough to deny help to a Moroccan child who was drowning. This was confirmed
by Folha itself. In 1994, in an article about racism, one of its editors again
mentioned this story as if it had been actually true.
Cristaldo is an author, translator and journalist and suffers São
Paulo. His e-mail address is cristal@baguete.com.br
Tereza Braga is a professional free-lance translator accredited by the
American Translators Association. She specializes in technical and legal translation, as
well as simultaneous interpretation, for corporations doing business with Brazil. Tereza
came to the U.S. in 1984 as Trade Promotion Officer with the Consulate of Brazil in
Dallas, where she served for nine years. She can be reached at tbragaling@cs.com
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