Nothing new in the media front. The question of Iraq was
erroneously conveyed and reduced by the media (both
domestic and international) to a Bush vs. Peace confrontation.
The coverage of our own war against narcoterrorism was also
characterized by a vision both fragmented and simplified.

Alberto Dines

They are neither related nor linked. The war in Iraq and the (imminent) war against narcoterrorism occur in diametrically opposite worlds. Their dimensions are unequal, their phenomena disparate. No similarity in motivation, characters or armaments.

Notwithstanding all this discrepancy, they do intersect through the communications media. To the extent that both are facts needing to be exposed, explained and understood, they are at the same level. Both make unprepared narrators gag, both simplify the narrative and both turn the daily work of chronicling life into an unending succession of trifles.

The question of Iraq was erroneously conveyed and reduced by the media (both domestic and international) to a Bush vs. Peace confrontation. This was again visible during all the marches last weekend in the four corners of the world. But people who favor Peace cannot militate in favor of either one of the opponents because, in this case, peace becomes a masked way of aligning oneself.

Peace is necessarily neutral, and an abdication of military resources. Peace means equidistance from the idea of confrontation—any confrontation. That is the way it was in 1914-1918 and this is the way it should be now. If a person is able to visualize both contenders as representations of something he rejects, then he is indeed a convicted pacifist. Furthermore, pacifists are people who resist all persuasions, faithful only to their own conscience.

If one adversary is presented as absolute evil and the other as a lesser evil, the pacifist is no longer a pacifist—he has taken a side, he is already engaged, and he wants to pull a trigger.

Five centuries

The media was unable to explain to pacifists what is pacifism. It has lost a rare chance to offer something called meaning. It proved equally unable to offer readers and viewers a real alternative to war. This alternative would have to consider Saddam Hussein as a kind of Slobodan Milosevic who needs to be controlled, neutralized and, eventually, judged by international bodies and tribunals.

If, from the beginning, the media had been able to show that opposing the war doesn't mean favoring Saddam, things could have been geared in another direction. Opposition to war involves opposition to all sorts of violence, including opposition to dictatorships. The Iraqi people need to be protected against any bombs, intelligent or not, but it also needs to be protected against the stupidity of the Saddam clan. This has not been proclaimed as it should.

If the issue had been presented from the beginning as a conflict between Bush's unilateralism and the multilateralism of the international community, Chirac's France would not have been able to pretend to be the good girl, like it's doing now, and would have been pressing in favor of peaceful action from the U.N. for a long time.

We can't talk about peace in Iraq without mentioning the Kurds. No use recalling how Saddam killed tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds if the other Kurds—Iranians, Syrians and Turks—are forgotten and left in a limbo. An international mobilization in favor of some type of autonomy for Kurdistan will serve as a warning to Turkey that their candidacy to the European Union is incompatible with their repression of the Kurdish minority.

Humanity has never been so well-informed and so ill-informed at the same time. And the simple reason is that the press media—the media that explains, surveys, relates and interprets—is mimicking the electronic media, fascinated by its impact, synthesis, images and spectacle. Long essays are generally extremely dull simply because journalists—with rare exceptions—don't feel safe in the land of references and prefer to transit in the sphere of evidence, while historians and "scientists" are generally incapable of working as effective narrators.

The encounter last March 16^th in the Azores gave us a measure of the lack of vision demonstrated by news programs. The Spain of José Maria Aznar dominated the world from the end of the 16^th century through the 17^th century. The England of Tony Blair dominated the world in the 18^th and 19^th centuries (up to the very first part of the 20^th). And Bush's U.S. has been dominating the world along the 20^th through the 21^st century. Portugal, the host, was a shadow of both Spain and England.

It was a sudden live lesson in history. Five centuries of history, a summit of past hegemonies, an exclusive club for ghosts and an object of desire from autonomous tyrants (Bonaparte, Hitler and Stalin). If the international news pages of the big press media are unable to unveil panoramas with these kinds of perspectives, we don't need to lose time with press media—a talk show would be more effective.

Optic Disturbance

The coverage of our own war against narcoterrorism was also characterized by a vision both fragmented and simplified. Starting with a problem of identification—very few dared to identify the adversary (narcoterrorism) in the last few weeks. And the reason was political engagement—the fear of extending to Colombia's FARCs the ranking of "terrorist group".

Editors and editorial writers are treating the issue of violence in Rio from within a hall of big criminals. Only now—with the editorial on the cover page of O Globo on Saturday 3/15 serving as landmark—we notice in the Brazilian press a wider and broader view of the wave of violence. The issue transcends the thug called Luís Fernando da Costa, better known as Fernandinho Beira-Mar (Seaside Freddy). It transcends the incompetence and demagogy of the husband-wife team of Governors of Rio de Janeiro State. It transcends Rio de Janeiro itself.

Narcoterrorism can't be contained in the portfolio of the Justice Department or in the national prison system. It can't be fought with the symbology of the presence of the Armed Forces in the streets of Rio. It has to do with the defense of the country of Brazil and its institutions. It implies in altering the Judiciary enough to deter the complicity of judges. It implies in exercising the federal inspection general offices and all the ethics committees of both House and Senate to put a stop to the collusion between crime and the Legislative Power

The Brazilian people cannot be cheated with the impression that the interest rate is Enemy # 1 and Minister Graziano, with his zero success in the Zero Hunger program, needs to be removed. The elaborate edifice of fiscal credibility may tumble down in the exact moment when investors perceive that the government, while able to maintain the basic surplus, was unable to make up for the deficit of determination to confront narcoterrorism.

Our media suffers from a serious optic disorder: it can't see the significance of the very phenomena it covers. For the citizenry, deprived of participation in history, it's frustrating. For those who need the media to make decisions, it's tragic.

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. He also writes a column on cultural issues for the Rio daily Jornal do Brasil. You can reach him by email at obsimp@ig.com.br 

Translated by Tereza Braga, email: tbragaling@cs.com 

This article was originally published March 19, 2003, in Observatório da Imprensa - www.observatoriodaimprensa.com.br  

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