Brazilian Media: Smoke and Mirrors

Lula's cap crisis was just a piece of clothing that was converted into
a political message because we are deeply inserted into a self-feeding
circuit where everything is fragmented and reduced to signs. The
media needs them to lend meaning to the information, and the
producers of information needs them in order to be understood.

Alberto Dines

 

The French say "bonnet" and the Americans "cap". In Brazil it's "boné". We try to make it simple, but faced with the commotion created by the little red cap with the MST (Landless Workers Movement) logo on the head of President Lula, we will soon have something similar to the cakes of Marie Antoinette.

Exaggeration abounds from every side: critics of the media say it has gone overboard in attributing so much political significance to an insignificant gesture in the presidential routine. Critics of the government respond by saying that any gesture from the nation's leader has meanings that can't be ignored or minimized.

The fact is that both sides cling to a symbol but the real issue is different, and bigger: what we have is a gigantic set of gears used for simplifying everything, beginning in the media— unable to refuse it— and ending on those who need the simplification in order to make their messages intelligible. In other words: we are in the territory of drama. Theatre with no dialogue, based in signs—a pantomime.

The "crise do boné" used a piece of clothing and converted it into a political message simply because we are deeply inserted into a self-feeding circuit where everything is fragmented and reduced to signs. The media needs them to lend meaning to the information it circulates, and the producers of information can't be without them, in order to be understood.

The boné is the disguise of a system which is apparently convenient to all but which is, in reality, the enemy of all who want something beyond a virtual culture—maybe a facilitator in appearance, but complicating in its essence.

The disarticulation of this system starts with a review of the events affecting our media since the 1990s. The feat of overthrowing President Collor was casual and marginal and resulted less from its virtues than from its vices. Enthused with the triumph, the media strived to increase its fire power at any price. It went into telephonic tapping and demoralized investigative journalism. It invested heavily into increasing audiences by playing magic tricks, paying no attention to the process of building credibility through editorial quality.

Then came modas & manias (fashions and fads), hypochondria & therapies, with the appearance of knowledge but the basic mission of paving the way for the supremacy of the trivial and the consecration of irrelevance. We succeeded in the feat of covering the invasion of Iraq without having ever explained how and why Iraq was created. The electoral campaign was covered with a reasonable equidistance but after inauguration it was clear that in this land, impartiality is the sum of partialities.

To generalized destitution we added strategic disorientation. Companies have their hats in their hands and no ideas in their heads. Communication vehicles insist in making noise but all the drum is doing is to drone, like a cuíca. Following all the streamlining and reengineering, the ones with the biggest salaries were fired and suddenly it was discovered that without them, the media could no longer mediate.

In this scenario, the boné fitted as a glove. The government rocked on all the symbols and metaphors while the media fooled itself with the idea that its mission consisted in simply changing them. Not even the so-called intellectuals are able to articulate a more consistent way of thinking, entangled in mottos, words of command, clichés and scams of a code accessible only to communicators and communicants.

In the times of the Estado Novo and censorship, the masses nicknamed DIP (the Department of Press and Propaganda) the "One who Talks-to-Himself". These days, with the media choking, all we hear are the bonés of the MST and the quepes (kepis) of the UDR (União Democrática Ruralista—Democratic Ruralist Union).

 

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 

This article was originally published in Observatório da Imprensa — www.observatoriodaimprensa.com.br  

Tereza Braga is a freelance Portuguese translator and interpreter based in Dallas. She is an accredited member of the American Translators Association. Contact: tbragaling@cs.com