The Folha de S. Paulo In Flagrante Delicto

The story behind the historic photo, which now plays on TV screens from Oiapoque to Chuí.

I just picked up the latest edition of CartaCapital and my jaw is on the floor once again.

Fico boquiaberto, quer dizer.

The cover story is on the media coverage of the money confiscated from two PT members, a photo of which showed up on the front page of every paper in the country on election eve, when it took up the entire evening newscast on Globo — even as a Gol flight out of Goiás went missing over the Amazonian jungle.

The photo was leaked to the press by a federal police officer named Edmilson Bruno, who in previous reports was said to have asked for anonymity as a source. What he actually did was to ask the papers to  lie about the source to cover his ass. The Estado described the source as a “civilian policeman” — a half-truth.

The Folha de S. Paulo ran the lie as truth.

Some of the lefty blog-like Internet press had already pointed out that Globo showed the footage of the police officer turning over the tapes during an interview with him that aired at 11:30 at night — but did not broadcast the soundtrack in which he allegedly said, “Here it is. Now let’s f**k over Lula.”

I saw that Globo interview — it was aired right before Jô Soares, the Brazilian David Letterman — and can confirm that a very brief portion of the clip was shown without the soundtrack.
Two new elements emerged from CC’s very thorough reporting.

First of all, there was the existence of the tape containing all of what Officer Bruno actually said, which including suggesting to the reporters from the Estadão and the Folha de S. Paulo that they tell their editors that the photos were “stolen from police custody.”

He also suggested that the photos be doctored in Photoshop to make it impossible to identify the location in which the money was photographed — from a low angle, to make the pile look more imposing.

Quoting the tape, which was recorded by the Folha reporter, CC says the policeman said, “That’s what I’m going to tell my boss, that the photo was stolen out of my custody by someone else.”

Second, there was the complete blackout on the investigation into charges that a businessman involved in the sanguessuga scandal, and a close personal friend of the PCDB Health Minister who succeeded Serra, was offering R$10 million to the same broker to hush up the alleged “dossier” — or so says the broker.

That will be a great tabloid story to follow for months, if not years, to come.

But the really astonishing thing is that the CC, in possession of the tape, was able to nail the reporter who recorded it for publishing the lie suggested by Bruno, word for word, on the front page of the Folha the next day — fully knowing it to be a lie.

Oh sure, all of us complain about bias against our preferred cause in our press back home.

But catching journalists out and out lying is still rare enough — Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, and, someday, Judith Miller, I suspect — that the perpetrators wind up getting book deals and Oprah appearances out of it.

The point is that you can’t really get away with saying, for example, that John Kerry had gay sex with Donald Trump. Because reporters who cover the same beat will immediately call shennanigans on you and you will be summarily fired.

But this really takes the cake.

The name of the Folha reporter on the scene, whose byline appeared on the piece consecrating the cover story of the “fuck the PT” fed, according to CC, was Lilian Christofoletti.

May she spend the rest of her career writing the daily pamonha report from Piricicaba. May she end her days writing the lonelyhearts column in the Oiapoque Coupon Clipper.

Unless there’s a good explanation. Like someone else signed her byline to the story.

Perhaps the SPJ will give her a freedom of the press award.

The executive editor of the Folha, Eleonora de Lucena, did not wish to comment, but defended not publishing the tape out of “respect for the confidentiality of the source.”

Speaking of Judy Miller, who identified VP Cheney’s current chief of staff as “a former Hill staffer” in order to disguise the source of the Valerie Plame leak.

Technically not a lie, but utterly dishonest and contrary to accepted practices of professional journalism.

But Judy Miller no longer works for the NY Times.

Christofoletti apparently still works for the FSP. And five other journalists heard the same conversation she recorded. So obviously they failed to do their little bit for professional ethics as well.

Why?

Man, these people really are the scum of the earth — or under the thumb of the scum of the earth. Married as I am to an unemployed journalist, I have some sympathy for the plight of the rank and file in such situations.

The Lord should smite this city with fire.

That’s not very objective of me, I know, but hey, you haven’t gone to dinner parties and the theater with these folks.

I have.

And there’s a good reason why they all drive armored SUVs — if they can’t afford their own helicopter.

It’s because they are that insufferable.

To their credit, a number of Globo staff in São Paulo protested to the Director of Journalism, Ali Kemal, about the lack of balance in the coverage on the Jornal Nacional that night, according to the CC report.

Brazil has plenty of whip-smart journalists with tons of wit, integrity, and balls, don’t get me wrong.

They just don’t happen to be running things.

Someday I expect we will see labor and middle management locking out upper management and insisting on doing things right.

I’ll translate Mauricio Dias’s “Ten Questions for Ali Kemal” when I get a chance.

The possible electoral angle on all this, finally, is that the PF is investigating Mr. Bruno on suspicion of having been paid to leak the photo. How would that be for a scandal heaped on a scandal aided and abetted by a scandal?

Alckmin’s electoral programming this evening, by the way, makes an interesting statement about the “dossier”: that the risk manager from the Banco do Brasil and his buddies in Operation Tabajara were “trying to buy a false dossier on Geraldo Alkmin.”

The dossier was actually supposed to be about Serra and this Barjas Negri character, and no one from the Federal Police has said yet whether it was false or not.

The PSDB argues that this “foot-dragging” on the part of the PF is part of a plot to “armor” Lula, perpretrated by one of the most distinguished authors of Brazil’s flawed 1988 constitution, justice minister Thomaz Bastos, past president of the OAB.

The only part of it I have seen shows Serra on the dais with the colorful, infamous Vedoin Bros., at the delivery of some of the ambulances, looking weary and jet-lagged and trotting out some perfunctory remarks.

Unless I have not understood the context correctly, it does not look incriminating per se. See my Brazilian Maxim No. 1: In the tropics of Brazil, you need not lie down with dogs to get fleas.

Which is why I tend to agree with the Lula line, by the way: Corruption is an attribute of institutions more than it is of persons.

We arguably commit corruption every time we — hypothetically — hire a black-market handyman to fix our roof, for example.

But otherwise we would not be able to afford to get stuff done.

In Brooklyn, this hypothetical guy would own his own hardware store. He’s honest, knowledgeable, trustworthy, competent, friendly, thrifty, loyal, brave, reverent …

But this is Brazil. He’s been screwed by the system his entire life.

So he does the best he can in a “grey market” that outcompetes the “white economy” — to extend the metaphor — in terms of providing needed services in a timely manner at an affordable price.

This is what we call the jeitinho, or quebrando o galho.

Anyhow, boy, what excitement. As I always say: If you want to study journalistic governance and misgovernance, and the infotainment State, in its wild and untamed condition, Brazil is a living laboratory.

Still, if I have to watch Alckmin step off his private jet to kiss one more gushing old black woman in the old marketplace of a bombed-out city in the Northeast to show that he’s not really a clone from The Boys From Brazil, I may have to switch over to the novela das oito, where the young, studly terrorist bomber has fallen in love with the daughter of the capitalist pigdog he has been sent to obliterate …

Bet you didn’t see that plot twist coming!