Open Letter to the New York Times Public Editor on Larry Rohter

“Did Larry Rohter do good journalism?” Brazilian Press Association, 2004. The government tried to have the Times reporter’s visa cancelled over a [sleazy hit-piece sourced to sleazy hacks, when sourced at all] implying the president of Brazil was a drunken lout. Sponsoring the habeas corpus that allowed him to stay: then-Senator Sérgio Cabral, now governor of Rio de Janeiro.

Attribution to another publication … cannot serve as license to print rumors that would not meet the test of The Times’s own reporting standards. Rumors must satisfy The Times’s standard of newsworthiness, taste and plausibility before publication, even when attributed. And when the need arises to attribute, that is a good cue to consult with the department head about whether publication is warranted at all. –The New York Times, Guidelines on Integrity

Dear Mr. Hoyt:

I’m am American citizen residing in Brazil, married to a Brazilian national — Neuzinha is a card-carrying member of the press — and a regular consumer of the Brazilian news media.

Your Latin American correspondent, Larry Rohter, frequently repeats, verbatim, the press-relations talking points of dubious actors, without attribution, and omits the viewpoints of more credible sources.

A recent example, I think, was his latest story on the Pan-American Games in Rio:

It is no secret that Rio is crime-ridden and quite violent, and becoming more so: the heavily-armed gangs that control the hillside squatter slums known as favelas are growing increasingly bolder in their assaults and threats, even in the city’s most elite neighborhoods.

I have heard the state military police commandant, Col. Ângelo, say almost exactly the same thing in recent press conferences, particularly with respect to “increasingly bolder in their assaults and threats.”

But see Rio: BOPE in the Vila Cruzeiro, a review of local coverage of that issue.

Col. Ângelo also said that community protests against police actions in Rio shantytowns was agitprop on behalf of drug gangs, and that any stray-bullet deaths were due to a drug-gang practice of shooting innocent bystanders in order to smear the reputation of the “trooper elite.”

No hard, credible numbers or data have been forthcoming to support such statements. When they are, I will give them full faith and credit.

Other, reasonably reputable local journalists, however, have tacitly dismissed those claims by covering community demontrations as valid expressions of public sentiment and presenting hard numbers on the current crime scenario in Rio. See my Violence in Rio de Janeiro: Fact and Fiction, for example.

So where is Rohter getting those soft numbers? Can he cite statistics?

“It is no secret” is not proper journalism, or proper sourcing.

It is rumor-mongering. It is glittering generality. It is an abdication of the reporter’s job, which is to substantiate such generalizations with well-established facts.

“Statistics from Source X show” might be journalism up to the stated standards of the New York Times, for example — depending on the reliability of Source X. But Rohter doesn’t do sourcing — except for the occasional “[unidentified] press sources say” — and Bill Keller’s principles of integrity be damned.

According to my reading, for example, it seems that common crime has actually decreased in Rio in recent years. What has continued to grow is police violence, according to a recent report by the Rio bureau chief of the Folha de São Paulo newspaper:

Statistics show that direct clashes have been more common than has been the use of intelligence services. In 2007, the Rio police have killed 40% more, arrested 23% less in comparison with the first three months of the previous year, apprehended 9% less drugs and 8% fewer weapons. Stray-bullet incidents are on the rise.

See my translation, Rio: Still Rolling in the Tanks.

And see also “Resistance Followed By Death”: Truths, Partial Truths and Statistics, on violence in our home city of São Paulo.

More detailed notes, with coverage of local press coverage of Rohter’s coverage:

• “Things To Do in Rio Without Being Dead”

Brazilian police forces have a serious corruption problem.

This is no secret, either.

Globo’s Fantástico: “The war in the streets of Rio is just like Iraq.” See NMM(-TV)SNBCNNBS: The Cops of Fox x Globo’s BOPE for a close reading. Globo simply gave the special ops battalion a camera and ran the resulting footage without critical context. Nothing is revealed. A Globo TV reporter, José Messias Xavier, was arrested for selling information gleaned from law enforcement sources on the job to gambling mafias protected by civil and military police. Gambling mafias that fund militias and political campaigns.  

Local and international human rights group say so. Local journalists and researchers say so. The U.S. State Dept. even says so. And the problem is not confined to the Rio-Sampa corridor, either. See my review of press coverage on a notorious case in the Northeast in Homicídios, SA: 1,000+ Corporate Actions From Brazilian Murder, Inc.

Your reporter launders the press relations of these people into “all the news that’s fit to print” and systematically omits any mention of credible critics — critics who exhibit a great deal more professionalism and integrity than your reporter, in fact.

On Rio police as a major part of the problem, for example, see also “News of a Private War”: Pra Inglês Ver, in which you will see an interview with the former Rio police chief who recently told the Zero Hora newspaper:

In Rio, the problem was never the Red Command, but the “Blue Command,” the military police. The problem is police corruption. There is this impression that crime is high in Brazil. It’s not. Police corruption is high. Criminality flows from the corruption of the police. When the police stop being corrupt, crime goes down. When kids [interviewed in Falcão: Children of the Traffic] say they pay part of the cop’s salary, that’s true. The traffic, in reality, is a partner of the Brazilian police.

Rohter’s tendentious reporting is not only transparently substandard from a journalistic point of view; it gives cover to unspeakable acts and dubious actors, and appears to do so knowingly and systematically.

If I were your correspondent in Rio de Janeiro, my filings would include interviews with experts like the Rio bureau chief of the Folha, who report the other side of the question — using hard numbers and hard sourcing — at what I suspect is great personal risk.

The New York Times does not.

It silences the voices of courageous journalists and amplifies the voices of the people who try to silence and intimidate these journalists — my colleagues and yours.

It’s an unspeakable disgrace.

What are you going to do about it?

Sincerely,

Colin Brayton
Brooklyn, NY/São Paulo, Brazil

A personal postscript: My wife was in a bank robbery in São Paulo recently. She managed to slip out before the PM came in blasting.

In a similar incident that same week, a woman was hit by a stray bullet. Local news showed the woman being manhandled into a squad car by PMs, like a sack of potatoes, rather than immobilized, stabilized in place, and transported on a back board. The woman is now reportedly paralyzed.

And see Order and Progress, Sampa-Style — harbinger of a number of extremely disturbing police actions this summer in our city.

I love my wife.

I do not want to see her end up on a slab.

In New York City, for all their occasional problems — “Giuliani time” — you are not afraid of the police. It is much easier to believe in their competence and commitment to community service. “Courtesy, professionalism and respect” does not ring hollow. Concerts in the park and officially sponsored mass bike rides almost always go off without riot police wading into the crowd, busting heads.

And Al Sharpton, for all his occasional problems — Tawana Brawley — is free to run his big mouth, without suffering intimidation or censorship, and serves a useful purpose in the overall scheme of things. As do the 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement who campaign for reform. Police officers who engage in misconduct get a fair trial in a court of common pleas, and all the newspapers cover it widely as a matter of course and vital public interest.

Police officers who die in the line of duty get the bagpipes and a slot on the evening news, and you feel genuinely awful for their families. Every corpse gets accounted for. TV programs document the heroic lengths we sometimes go to make sure that every corpse gets accounted for. The murder rate is about 4 per 100,000, and the trend is downwards.

In Brazil, very little of this is the case, but there is, I would say — I have not done formal polling, but I do know quite a few Brazilians — a fairly strong consensus that it ought to be. And sooner than now, too.