Latin American Zeitgeist consultant emeritus
"Eu sou o rei dessa folia, pra delírio da Fiel"
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Jesus Wept: Current Brazilian Videoscandals
Posted by Colin Brayton on July 5, 2007
I am doing a slow but steady study of the “videoscandal” as psuedo-journalistic genre, and I am tending to think that the TV news coverage of current political scandals in Brazil makes for some interesting points of comparisons with coverage of (1) the parapolitics scandal in Colombia (2) the bogus Teleamazonas telescandal in Ecuador, and (3) the life and works of Vladimir Montesinos of Peru. The Renan Calheiros case in particular reeks of phony rigged scandal (even if, like the Clinton-Lewinsky case, it does eventually arrive at some malfeasance). It’s a theory, anyway. And these are the visual aids.
Exercising my vocation for contrarian opinions, I am going to argue, for the sake of argument, that Renan Calheiros, the embattled president of the Brazilian Senate, is right: he is the target of a media-driven character assassination driven by a political strategy.
Whether he is just a corrupt and borkable politician or not, involved with yet another Brazilian Abramoff — the species teems upon the central high plains, like the American bison of yore — is another question entirely.
But I think the media campaign against him shows signs of having more to do with the “folklore of corruption” than with any concrete and demonstrable wrongdoing by the cattle-ranching former Cardoso Minister of Justice.
I could, of course, be wrong. But consider another political scandal that started with an anonymously sourced report in Veja magazine:
And that fact that Veja and Globo’s Época have teemed up to move this corruption case to the top of the news agenda rather than some other tends to confirm that suspicion. Both have a long history of recounting only convenient truths, and partial ones at that.
The video is from the remarkably dedicated PSOL videblogger 2224Cristina — on whom see also Brazil: 2224Cristina on the Political Economy of the Comments Thread. Her indignation is a pretty fair specimen of Brazilian public opinion, I would say.
But first, an infotainment interlude featuring the introduction to “Jesus Wept” by Racionais MC.
Os Racionais are the real deal: deep hip-hop poets wielding the metralhadora cultural. I remember my mentor back in college in the early 1980s, poet Dick Barnes, predicting that hip hop was going to change the world. Mano Brown & Co. are what he had in mind.
My translation is, of course, hasty and awful. But you get the idea.
I guess the main thing I would point out is the contrast between the Rede TV report on Roriz and the TV Record report on Calheiros.
The Rede TV report reproduces clips from a federal wiretap about whose provenience the newscast does not tell us. The leaky police is a subject of some controversy, most especially because of the strange case of federal police delegado Edmilson “Bruno Surfistina” Bruno (Puta Sacanagem: Sampa Journalists Huddle with Capt. Edmilson of the Federal Police).
But the Rede TV report has some journalistic virtues. It lays out the transaction in question, digs into it, gets the other side, then digs into the alternate explanation for it — the loan from the Gol board chairman, which might well be a questionable transaction in its own right, even without the bribery charges laid by Veja.
The Brazilian tax man has gotten less and less good-humored since 2003. The notion: Crack down on tax evasion as a way of being able to lower the tax rates. Which the government did last week, by the way. Lowered the tax rate. Bank interest rates, the business sections noted in passing, are no longer the most outrageously usurious in the world (though still freaking outrageous, as everyone is, you have to admit, correct to quickly point out.)
Rede TV does not go off on tangents, but stays strictly focused on the police case.
Roriz, by the way, has now resigned his post in order to avoid the suspension of his political rights — a common pattern that we saw also in the “bloodsucker mafia” scandal.
A loophole in the law means that you can avoid suspension of your right to run for reelection by resigning, then running again.
Brazil’s election governance system is a bizarre, misshapen creature, I have to say.
The Record report, on the other hand, reminds me strongly, just in terms of its organization and rhetoric, of that Teleamazonas “videoscandal” in Ecuador recently (“Mountains of Money”: RCTV and Teleamazonas in Action) .
The accuser, a man with a criminal past, waves around “evidence.”
The report merely registers the existence of this evidence, but does not dig into it. The personal history of the source is glossed over by describing him merely as “an ex-bicho banker.”
How does one go from being a bicho banker to an ex-bicho banker, anyway? I imagine it is a bit more complicated than just filing a petition for change of status with some bureaucratic agency.
He’s not a federal cooperating witness of some sort, by any chance? Who knows? The point is that the principle of “considering the source” is not respected here.
At a time when bicho bankers are in the headlines as massive bribers of cops, judges, and politicians, these charges have a lot of mythic resonance, and gain a lot of plausibility.
But the devil is in the details.
What has Fernando Collor been doing this whole time, by the way?
The impeached former president is Calheiros’ Senate colleague from Alagoas. I bet you anything Collor and his flack in chief, Cláudio Humberto, have a hand in all this. Again, this is just an intuition, though. I would bet free beer on it, but it is purely based on suppositions at this point.
Another interesting case to compare: The infamous photo of Uribe’s brother with a known paramilitary death-squadder from the mid 1980s presented in the Petro testimony earlier this year in the Colombian, and the video recently published by the Nuevo Herald of Uribe meeting with paramilitaries on the campaign trail.
The 1985 photo was far from being the most probative element of the argument made by the Colombian opposition in accusing Uribe of being compromised by ties to paramilitaries, and to their credit (as competent public debaters) they do not make it the crux of their case.
And so forth.
I am just trying to work out a theory here by comparing case studies. The old-fashioned Harvard B-School way (of which there is no better method, if you follow it rigorously, by the way).
Another parallel case to consider: The Brozo the Televisa interview clown videoscandal in Mexico in 2006, in the so-called desafuero episode in Mexico City.
In that case, some concrete cases of wrongdoing were mixed in with surreptiously recorded honey-trap videos showing no actual wrongdoing, but strongly implying it, to create a phony impression of generalized corruption that was used in an unsuccessful attempt to impeach the governor of the federal district, López Obrador.
This was a classic case of the “folklore of corruption” at work. And the technical similarities with other cases gets you to wondering whether these news organizations do not tend to read from the same textbook.
Above: Felipe Calderón of PAN receives crucial support from Brozo the Televisa ambush interview clown. Note Calderón’s trademark “Mussolini fist pump” gesture. Source: YouTube. In terms of journalistic integrity, Televisa makes those greasy little infowarriors at Rede Globo — “Beyond Citizen Kane” — look like the producers of PBS’s Frontline.
