Latin American Zeitgeist consultant emeritus
"Eu sou o rei dessa folia, pra delírio da Fiel"
Seed Newsvine
The Bald Man and the Bad, Bad Banker: Notes on the Contemporary Brazilian Meme Wars
Posted by Colin Brayton on September 30, 2007
NMM(-TV)SNB(B)CNN(P)BS on Dailymotion.
This [blog post] is basically a conflation of cinema-induced fantasy, anti-Americanism, anti-President Bush, anti-capitalism, and fear of propaganda stemming from World War II. –Richard Edelman
A good horse runs even at the shadow of the whip. — Zen koan.
Fads can be incredibly lucrative: mass hysteria and stupidity can make a real difference to a business’ bottom line. … –Rhymer Rigby. “Craze Management.” Management Today. London: Jun 1998. p. 58
Some commentary on recent journalistic coverage of two Brazilian governance scandals: corruption at the Central Bank ca. 1998, and the emerging story of the bald ad man from Belo Horizonte and his political slush-fund pipeline. With off-the-cuff notes on the Record-Globo face-off and an homage to Richard Edelman and Faith Popcorn.
I translated “accused of rustling up R$44 million” for Azeredo’s campaign.
This is erroneous. The reporter says “R$24 million.”
This is a blog. You get what you pay for. If it was real news operation, I would have copy editor. It is hard to copyedit yourself.
On the “three aces in a deck of cards” metaphor for the “Minas Gerais big monthly allowance” scandal, see
- “Every Toucan For Himself, As Baldy Drops the Other Shoe”
- “Decent Brazilian Coalition-Leader Will Be Indicted”: Estadão
- Brazil: The Minas Maracutaia Emerges!
- Brazil: Spreadsheet B “May Implicate Senators!”
A commentator in the CartaCapital newsweekly last week defended the thesis that these men served as fall-guys for other folks that ought to have been indicted.
CartaCapital does not tend to float idle theories, or engage in too much dumbing down of complex issues for the purposes of soap-opera scriptwriting, so by all means, bookmark for reality-testing against future newsflow.
On Faith Popcorn — if that really is her name — see
On the Globo-Record infotainment confrontation, see
On Globo Journalism Central as an perpetual font of gibbering nonsense that makes you stupid and useless if you consume it without boiling thoroughly first — here analogized acidly to British Army experiments with weaponized LSD — see also
- TV Globo: “Corruption is an Incurable Disease!”
- “Globo Gabbles on Communist Indoctrination Textbook Plague!”
- Brazil: TV Globo Covers Reaction to Its Coverage of Reaction to Its Coverage While Corpses Smolder
And many, many more cases in point.
On Veja’s autohagiographical pop-sociology of the anti-meritocratic power elite, see
- Veja Só: The Supremacy of the Power Elite!
- Veja Só: Editorial Integrity at Brazil’s Grupo Abril
- Abril Dissident: Cooking Up Libel at Veja Magazine
For a critical take on “The MST is an Interahamwe that wants to barbecue your forcibly aborted white Christian babies,” see
Important caveat:
According to a Globo TV journalist, who preferred not to identify himself, before the first round of the presidential elections [in 2006], Mello commented that he had received instructions to “go easy” on economic indicators that might be interpreted as favorable to the government.
Why Dailymotion?
Not many people actually seems to watch videos I post there.
If you want an audience, you post to YouTube. (My personal best there: 60,000 views for having captured, with my camcorder, in a park near where I used to work, the man with his hand up the tuchus of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, making jokes about panties. Whoo hoo!)
On the other hand, the uploading experience is awfully good — as good as Google Video’s Java widget for uploading, even. They actually show you a progress bar, for example. YouTube does not.
And the player looks kind of nice.
