Cervi: 'When religion focuses on material power, it is because it has already lost its essence'
I was happy every Monday afternoon this semester. In an elective course at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), in a class of very few students, I received from Dr. Emerson Urizzi Cervi the impetus, so dear to me, to discuss journalism. Cervi has a sober journalistic style that reminds me of newsrooms that did not succumb to the allure of the internet.
Sgarbe: Dear Professor Cervi, the readers of this website would be bored if I didn't tell them that I wrote to you when I was still in high school and dreamed of being a journalist. I remember being interested in political communication. Well, as is the nature of self-fulfilling prophecies, here I am about to write my first article for your consideration. Having overcome the main emotional aspect of this conversation, I move on to the next. That is, the cold feeling that watching television journalism causes me. It is not, evidently, a matter of personal taste, but a collegial, collective, and communal dimension of journalism. Despite my conviction that it is not possible to do mass journalism as we conceived it decades ago, it is possible and necessary, it is just and necessary, that television journalism resort to the basic literature of what constitutes news. I refer directly to the "new generation," which has at its disposal reporters of excellent quality, and through whom, via interpersonal relationships, the DNA of journalism can be transferred. I am very seriously suspicious of any journalism that does not clearly address the "commercial-editorial" dilemma. And my first question is: which came first? The chicken or the egg? Is flabby journalism the product of a flabby community?
Cervi: Sgarbe, journalism is a human activity, constrained, limited, and empowered by the social context in which it finds itself. Twenty-first-century journalism will not be the same as twentieth-century journalism, which cannot be compared to nineteenth-century journalism simply because the society of each moment in which journalism is inserted is specific. We need to avoid some exaggerations if we want to understand the role of journalism in twenty-first-century society. The first is technological determinism. It is not technology that shapes journalism, but rather journalism that makes use of available technologies to shape itself. The second is the excessive centrality of journalism in the world.
Journalism is a professional activity and a social institution that integrates the so-called intermediary institutions. Journalism, by nature, mediates the relationship between people and people, people and institutions, people and more abstract social concepts.
So, journalism plays its role well when it manages to mediate social relations in a relevant way, that is, in a consequential way. Historically, mass journalism is an intermediary institution for social stability. It presents the expected rules and behaviors (of course there are cases of journalism used for revolutionary purposes, but this is not the rule). However, and here is an important element, the positive consequence of the intermediary role does not depend only on who mediates, but on the expectations of those who are at the "ends" of the intermediation processes - outside the direct scope of journalism - the sources, on one hand, and the public, on the other. If we want answers about twenty-first-century journalism, we need to ask the sources and the public what they expect from twenty-first-century journalism, not the journalists directly.
Sgarbe: When I read your paragraph, I thought, "I have to come back with at least a few interviews in which I ask people what they expect from journalism." Obviously, this is not the case, but I had a reporter's impulse. I understand that to keep journalism alive, as has been done in other eras, we will have to deal with communities absurdly different from those we had ten or twenty years ago. These rapid changes, sometimes justified by technological contributions or even by the severity of a pandemic, have little to do with cell phones and vaccines themselves - items that are much more symptoms than causes. After the fascist uprising and Covid-19, we are in a post-war period. Let's go back a bit. After the First World War, we experienced the avant-garde art movements, among other less singular effects. Psychoanalysis and religious fundamentalism also came out of there. However, in the case of these last two, the results were completely different. For the former, the conclusion is that the end is inevitable and desired, while the latter clings to the harshness of a few phrases that encourage waiting for the return of the Messiah. I understand that, as is expected of history to repeat itself, our present has traces of those patterns. It is utopian, but it would be very good if individuals were able to deal with their internal problems before going on the public stage. Maybe in a thousand years. There are many scenarios and micro-scenarios on the screen, so I am aware that the following excerpt is imprecise. We are polarized more or less like this: on one side, the academy, the cult of scientific investigation (a few hours ago, I said that believing in science without restrictions makes science a religion - it didn't go over well with the group, but I don't care, in this case); on the other, the powerful God who will avenge the wicked and distinguish us from the perverse. I think both are delusional, for this reason here: what good is all this if what is sought is not peace? It will be very difficult to get answers from these people about journalism. Meanwhile, my bet is on precision journalism and a brilliant capacity for dialogue and good humor - with whomever.
Cervi: Well, if I understood you correctly, we have broadened the discussion, moving beyond journalism itself. If so, I agree with your proposal. If we take journalism for what it is: a professional activity with collective impact as its purpose, we will realize that it can only be understood when placed in front of other institutions, groups, and social norms.
The collective purpose of journalism is to meet society's demands for information.
When this purpose is successful, journalistic information serves as a social amalgam, shaping and uniting other social institutions. In other words, the purpose of journalistic information is social cohesion, not distension. The typical phenomenon of the 21st century is that journalism as a purpose faces competition from the dissemination of content and information with the opposite objective of social cohesion. An interesting discussion would be that of freedom as a right. Like any other, there are no absolute rights in any society. Ultimately, even the right to life is not absolute in many societies. What happened in the 20th century is that the struggles for the right to expand and democratize information, which are means, left the ends, which is social cohesion, in the background. It is necessary to bring the discussion about the purposes of freedom of expression back into the public debate. I understand that this was not what you proposed, so I'll stop here. Your proposal was to look at contemporary social conflicts from the micro level, the individual. And, in this case, you point out which institutions have the most impact on social behavior starting from the individual: the church, notably. Religion has the ability to cross from the private to the public sphere without the need for any filter. We will only understand personal conflicts at the beginning of the 21st century when we think about how religions are addressing the differences between spiritual power and material power. When religion focuses on material power, it is because it has already lost its essence, which is spiritual control. From then on, it tends to be increasingly involved in worldly issues and less in spiritual ones. All of society loses, but mainly religion is the biggest loser. Addressing individuals' crises, conflicts, dissensions, the formation of social bubbles from the role of institutions has a greater explanatory capacity than falling into technological determinism, which tends to be a dead end.
