Conflict Between Public Interest and Sales Redefines the Course of Journalism
Editorial decisions give way to commercial logic and the appeal of the target audience.
Tempo previsto
3/7/2025
Narcissistic speech reveals fragility; Dallagnol blames nation for his setback.
The news outlets are right to broadcast live the pronouncements of the former prosecutor and former federal deputy for Paraná, Deltan Dallagnol, this Wednesday (17th), but they are right with the caveat that there might be something sadistic about it on a national network. The decision to strip him of his mandate came out yesterday, and he defended himself today. As is common knowledge, he was ousted by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), which divides the opinions of serious people. Some consider it a legal error, while others defend the interpretation and vote of Minister Benedito Gonçalves. In this text, that discussion is over.
I had just arrived home from a university commitment when I turned on the television and came face to face with Dallagnol, alongside a rather intriguing group, explaining to Brazilians that evil had triumphed in Brazil because he had lost in court. Blatant narcissism, megalomania, Protestant fundamentalism, a bit of everything? Or, on the contrary, the absence of anything at all?
Frankly, I was expecting a striking speech, but I had no idea how striking it would actually be. It’s a historical embarrassment, fit for use in psychoanalysis and political communication classes. Could it work to the point of restoring his ridiculously inflated prestige? It could. Especially from the people of my state, I can expect them to make him mayor of the capital (even without any experience in governing, but sufficiently white and resentful).
I'm not in the habit of celebrating blunders in public life. I'm ashamed when our authorities are investigated or arrested, or anything of that sort. So there's nothing to celebrate in the ousting of this gentleman, just as there's no lament, at least on my part. Perhaps they forgot to tell him how things work in politics. Or had all politicians suddenly forgotten the way Dallagnol referred to and scorned them? What was this guy expecting? Was it with this naiveté that he led Operation Car Wash?
From the perspective of some friends who not only support Dallagnol but also have little or no regard for the Workers' Party or Lula, vehemently opposing the latter two, moral practice also applies when it’s necessary to imprison (or kill) a dangerous individual. Judging by the hero's words today, it is absolutely moral to remove him from public life as long as he is incapable of understanding that politics is a communal experience, and that what matters is what the other person thinks. That this is how things are built.
Setting himself up as a hero, this man’s speech doesn’t offend me, but it worries me in civilizational terms. Once again, a "brother", an equal, a "piece of shit like us", rants: "I will save you". Sir, I and the people I know didn't ask you for anything. You compared yourself to Joseph of Egypt (a round of applause for the Record TV series!), to Jesus. You know what you're missing? Reading the Gospels a bit more. There's something you interpreted à la Car Wash in the biblical text, if you know what I mean.
In recent weeks, I've been leaning toward the psychological perspectives of leaders' choices. Broadly speaking, those who are elected to govern run enormous risks – including that of being assassinated (e.g., Bolsonaro's stabbing). Becoming a passion of the masses requires offering them protection and assistance. When these elements become scarce or cease, and that leadership is no longer useful (after garnering more than 300,000 votes for a party, for example), then they are lynched by those who lauded them. On this point, there is indeed a connection with Jesus, because he was crucified by those who received him with palm branches.
The same press that reported Dallagnol as the country's salvation now exposes him in a humiliating role of a crying child. "But this only happens to me", "why don't they do this to Gilmar?", "even Beto Richa has a mandate". Then he transitions to a furious critical stance through which he will supposedly deliver all of Brazil from an evil he fears.
If we take it as truth that individuals are responsible for their own paths, we can then ask ourselves the child's question: "why does Beto Richa have a mandate and Dallagnol is ousted?".
Leia insights sobre a interação de humanos com modelos de linguagem de IA, e sobre os ODS no Brasil. Lab Educação 2050 Ltda, que mantém este site, é signatária do Pacto Global das Nações Unidas.
Live streams test social maturity, exposing public heroism illusions.
Narcissist speech undermines solid institutions & inclusive dialogue.
Editorial decisions give way to commercial logic and the appeal of the target audience.
The founding canon of Brazilian radio and television is a jumble of decrees and legislation written over nearly 70 years. If read optimistically, this body of work confers upon journalism a role almost as important as that of the industry's entrepreneurs. In 1941, the iconic Repórter Esso went on the air, establishing itself as the country's main news program – a kind of ancestor of Jornal Nacional.
Reporter what? Esso. The news program was a product of the Standard Oil Company of Brazil, replicating a pattern already implemented in 15 other countries: the advertising agency McCann-Erickson supervised the content produced by the United Press Associations (now United Press International, one of the ugliest news websites in the world).
It's as if the name of Jornal Nacional were Jornal do Nubank, and its editorial guidelines followed the commands of the sales department. That is to say, except for the explicit name, nothing has changed. Or rather, it has changed a little, yes.
Around '64, the then Minister of Justice, Juracy Magalhães, sent the editor-in-chief of O Globo, Roberto Marinho, a list of names forbidden from appearing in the news. To which Marinho replied: "Minister, you do one thing, you take care of your communists, and I'll take care of mine." One of the most precious talents of competent newsrooms is their proximity to disobedience – of course, this is a thorn in the side of any authoritarian.
The tension between the sales department and the newsroom sets the daily tone for the reasons journalists work. Once, on the radio, an advertiser suggested a story about the opening of an exhibition of dinosaur replicas. I went. I reported what I saw, interviewed the owner, but the agency didn't like it and called for my head before I even got back to the newsroom. The agency was put on ice, and for six months they didn't air anything except for paid advertising spots during breaks.
This dynamic, however, seems increasingly historical. An artifact of a glorious past, in which owners of journalistic enterprises defended their reporters to the bitter end. At this same station where I was defended, our director was fired at the request of state representatives from Paraná who were offended at being compared to chicken thieves (they had approved a way to earn more money in the dead of night).
The contamination of journalism by money caught all station owners and journalists by surprise. It's an old story that internet ads drastically reduced the amount of money that previously circulated on television. But the internet brought something more: the possibility that these digital ads would be seen and clicked on more when inserted into news stories attractive to the public.
Unlike journalism limited by a spatial window – the television screen – and by a temporal window – the time of the news program – in which the selection of news should prioritize the most important issues and, to some extent, grudgingly inform, today what matters is the client's taste.
If the sales department imposes itself on journalism, as it does, the public must be pampered to the fullest, so that they buy more, so that sales success returns to the station in new contracts. The price imposed on journalism costs all of journalism. All of this hit broadcasting hard.
In Paraná, the most-watched lunchtime news program looks like Escolinha do Professor Raimundo (a Brazilian comedy show). Don't dare say, in its defense, that it's characteristic of the time slot. Here next door, in Santa Catarina, they don't do something so ridiculous, let alone in São Paulo. Not to mention the morning news, in which, I will repeat until it is understood, the anchor reported that the sun rose in Cascavel.
War Requires Illusion
This article isn't exactly hopeful at a cursory glance. It tends to make more sense when, through difficult conversation, we achieve some freedom to think and act about wars without the interference of armies. After all, those who promote war can do nothing for peace.
I remember my first lessons on World War II. Well, how could I forget them? At the time, I found it utterly unattractive to learn the years in which it began and ended. I considered the dates meaningless due to my inexperience in relating events. Moreover, my young age didn't differentiate between what fits into one, ten, or a hundred years.
Generally speaking, and for the sake of argument, the Second War followed the First. And it was called "world" because those who named it so considered the entire world to be limited to themselves. Elementary school knowledge that remains relevant today.
(Parenthesis: Those who lived through the 1990s know that, in terms of forensic pathology – people run over, stabbed, corpses in decomposition – television abundantly supplied us with violent images. In the city where I grew up, a woman drowned her two children in a well and then threw herself in after them. On the lunchtime news program, I watched the small bodies floating. Another case involved a daughter who, with the help of her girlfriend, killed her mother and grandmother. Not to mention the rape, murder, and robbery committed against an elderly woman living alone on Rua XV.)
Ultimately, those who died and those who killed had some kinship with someone close. They were, in any case, considered degenerate, not exactly counted as people. This is without mentioning national cases like the Candelária Massacre, the murder of Daniella Perez, and the murder of Índio Galdino. (End parenthesis)
This is my argument: it's difficult to impress a Brazilian child.
Those common murderers, though extremely dangerous, committed their crimes clandestinely. They were discovered, and then televised, arrested, lynched, or killed by the police. But what they told us about the extermination camps was entirely different, and often more terrifying. There was something wrong about multitudes being murdered in broad daylight.
What we know about the genocide of Jews is etched in black and white in our memories, both through photographs and the brilliant cinematic work *Schindler's List* (1993), directed by Steven Spielberg. Thanks to new technologies, some of these memories can touch us even more profoundly. Using digital resources, I myself colorized a photograph of child survivors of Auschwitz taken by Alexander Vorontsov.
It is difficult to look at them and say: “We despised their families to the utmost, we chose who would be enslaved and who would be killed and incinerated in our four gas chambers with crematoria.” Because that is precisely what we did, in the role of humans. Shouldering responsibility for that atrocity is a lifelong burden, and I don’t believe there’s any other way to deal with it than to carry it, with shame and remorse, until my last day.
Confronting this inhumanity, however, is not the same as stagnating in lament. It is precisely the opposite. And, to move forward even minimally, we must shed two convenient illusions. The first is that all responsibility can be attributed to the Führer. Let us, even if this discomfits us to almost unbearable levels, be consistent. No single man could have undertaken the Third Reich without assistance. In 1935, the Nazi Party enacted the racial discrimination laws, and Mr. Hitler was not alone – as official footage attests.
The other classic illusion is that the "world" of the Second World War did not prevent the genocide simply because it knew nothing. Now then. Upon further reflection, I don't even consider it an illusion anymore – since not every illusion is necessarily a misconception – but rather a blatant lie. With the illusion, we achieve a certain psychic relief, which frequently converts into proud satisfaction: "I would never have done something like that." With the lie, we maintained the idea that we possess a power that, in truth, we do not.
Since the Gulf War, another ridiculousity of the nineties, international military conflicts have also become television programs. This is not a figure of speech. Literally, wars are simultaneously television programs. One needs little intelligence – sometimes not even that – to understand that the images we consume are the creations of a single person. Someone holds the camera, chooses when to press REC, when to stop, from what position what he sees will be viewed, what enters or does not enter the frame. In the case of AI-generated content, someone will have to write the prompt. In this way, the media product of war integrates the general arsenal of war. Those with more or fewer resources to create and propagate stories consequently have more or less war power. It is fair to ask what the destructive reach of a weapon of this kind is.
Since the spontaneous constitution of a public sphere, and its progressive and irreversible decay, public opinion has been used to legitimize or delegitimize the actions of the State. If I convince Brazil that I am "good" and the other is "evil," then Brazilians tend to pressure their government in a specific direction, the product of which varies from support on digital social networks to proposals in the United Nations Security Council. Telling the best story, however, has nothing to do with telling the most accurate story. This quality criterion is restricted to citizens who are not easily moved by the appeals of the masses – people who, in each social circle, can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
On the path to the finally. So, if the world had known about the annihilation of humans in World War II, it would have acted to protect the Jews. I guarantee that with a clear mind, and three or four videos of the apocalypse in Palestine, one can guarantee with one hundred percent accuracy that it is a lie.
Not even the adequate terms to address war crimes in Palestine have been used appropriately in different parliaments around the world. The Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote that "the closer one looks, the more Netanyahu resembles Trump," in the worst sense. The article states that "about eighty percent of Israelis blame Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition government for the Hamas catastrophe, according to a poll by the Hebrew newspaper Maariv."
In Brazil, Congresswoman Carla Zambelli – a woman born to be a donkey and who will never become a mare – published an image depicting a US and Israeli eagle attacking a Palestinian rat. I am persuaded, by myself, not to expect this human project to grasp the enormity of its own bestiality.
Faced with nominal lists of thousands of civilians killed by Israel, the response of the “world” is so weak, languid, flaccid. Perhaps this is the moment for this awareness: we are incapable of preventing violence merely by knowing that violence exists. I am warning you now: in the coming hours, Palestinian children will be brutally murdered or maimed, and those who survive will have witnessed their families and friends explode. Knowing this changes absolutely nothing.
A few hours ago, a Palestinian boy went to retrieve a ball when a bombardment occurred directly behind him. His nephew’s back was injured. But the nephew is better off than Saleh al Qaraan, whose head was obliterated in the explosion.
Accustomed to daily encounters with animal posts on Instagram, I saw a tabby cat leap onto the lap of a Palestinian man, where the pale body of a dead child lay. The kitten nestled in, closing its eyes. This, alongside the mother, who, with the dead baby wrapped in white cloth, refused to cease kissing it. Or the countless videos of children experiencing panic attacks within hospitals.
On an individual level, my work or yours against the war seems insufficient. We cannot count on, at least not now, the prudence of the wise finding a space on the world leaders' agenda. But whether or not we defend Palestinian civilians, now, at every opportunity, speaks volumes about what we have learned about our own wickedness.
