Forthcoming book

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Media-Politics-Latin-America-Globalization/dp/1848856121/ref=sr_1_178?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276587208&sr=1-178

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Journalism-Political-Democracy-Brazil/dp/B003Z0BJUW

Resolvi começar a seção de poesia com o meu escritor favorito: Guimarães Rosa

Guimarães Rosa não ficou conhecido por sua poesia, mas pela prosa inovadora e personalíssima de livros como Grande Sertão:Veredas. Nas palavras do digno Manuel Bandeira, apesar de Rosa ter escrito poesia das mais belas, ele estava mais para bissexto contemporâneo quando o assunto era poesia propriamente dita e não prosa. Para quem ficou perdido com o que falei, é melhor não correr para pegar o Aurélio e procurar a expressão. A designação foi dada por poetas peso pesados como Vinícius de Moraes (setembro de 1942 na revista argentina Sur) para descrever um escritor esporádico de qualidade, daqueles que produzem dez poemas em toda a vida. E Guimarães Rosa se enquadra nessa categoria quando o assunto é poesia. Poucos sabem que ele estreou nas letras com Magma (1936), um livro de versos. Em ’61, apareceram no Globo, na crônica semanal assinada por ele alguns poemas de um certo Soares Gulamar, mas esse tal era o anagrama de Guimarães Rosa..... Seguem abaixo algumas poesias de Rosa. (a terceira é a minha predileta…bem, a “Adamubies” também….não dá mesmo para escolher!). Divirtam-se!


Pescaria

O peixe no anzol
É kierkegaardiano.
(O pescador não sabe,
Só está ufano.)

O caniço é a tese,
A linha é pesquisa:
O pescador pesca
Em mangas de camisa.

O rio passa,
Por isso é impassível:
O que a água faz
É querer o seu nível.

O pescador ao sol,
O peixe no rio:
Dos dois, ele só

Guarda o sangue frio.

O caniço então
Se sente infeliz:
É o traço de união
Entre dois imbecis.....



Adamubies?


Corpo triste
Alva memória
Tenho fadiga
Não tenho história.

Triste sonho:
Sonhar quero....
Pelo que espero
Tudo abandono.

Corpo triste, triste sono,
Faz frio à beira da cova,
Onde espero a lua nova
Como o cão espera o dono.


Ou……Ou……


A moça atrás da vidraça
Espia o moço paasar.
O moço nem viu a moça,
Ele é de outro lugar.

O que a moça quer ouvir
O moço sabe contar:
Ah, se ele a visse agora,
Bem que havia de parar.

Atrás da vidraça, a moça
Deixa o peito de suspirar.
O moço passou depressa,
Ou a vida vai devagar?


A Ausente Perfeita

Mal refletida em multidão de espelhos,
Traída pela carne e meus olhos,
Pressentida
Uma ou outra vez, quando
Consigo gastar um quanto de minha
Pesada consolação transitória
Poderás ser:
A ave
A água
A alma?



Para quem quiser reler obras-primas, leiam também. Tudo bem, admito, a minha vida de jornalista “pau para toda obra” só me deu tempo para reler dois livros, Grande sertão:veredas e Primeiras Estórias.

Grande sertão:veredas
Manuelzão e Miguilim
No Urubuquaquá, no Pinhém
Noites do sertão
Sagarana
Primeiras Estórias

Livro conta um pouco dos rígidos costumes ingleses dos anos 70

Um Experimento Amoroso*
Carolina Matos

As famosas peripécias sexuais, os rompimentos com rígidas normas sociais e o ceticismo em relação às tradições religiosas foram alguns fatos que marcaram os anos 70 no Ocidente. Um período conturbado e rico que já foi dissecado em inúmeras peças de teatro, programas de TV, obras literárias e teses acadêmicas. A Inglaterra, por exemplo, parece somar a obsessão de olhar para o próprio umbigo com a reavaliação quase nostálgica destes anos que antecederam o Thatcherismo. Nos anos 90, os lemas são a moda neo-hippie, o partido do primeiro-ministro Tony Blair tentando criar o “novo” sobre o “velho” trabalhismo e produções de TV revendo a época da boca-de-sino, em programas como The Buddha of Suburbia (“O Buda dos Surbúbios”, BBC2,1993), adaptação do romance premiado de Hanif Kureishi, que também escreveu My Beautiful Laundrette (Minha Adorável Lavanderia,1985), dirigido por Stephen Frears. Traduzido para o Português pela Editora Record, o livro Um Experimento Amoroso (238 páginas), sétimo da escritora inglesa Hilary Mantel, usa os anos 70 como pano de fundo para contar a história de Carmel McBain, uma garota de classe média baixa do norte da Inglaterra que consegue vencer barreiras sociais e conquistar uma vaga na Universidade de Londres.
Ganhadora de vários prêmios na Inglaterra, entre eles o Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize (1987), Hilary Mantel mantém o estilo cético e irônico dos seus livros anteriores, Oito meses na rua Gaza e Mudança de Clima, e os seus temas prediletos, como a perda da fé, as angústias terreais e o olhar feminino predominante e peculiar. O seu quase sarcasmo e deboche são retomados em Um Experimento Amoroso, um livro com traços autobiográficos que centraliza a ação em relatos psicológicos que hesitam entre três passados da personagem principal, Carmel McBain: a sua tediosa infância no primário numa cidadezinha industrial do norte; a batalha para obter uma bolsa e ingressar num rígido e antiquado colégio de freiras, e os seu esforços para se destacar como advogada- -rumo-a primeira-ministra na Universidade de Londres no final dos anos 60.
Os clichês desta época áurea estão todos lá, embora vestidos com uma outra roupagem: o conhecimento entre as mulheres universitárias do preço de um aborto, os ataques às “Sofias” – hoje leia-se “Patricinhas”- que queriam casar com os “Rogers”(os “Mauricinhos”) depois de formadas, e as regras rígidas da etiqueta inglesa, como as que obrigavam as meninas a não serem gulosas. Carmel acaba sucumbindo à imposição dos costumes ingleses e mergulha na anorexia, levando-a no final à tragédia. As conseqüências são uma justaposição da perda da fé à um ceticismo intelectual que não a leva para Downing Street, mas para uma casa de família.
Boa nas frases de efeito e nas descrições dos conflitos pessoais de Carmel, Mantel peca por ter uma visão demasiadamente “inglesa” do mundo e de seus personagens, o que dificulta uma narrativa mais envolvente para um leitor não-inglês. Filha de pais nascidos na Irlanda, a rígida mãe de Carmel parece resumir o estilo literário da própria autora quando diz que ela parece uma “inglesinha” de tão fria que é. Mantel nos oferece sempre uma visão um tanto superficial e distante dos seus personagens, principalmente das outras duas garotas que foram criadas com Carmel na sua cidade natal e também conseguem uma bolsa em Londres, Karina e Julianne. A primeira é descrita como sendo filha de pais imigrantes – cuja nacionalidade seria “russa”, mas nunca se sabe ao certo. Karina é o objeto do desprezo de Carmel, que prefere a companhia da esnobe Julianne, uma menina de classe média alta que a “cada dia acorda em uma cama diferente.”
Apesar de ter a intenção de desvendar as conservadoras barreiras que separam as classes sociais inglesas e tolhem a ambição feminina, Mantel se recusa a ter uma visão crítica da famosa repugnância de muitos membros da classe trabalhadora inglesa por imigrantes, e ainda o desejo de ascensão social de muitos na associação com elementos da burguesia, coisa que o ator John Cleese explorou bem no célebre seriado inglês Fawlty Towers (BBC1,1969). Em O Experimento…, a autora parece optar pelo caminho simplista das rivalidades pessoais, o que faz o ódio de Carmel por Karina ser reduzido a justificativas pouco consistentes, como o fato da menina “comer gordura” e ter pais que não falam inglês direito. A autora acaba reforçando os clichês das quais ela mesma parece querer combater. O seu livro anterior, o thriller policial Oito meses na rua Gaza(1988), também inovou muito pouco na visão que o mundo tem do Oriente Médio, alimentando os batidos estereótipos de uma sociedade feudal mergulhada em um islamismo fanático, ignorando a interação complexa e confusa de um modernismo que cresce com furor ao lado do tradicionalismo conhecido.
Em tempos de pós-feminismo, a autora parece esquecer ainda a relevância de problematizar o universo masculino, mesmo se for a título de botá-lo em xeque com o feminino de inspiração feminista. Os homens em O Experimento Amoroso ou são os “Rogers” que circulam clandestinamente pelos quartos das moças no dormitório da universidade ou são os machistas e pedantes esquerdistas do Partido Trabalhista, que não dão a palavra para as mulheres companheiras. Apenas o namorado de Carmel é individualizado, embora receba o mesmo tratamento superficial dispensado às outras meninas. Desta forma, O Experimento Amoroso enquadra-se entre a boa e precisa descrição dos conservadores costumes ingleses e dos conflitos de uma adolescente em amadurecimento, mas perde o impacto das críticas e desestimula o envolvimento do leitor por suas dificuldades em transpor as fronteiras nacionais e explorar mais os personagens devidamente interagidos com o meio social e os famosos anos 70!

* Crítica publicada no caderno Idéias do Jornal do Brasil, no dia 27 de novembro de 1999.

Smith: an icon of pos-modernity

Carolina Matos

Any criticism of Kevin Smith’s (Born, New Jersey, USA, 1971) films must necessarily be in the past tense. Viewed by many critics as an ex-auteur and independent filmmaker, Smith is that type of director that entered Hollywood after making a few original loud-mouthed, witty, sexy and hilarious films, the so-called New Jersey trilogy. His main achievement was bringing the importance of dialogue back to the core of cinema, at the expense of the camera. A fan of Stars Wars and teenage comic books, Smith was not influenced by other auteurs, like “Eric Rohmer and Jean-Luc Godard”, as he himself puts it, but rather by the likes of Spike Lee and the new Richard Linklater (of Slacker).

Averse to film theory, Smith dropped out of Vancouver Film School claiming not to have learned anything about film. Clerks (1994) popped up and changed the picture. However, Smith is pointed out by critics to be much more of a writer than a film director. Critics have compared his witty dialogue with that of Quentin Tarantino’s. Clerks was the first film of the New Jersey trilogy and was automatically acclaimed internationally by critics. It won prices both in Cannes (the Young Director’s prize) and at the Sundance Film Festival (the Audience Award Trophy). Passionate about writing since high school, Smith combined a personal tale – since 19 he used to work as a clerk in a convenience store in New Jersey – with a lewd dialogue and youth humour that resulted in the cult Clerks. The ‘story’ of the making of the film has a sense of déjà vu: it was made on a low budget of US$ 27.575, with pals Scott Mosier (producer), David Klein (director of photography) and unprofessional actors, winning in the end the 24 year-old director two prizes and a cult status as an independent author.

Centered on the sexual ups and downs of two young clerks of diverse personalities, the film has strength in its humour and original dialogues, eccentricity of its costumer-characters and in the first screen appearance of the pair Jay and Silent Bob, the latter played by Smith himself. Brought to life by friend Jason Mewes and Smith, the characters first appeared in comics that Smith produced, Jay and Silent Bob and Clerks: The Comic. Feminine promiscuity, male relationships, sex talk and discussions about Star Wars are the main subject matters of Clerks, which also provides the viewer with hilarious moments. In Clerks, the lack of a more visual sensibility can be taken up as a challenge to the argument that cinema is all about image.

Although maintaining the sharpness of Clerk’s dialogues, the next “sequence” of the New Jersey trilogy was disappointing. Aimed at a teenage audience, the mainstream Mallrats (1995) was Smith’s first studio picture. It was financed by the former Universal/Polygram joint venture Gramercy. Mallrats also starred Beverly Hills 90210’s Shannon Doherty and the American skate-boarding champion, Jason Lee. The film marked the start of the friendship of Smith with one of the actors, Ben Affleck (also of Chasing Amy (1997), who would later write, with Matt Damon, the Oscar winning screenplay of Good Will Hunting.

The funny and “politically incorrect” Chasing Amy (1997) reclaimed Smith’s authorship among international film critics. Starring the three leads of Mallrats – Affleck, Joey Lauren Adams (as Alyssa Jones) and Jason Lee (as Banky) – Chasing Amy was both a cult hit and a mainstream success. Based on Smith’s personal experience, the story explores the difficulties of contemporary liberal relationship through Holden, a young romantic hero and comic-book writer of Bluntman and Chronic who falls head over heels in love with a lesbian, Alyssa, played by Smith’s then girl-friend Joey. Like much of Smith’s films, Chasing Amy depends on the formula of two guys talking bluntly about sex and making dick jokes, but it is his most serious work to date. Alyssa and Banky’s duet about injuries incurred during cunnilingus and the riffs on Star Wars mythology during the initial comic conference are some of the film’s high points. The characters Silent Bob and Jay are there again, with Bob (Smith) telling once more the ‘moral of the story’ and explaining the film’s title.

Chasing Amy opened definitely the doors for Smith to go to Hollywood, but for radical critics it seemed to signal to the end of his author career. Arguably, Smith has not been as successful yet as a director in Hollywood. As executive-producer of Good Will Hunting, he managed to win his friends Affleck and Damon an Oscar for the screenplay of the film, but his new piece Dogma (1999), seen as a clear departure from his relationship movies, has not been acclaimed either by the mainstream or cult critics and has actually been attacked for its senselessness and lack of consistency.

Caught between the bitter line of Hollywood big blockbusters and an alternative point-of-view of questioning religion, Dogma tries do to both and ends up doing neither. Starring the same group of “friend-actors” of Smith’s last films - Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jason Lee and the funny duo Jay and Silent Bob, the only ones who manage to add some laughs to a humorless piece -, Dogma stands heavens away from Godard’s Je vous salue, Marie, Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ in terms of intellectual and insightful criticism of religion. The appearances of Linda Fiorentino and even of the icon of 90’s rock music Alanis Morrissette as God do not save the film from an inevitable catastrophe.

This intended satirical religious tale that proposed to discuss the loss of faith of mankind ends up sounding more like a teenager’s joke with its confusing and apathetic story of two angels who attempt to re-enter Heaven and see in the creation of a new church in New Jersey their chance, although on their way they go around killing people in the name of morality and are finally stopped by a black apostle, a descendent of Jesus Christ and the dirty-mouthed Jay and Silent Bob. The film created more of a polemic with The Catholic League watchdog and with Disney distributors than it did with critics, who were more agitated for considering it a bit of a flop in comparison to Smith’s earlier cult work. It is not surprising then that Smith’s future as an independent filmmaker, or of a Hollywood director that has not defined consistent strategies of work, stands on edgy ground.

Filmography (as Director)

Clerks (1994)

Mallrats (1995)

Chasing Amy (1997)

Dogma (1999)

Spike Lee: the angry voice of America?

Carolina Matos

Spike Lee (Born, Atlanta, Georgia, USA,1957) has been elected the angry voice of America by the mainstream white film industry and press. Polemic and self consciously radical in his commitment to an interaction of black nationalism with social realism within a style that has been deemed by lazy critics as a ‘MTV’ video production orientated one, Lee fixes his gaze on alternative black representations within a Brecthian and Jean-Luc Godard nuance and a folk-jazz, hip-hop, rap and youth urban culture aesthetics. Lee goes against the grain of the balanced filmmaker, stuck between action and emotion. Positioning himself midway between didacticism and dialects, Lee has challenged Hollywood with representations of black American life in the US, contributing to the treatment of race in the film industry as a living organism rather than a frozen entity and putting in the limelight films of other black directors, such as Jonh Singleton’s Boyz N The Hood (1991) and Mario Von Peeble’s New Jack City (1991).

Son of the respected jazz musician Bill Lee and of an art teacher, Jacqueline Lee, Shelton ‘Spike’ Jackson Lee studied mass communications at Altanta’s Morehouse College, where his father had been a classmate with Martin Luther King. The nickname ‘spiky’ was provided by his mother for his brusque character even in infancy. Spike Lee was introduced to film-making at the New York University, where he won the Student Academy Award prize for his project Joe’s Bed-Stuy Babershop: We Cut Heads (1983). His first student film was Answer (1980), a reverse of Griffith’s classic The Birth of a Nation (1915), which Lee claims was criticised by his teachers.

She Gotta Have It (1986) was Lee’s first feature film. A comedy, the film was about a young black female ensconced in a menage a quatre. It also highlighted the sexual stereotypes shared among black males. Directed, scripted and starred by Lee, the film was shot during 12 days with a low budget of US$ 175,000 dollars and won the best new director prize at Cannes. The exposure of black culture life disassociated from crime and drug-dealing within a new Afro-American semiotics of humour and style were seen as innovative. The treatment of gender identity conflicts within a race aesthetics combined with Lee’s hilarious performance as the bike messenger were some of the film’s high points. School Daze (1988) came out still in an atmosphere of hype with the director Spike Lee, seen by many as the new ‘black voice of America.’ Signalled by critics as artistically pallid and mushy, School Daze was somewhat of a disappointment in its wandering plot lines and overlong dance numbers. The difficulties of engaging a white audience were also felt in the film’s insider tone. However, the story of activism and interracial divisions in a black state college did well in the box office.

Notably, it was with the ground-breaking Do The Right Thing (1989) that Spike Lee was acclaimed internationally as a black independent film director. Do is arguably the most controversial and significant work of Lee to date. Inspired by the death of a young black man in the Italian-American community of Queens, in 1985, the film depicts the riots and racial tensions in New York. The story line centres on the pizza delivery boy Mookie, played by Spike, who works for the Italian-American Sal (Danny Aiello) in his pizzaria in the black neighbourhood of Brooklyn. The philosophies of the black leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King are used as competing forces which emerge in the conflicting voices of the younger generation, represented by the radicals Italian-American Vito (John Turturro) and the African-American Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), more identified with X, and also in the older generation, represented by Da Mayor (Ossie Davis).

Do is also Lee’s most musical film: music is used as a play of competing and merging voices. Lee posits Public Enemy’s music and rap style, which have been embraced by the mainstream, as politically oppositional and revealing of racial tension, identity and social position. Music serves in Do to challenge Hollywood’s conventional approach, which rests on the intentions of pleasing a passive viewer who is made to be unaware of the music’s manipulative potential. Lee also redefines Godard’s use of the ‘jump-cuts’ in Breathless (1959) by repeating several shots of blacks, Italians and Koreans as a form of emphasising the sameness of racial stereotyping. Adopting a Brecthian approach, Lee makes use of multiple distanced storylines to explore racism sentiments among America’s minorities. Do The Right Thing was nonetheless surrounded in controversy. The film was acclaimed by progressive mainstream critics as ‘screamingly funny’, ‘astonishing’ and ‘1989’s best film’, while others accused Lee of stimulating racial violence. In spite of the hype, the film did not receive an award in the Cannes Film Festival.

Mo’ Better Blues (1990) is a strictly inferior piece, artistically rigid and with a hollow plot that does little to captivate the viewer. Starring Denzel Washington in the part of the jazz musician Bleek Gilliam, the film adepts to deal with the problems of artistic expression, which are shown to be the result of forced junior years of studying the trumpet. Like School Daze, the film suffers this time from overlong jazz numbers. The impulse of playing an agenda that identifies a moral in an interracial romance is the motif of Jungle Fever (1991), Lee’s next ‘joint.’ Similary to Do, Jungle Fever is self-conscious and dependent on artifice and impact dialogues. Again, Lee uses in both films good black actors, such as Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes, stars which today are more identified with Hollywood mainstream cinema and action movies. In Jungle, Wesley plays a middle-class black architect who has an affair with his white secretary, the Italian-American Annabella Sciorra. Lee’s portrait of the impossibility of a successful amorous union between an interracial couple was received with disapproval by many critics, culminating in attacks of racism of the director.

First Hollywood epic about an African-American, the grandiose and symbolical Malcolm X (1992) did not live up to the polemic expectations of many whites and blacks. Deemed too tame and mythical, lacking in attempts of problematising Malcolm’s personality, the ore than three hour long film was a mainstream success among both white and black young audiences and the subject of many press criticisms. An adaptation of the classic Malcolm X autobiography written by Alex Haley, the film’s quality lies primarily in the conventional treatment if the epic genre. The outstanding performance of Denzel Washington as Malcolm and the glamourized construction of the main character as a mythical hero, rather than a complex political leader capable of mistakes, are examples of the film’s faithful commitment to its genre. Among critics, the film aroused neither favourable passions or strong attacks. This post-civil rights product, the result of an ultra-urban and neo-nationalist middle-class black American intelligentsia, raised both a priori discussions over its controversial potential and debates after its launch which seemed more interested in the complementation of its funding by African-American stars, such as Oprah Winfrey and Bill Cosby, than in Lee’s artistic and cinematic expression.

Still supported on the idea of the search for an African-American self-identity, Lee this time placed the issue within the personal sphere with the semi-autobiographical Crooklyn (1994).Although insisting that the story did not involve the Lees growing up in Brooklyn, Spike and his sister Joie and brother Cinque wrote the script based on their growing up experiences in the ‘70s. A systematic account of an African-American childhood, the film has been judged as ‘a haunting’ piece by critics, a delicate visual portrait of struggling childhood identities. A high oblique angle of the three kids when they are making their way to their mother’s funeral at the end of the film is one of these delicate moments that seems to come from the filmmaker’s memory.

In Clockers (1995) and Get on the Bus (1996), Lee experiments with changing film stock for different locales. Centring on drug addiction, street gang fights, pop music (Seal and Chaka Khan) and on the charisma of Harvey Keitel, the former follows on the old social-consciousness model of Do The Right Thing, but did not steer the passionate criticisms of Do. Nonetheless, critics where divided: some saw it as an overwhelming film, others found it unsatisfying. Get on the Bus has been identified as Lee’s most heart felt film. Delicate, instinctive and spiritual, the film uses the well-know metaphor of the journey to another town as a means of investigating character personality and development, and of calling for humanity and black activism unity. Unlike other earlier films, Get on The Bus places black women and black gay homosexuality at the centre of the narrative. This is perhaps the filmmaker’s attempt of self-criticism for centring black male chauvinism in his cinematic language (i.e. Do, Mo’ Better Blues, Clockers). One of the main characters on the bus, a prejudice chauvinistic black male that is heading with the others to a post-civil rights march in Washington, is finally beaten up by a gay activist who makes references to Lansgton Hughes and James Baldwin while giving the blows.

It is no surprise then that Girl 6 (19996) that came soon afterwards should have focused on the black female, although the mode is much more a post-feminist one and cannot be identified with any form of sister activism of the Civil Rights Movement. With a Prince soundtrack, the story is about a young female (Theresa Randle) who turns to telephone sex after many frustrated attempts of starting an acting career and ends up enjoying her job. The film’s strength lies more in the curiosity of the theme and the absurdity of the dialogues than in artistic expression per se. Following up on this revitalised ‘progressive’ approach, Lee turned his attention to documentary and to history of the Civil Rights Movement in 4 Little Girls (1997) with the help of the cinematographer Ellen Kuras. Weaving archival footage, still photography, swing-and-tilt lenses and interviews, the story investigates the emotional impact of the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young African-American girls and fueled further political activism. Lee’s most recent film, a discussion of killings in New York in 1977 called Summer of Sam (1999), has not attracted much publicity and is maybe one of many recent signs of the director’s present artistic instability and indefinition of his future potential.

Filmography (as Director)

Answer (1980)

Sara (1981)

Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983)

She’s Gotta Have It (1986)

School Daze (1988)

Do The Right Thing (1989)

Mo’ Better Blues (1990)

Jungle Fever (1991)

Malcolm X (1992)

Crooklyn (1994)

Clockers (1995)

Girl 6 (1996)

Get on the Bus (1996)

4 Little Girls (1997)

He Got Game (1998)

Summer of Sam (1999)

Crítica de Kevin Smith

Isaac Julien

Journalism and Political Democracy in Brazil

Paper: Journalism and Political Democracy in Brazil (extract)

Reuters Institute

University of Oxford

Many South American countries in the last two decades experienced significant political and social changes, embracing representative liberal democracy and the global market after having lived through relatively long dictatorship periods. After escaping from the tentacles of the military generals (1964-1985), which kept the country tied to an old economic model of state intervention and to a weak form of political institutionalisation with fragile freedom of expression, Brazil reduced the role of the state, diving into the waters of the market. At a first glance, the contemporary scenario seems to invite only optimism: the market permitted stronger governmental accountability and a means of safeguarding citizens from corruption. Political democracy was also consolidated, with full competitive and free elections held regularly. Certain groups of civil society players were included in the mainstream arena and a relative degree of press independence and freedom was achieved due to political democratisation and market expansion. The contemporary years nonetheless have been highly contradictory, with the market and the state and the various societal spheres being overwhelmed in tensions.

Media systems have thus been shaped by both market expansion and by the newly (re)gained political and civil freedoms which (re)emerged with liberal democracy. Due to the stabilisation of the country in the 90’s, economic liberalism was to a certain extent inclusive because of the emergence of a wider consumerist market and society in the aftermath of the dictatorship. Market liberalism afforded the means for the incorporation of broader segments of civil society as legitimate members of the country’s public sphere and as consumers. Political democratisation and market liberalism thus contributed on one side to improve political reporting in the press as well as having imposed restrictions on the proliferation of this same space of debate due to excessive commercialisation and political authoritarianism. Slowly however political reporting became more sophisticated and balanced, with public debate expanding amid the increase also of market pressures on news to lower quality standards. The commercial press in the last 18 years has thus experienced the tensions of attending to the public interest in response to political democratisation whilst maximising consumerism approaches to news. Thus if on one hand the democratic potential for the Brazilian media has grown in spite of the increase of media commercialisation, on the other hand there is still some way to go before a more representative democratic space is created in the mainstream media arena.

Given the favouring of the professional and objective journalism style over partisanship in the decades of the 1980’s and 1990’s, one might ask how did journalists manage to contribute to advance democracy and promote social and political change if they relied mainly on instrumental tools (professionalism) rather than idealistic ones (militancy)? I argue that journalists did make contributions to the democratisation process through the use of multiple journalism identities. Different journalism models – militancy and professionalism – had their purposes, contributing to advance democracy in different periods of Brazilian contemporary history. The professional model is thus not flawed and is actually more relevant than ever in an era of increasing media concentration, excessive commercialisation and growth of political authoritarianism. One should thus avoid putting all the blame on journalism liberal values for the crisis of journalism worldwide. The decrease of interest in public affairs actually runs much deeper and is a result of a series of factors which include the decline of the Enlightenment project, the increase in relativism, growth of cynicism, individualism and consumerism.

Arguably, clashes between the market and the state have marked the contemporary years. The mid-80’s onwards saw the Brazilian media regain its political independence with the end of the dictatorship in 1985. The decade of the 90’s saw also the definite consolidation of market-oriented news practices in newsrooms in the light of the emergence of the market as the main force of power in the post-dictatorship phase. The Brazilian press began to experience the tensions of attending to both citizenship and consumerism rationales, functioning as a restricted arena of debate of divided elites concerning the future direction that the country should take in the decade of the 90’s. Hallin and Papathonassopoulos (2003, 3) have identified similarities between the Latin American media and Southern European systems. Among common characteristics are: 1) the low circulation of newspapers; 2) the tradition of advocacy reporting; 3) the instrumentalization (political use) of privately-owned media; 4) the politicisation of broadcasting and regulation and 5) the limited development of journalism autonomy. All these points can be applied to the Brazilian media, although in the last years professionalism and balance have grown and advocacy reporting is slowly falling, but has not disappeared altogether, as the coverage of the 2006 presidential elections has shown.

Similar to European newspapers, dailies in Brazil have had a strong political tradition, something which has not been abandoned altogether in the contemporary years. Veteran journalists have elected the more militant active journalism style that resisted the regime as being superior to the current contemporary commercial US model that has predominated in the Brazilian media. The alternative press during the dictatorship functioned as a sort of political and literary sphere (Kucinski, 1991; Waisbord, 2000) and had in the alternative papers O Pasquim and Opinião their main representatives. These flourished during the dark years of the regime in Rio and São Paulo, with most of these dailies ceasing to exist after the end of the regime. The state controlled the media widely during these years, a fact which undermines also the nostalgic stories of press resistance to the dictatorship, something which occurred more sporadically. Most of the mainstream media at that time preferred to engage in heavy official reporting than challenge military generals. The rule was cooperation between media firms and journalists with the government and not confrontation. Thus because of fears of censorship, the mainstream dailies such as Estado de São Paulo (ESP), Folha de São Paulo (FSP), O Globo and Jornal Brasil, the ones which I have examined in the case studies of my research, found difficulties in conducting critical political reporting. This slowly started to change from the mid-80s onwards, with the direct elections campaign of 1984 and the support given to it by the daily FSP for instance indicating that the media were slowly assuming a new relationship of critique of public authorities and the structures of the state.

With the collapse of the dictatorship, press exposés on corruption and abuses of power left the domain of alternative newspapers and were incorporated by the mainstream media as a major trend of contemporary journalism (Waisbord, 2000). The last years have thus seen the increase of the publication of stories on government corruption, with politicians having been made more accountable at the same time that market pressures and the pursuit of personal prestige by journalists has led to the rise of denuncismo journalism (journalism of denunciation) and the increase of cynicism. Opposing debates also emerged concerning the extent of the contribution of journalists to the democratisation process. Radicals critiques have tended to be nostalgic of a supposedly “golden era” of journalism of critical debate that existed in the 1970’s in opposition to what they see today as being a highly market-driven environment. They tend to see the media in basically class terms and as being a mere reproducer of the values of the ideological apparatus, thus minimising the advancements that occurred in the journalism field in the last years and the contributions of journalists. Other journalists that I interviewed – and including myself, as I share this position – have tended to opt for a more “realistic” position, seeing the complexity of the various forces at play (the market, the state, civil society and journalism) and the influence that each had on the media in the context of the advancements and resistances that occurred throughout the years.

Objectivity and professionalism during this period contributed for a fairer and a more complex portrayal of Brazilian politics and society. Similar to the emergence of the objectivity regime in the US during the 1920’s, professionalism in Brazil can be seen as a progressive ideology which undermines partisan media. Professionalism permitted the Brazilian media to attempt to be more inclusive and sophisticated. Contrary to the US and the UK, who have built their communication systems under a strong tradition of media independence, the Brazilian media has encountered difficulties in consolidating the Anglo-American commercial model. The development of the freedom of the press arrived late and is still being fortified. According to Schudson, after the First World War a more sophisticated understanding of objectivity arouse grounded on beliefs that human beings cannot be objective, so they must strive to reach certain standard norms and practices. The rise is also linked to the dominance of scientific thought in Western civilizations, seen as vital for publishers who did not want to alienate readers and a necessity for journalists who wanted their work to be taken seriously. By the 1960’s, this value was an emblem of American journalism. Today the regime of objectivity has began to be wrongly criticised by radical critics in the West (i.e. Schudson, 1978; Hackett and Zhao, 1998), who seem to take liberalism and free speech too much for granted.

Professionalism can be experienced in Brazil as being a double-edged sword. It can be empowering at times of pressure from market forces or from governmental bodies, affording them more editorial autonomy, but it can function also as a tool that can be used by media firms to control the behaviour of journalists (Hallin, 2000; Curran, 2000, Soloski, 1989). According to Soloski (1989, 1991, 310), news professionalism controls journalists through the setting of rewards. Professionalism also means different things to different people (Curran, 1996, 101). The sensitivity of many journalists during the dictatorship period to the need to fight the regime was substituted in the re-democratisation period and further onwards for a professional pragmatism combined with an understanding of their role as journalists who can serve the public by engaging in investigative reporting, addressing social issues in the news pages and making use of professionalism. Journalists in Brazil since the 80´s have thus been caught in an endless dilemma, paying lip service to the professional model identified with American journalism, with its insistence on detachment, while also struggling with other progressive readings of professionalism and with partisanship and democratic militancy. Furthermore, if on one hand professionalism gave new credibility and seriousness to the journalism profession in Brazil on the other it put the journalist on a similar level to other liberal professionals.

Lichtenberg is one of the scholars who has revisited the objectivity debate and made a defence of it. For her objectivity is crucial if we aim to interpret and report a highly complex and changing world. It is also a way of permitting us to judge if one news story is ‘better’, or presents a more coherent and analytical picture of reality, than another. According to her (2000, 238), the main attacks on objectivity come from critics who say that the media have misrepresented their views, which implies that fairness can be achieved somehow. Arguably, it was precisely balance and fairness in political reporting that social groups and centre to centre-left-wing politicians who fought for democracy wanted from the Brazilian media. My research has pinpointed the differences between the “better” stories which portrayed the Brazilian reality in all its complexities to the more partisan and ideological pieces in the in-depth investigation that I carried out on the political campaigns and presidential elections of the post-dictatorship phase (1984-2002). These included the 1984 direct elections campaign; the first presidential elections of 1989 followed by the 1992 impeachment; the elections of 1994, which elected Fernando Henrique Cardoso and occurred amid the launch of a stabilisation plan and the 2002 contest which elected the first left-wing government since the 1964 military coup.

During the contemporary phase multiple journalism identities coexisted in newsrooms. The tradition of opinionated journalism maintained its influence, with Brazilian journalism being also shaped by various international journalism trends and infotainment techniques. Liberal market democracy has thus paved the way for the expansion of confrontational reporting, with the growth of the watchdog function and critique of authority being seen as important democratic tools for societies that until recently were highly submissive towards government. Thus despite all of its faults, the media provide Brazilians today with more sophisticated, analytical and critical information than before, with less representation of politics in strictly partisan terms. Balance thus functioned to impede the publication of false news and prejudices that could serve to maintain privileges. As I have argued also, the media to a certain extent also regressed, suffering from the (negative) impact of international journalism trends of infotainment and witnessing an expansion in media concentration due to excessive commercialization. These factors raise concerns again in relation to the limits that can be placed on the strengthening of the public debate arena which has been constructed with a lot of struggle. It stimulates debates on the fortification of a public media sector capable of serving as a counter-weight to the predominance of the commercial sector in the communication field as well as on the necessity to boast the creation of a complex communication system which can attend to the multiple interests of Brazilian society.

References

Baker, C. Edwin (2002) Media, Markets and Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Bardoel, Jo (1996) “Beyond Journalism: A Profession Between Information Society and Civil Society” in Tumber, Howard (ed.) News: A Reader, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 379-393

Brandford, Sue and Kucinski, Bernardo (1995) Brazil – Carnival of the Oppressed, Nottingham: Russel Press

Calhoun, Craig (eds.) (1997) Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, p. 1-50, 73-143, 359-402

Curran, James (2002) “Media and Democracy: The Third Way’’ in Media and Power, London: Routledge, p. 217-248

Foucault, Michel (1972) The Archeology of Knowledge, London: Verso, p. 21-76, 79-88, 141-148, 166-177

Hackett, Robert A. and Zhao, Yuezhi (eds.) (2005) Democratizing Global Media – One World, Many Struggles, Lanham, New York and Oxford: Rowman & Little Field Publishers, Inc., p. 1-37

Hallin, Daniel C. and Mancini, Paolo (2004) Comparing Media Systems – Three Models of Media and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 1-17, 21-86, 251-306

Herman, Edward S. and Chomsky, Noam (2002) Manufacturing Consent – The Political Economy of the Mass Media, New York: Pantheon Books, p. 1-37, 87-143

Lichtenberg, Judith (1991) “In Defence of Objectivity Revisited” in Curran, James and Gurevitch, Michael (eds.) Mass Media and Society, Arnold: London, p. 238-255