COMMUNICATION-PORTUGAL: Politicians Take Over the Journalist Seat

By Mario de Queiroz Reprint | | Print |

Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Sep 4 2003 (IPS) - Journalists in Portugal are being displaced from news analysis and commentary by politicians, who media executives have taken by the hand in a bid to boost ratings. But media critics complain of sensationalism and conflict of interests.

The best examples of this approach can be seen on Portugal’s three major television networks, two private and one state-run, in which the "interpretive" spots in news programmes during peak viewing hours are hosted by politicians.

News anchors and reporters are consigned to the role of mere mediators of information.

Portugal has become a sort of guinea pig in testing this formula, which seems to be on the rise worldwide, says journalism professor Mario Mesquita.

"The very distinction between information and interpretation is beginning to disappear even in the Anglo-U.S. world," he said.

"In the past 30 years, the front page of the New York Times went from 90 percent agency-style news and 10 percent interpretive, to the exact inverse proportions," Mesquita said in an IPS interview.

Likewise, in Público, Diario de Noticias, Jornal de Noticias and Correio da Manha, Portugal’s leading dailies, it is political leaders who fill the pages with opinion columns and analysis of national and international news and issues.

The same displacement has occurred on Portuguese radio, such as the state-owned Radio Difusao Portuguesa (RDP), Renascença, of the Roman Catholic Church, and TSF-Radio Jornal, a media partnership.

The politicians-turned-news commentators on prime time TV programmes, who adopt the media style of presentation, "have been handed the role of interpreting themselves and their own actions." This creates confusion "between political actors and political commentators, and relegates real journalists to a secondary role," Mesquita said.

In Portugal, the European Union country where newspaper readership is lowest, this situation is especially evident in television news.

Mesquita noted that the phenomenon, which has gathered force over the last decade, was made possible by a context of "populist television news that operated in a similar vein to the sensationalist tabloid newspapers."

"This type of television programming is not European, but has emerged as a Portuguese style of South American inspiration," in a sort of informative soap opera, he said.

The state-run companies RDP and Radio Televisao Portuguesa (RTP) transmit signals to four continents via satellite, an attempt to reach as many Portuguese-speaking audiences as possible.

Both networks transmit 20 hours of programming daily to Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Sao Tome and Principe, and East Timor; to the former Portuguese enclaves of Gao, Diu and Damao in India; to Macao in China; as well as to Portuguese émigrés living throughout Europe, Australia and the Americas.

This enormous effort by a country with such a modest economy has come under fire from local media analysts, who also criticise the public RTP for imitating the model established by the private independent networks SIC and TVI.

TV critic Eduardo Cintra Torres says this communications model is "a sea of the dead, following a sea of fire (alluding to the recent spate of forest fires in Portugal), because it needs to be fed by more blood and more deaths" if it is to be successful.

Most television news programmes in the EU run a half-hour, while in Portugal, RTP’s lasts a full hour, SIC’s an hour and a half, and TVI’s main news show runs from 8 to 10 p.m. local time.

"In those incredible two hours, the few news items are stretched and repeated, reaching the point of fraud. They repeat months-old reports as if they were fresh news," Cintra Torres said in a recent edition of his column, "Olho Vivo" (Live Eye), in Lisbon’s Público newspaper.

But he says this conversion of news into "a real reality show" can be seen in other EU countries as well.

Such is the case in Britain, where the Sky News channel has gone so far as to use actors in a TV studio to reconstruct the legal investigations into the death of David Kelly, the scientist caught up in the controversy of the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The questionable circumstances of Kelly’s death are threatening the stability of the Tony Blair government.

On a daily basis, Sky News brings to the small screen "actors who re-enact the dialogues of the day, using the same words and the same intonations as those under investigation, who testify in the Royal Court hearings," said Cintra Torres.

Journalism professor Mesquita says that in Portugal "they turn to flesh-and-blood individuals to fabricate the ‘the image of the people’, which is what best serves the interests of the corporate, technological and economic powers that be."

The justification for this increasingly populist programming is based on the notion that "it is the result of the conjugation of audiovisual technological innovation with the free market." The academic says, "This is true, but not the whole truth."

It is also true that in "in the corporative doctrine everything is justified in the name of the people. A direct ‘people-TV’ alliance, in which television gives back to us exactly the popular image that television itself constructs," said Mesquita.

He adds that populist TV and sensationalist newspapers function "as a seismograph of the emotions, with the people in some cases breaking down in tears, in others, vengeful, euphoric or heroic."

In this context of massive audiences, Pedro Santana Lopes, mayor of Lisbon and one of Portugal’s best-known politicians, appears on television every Sunday in the role of "super- journalist", providing analysis of national and international events.

His aim, according to Cintra Torres, is to "use this public space to build his political career."

Others playing this role include a top executive of the governing Social Democratic Party (PSD, which is conservative- leaning, despite its name), who shares the table in the TV studio with José Sócrates, a member of the secretariat of the opposition Socialist Party.

The formula is not the classic debate between two schools of thought, taking place under the guidance of a journalist-host, but is a direct televised intervention that, according to Cintra Torres, "has the power to set the political agenda and even to define the steps to be taken."

Marcello Rebelo de Sousa, noted law professor and former PSD president, is the most famous of the politicians who have "invaded" the field of journalism.

His participation in the Sunday night news show on TVI has been dubbed "Sunday Mass" because, as Mesquita explains, "attendance isn’t obligatory, but whoever fails to show is marked absent."

Rebelo de Sousa "talks for more than a half-hour about any matter, from public health problems to Iraq to Chechnya, and on to tourism, literature or the latest football match of Real Madrid," said Cintra Torres.

The TV studio’s news anchor cedes his professional mission and allows the politician "to enter into circular logic or talk long on issues of little interest. The journalist plays the role of the passive student," said the media critic.

"This is the price we pay for having in this country – with the highest level of illiteracy in Europe (12 percent) – a TV network in which reporting is ever closer to tabloid journalism," said Cintra Torres.