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Prof Msc Roberto da Silva Rocha Roberto da Silva Rocha, university professor and political scientist
The arnetism of modern journalism
Journalism is the fifth worst profession in the world according to an international list by a consulting firm (CareerCast.com) of the best and worst professions in the world, ranking 195th out of the top 200.
The cinema has a cast of true stories and fictions about unscrupulous journalism:
The Mountain of the Seven Vultures
Mountain of the Seven Vultures (1951) is the feature film that Billy Wilder made right after his greatest and most celebrated classic, Twilight of the Gods. The acidity of the previous film continues in the story of an unscrupulous journalist who does everything to regain prestige, delaying the rescue of a miner who is trapped in the rubble to feed on the commotion of the population of the small town where he went to work.
The Intoxication of Success
The Drunkenness of Success, released in 1957, is Alexander Mackendrick's (Death Quintet) first film in the US. Burt Lancaster (The Leopard) is the unscrupulous gossip columnist who finds Tony Curtis (Some Like It Hot) an ambitious young man to shadow him. It's one of the harshest criticisms of the system, and one of Lancaster's greatest film performances.
The sweet life
Federico Fellini (Eight and a Half) performed in La Doce Vida, a Roman fresco on the desire for celebrity. A journalist from humble origins faces a crisis of conscience as he is always on the lookout for high society gossip, using it as a source for his articles. Between his superficial work and his personal problems (such as his girlfriend's suicide attempt), a decadent and hedonistic society is shown.
network of intrigues
Directed by Sidney Lumet (A Dog's Day), Rede de Intrigas (1976) is the story of a news anchor (Peter Finch, from Horizonte Perdido) who, upon receiving the news that he would be fired, declares his intention to commit suicide. up in the air. As the ratings rise, the director decides to keep him in office. Another criticism of the media and the search for an audience at any cost. Peter Finch had already died when he was nominated for an Oscar for best actor for his role as the anchor. He was the first to be posthumously awarded by the academy in the category.
The Price of a Truth
The Price of Truth (2003) is the debut of the talented Billy Ray (Break of Trust). Based on real events, the film tells the story of journalist Stephen Glass (Hayden Christensen, from Jumper). As a young man, he managed to make the first team of the respected Washington newspaper The New Republic between 1995 and 1998. But, of the 41 texts published, 27 were totally or partially invented and copied. When the farce comes to light, an interesting discussion ensues about ethics in journalism, and how far an editor should go to defend his writer.
paparazzi
Bo Laramie (Cole Hauser) is a rising film actor. But, as success has its price, the star begins to be persistently pursued by photographers known as paparazzi, those who closely follow the lives of stars. Doing what they can to get the best and most intrusive shots, one of these attacks almost ends in Bo's death. After that, the actor decides to invest in revenge against these professionals. Especially one of them, Rex Harper (Tom Sizemore).
It all started, or intensified with CNN reporter Peter Arnett during the Iraq War, the second US intervention made by Pastor George Bush there, until it became a predominant school of modern journalism, from the broadcasts of the bombing events. incessant, massive and surgical attacks of the so-called 4th generation smart weapons in Washington's Iraq War arsenal: it was the beginning of unstructured, uncoordinated and totally voluntary journalism, bordering on a mercenary free lancer.
There is a type of category of procedures and processes of journalistic action that is predominant nowadays, mainly in journalistic reports, in which the articles appear without any preparation, without agenda, without continuity, without organization as if they were ingredients of a dough to be cooked without being material is cooked. Then this pasta is served raw, cold and without mixing. This is the style of modern journalism, which I prefer to call Arnettian.
Who is your creator?
Peter Arnett
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Peter Arnett
Peter Arnett in 1994.
Born November 13, 1934
riverton, new zealand
Nationality
Journalist occupation
Awards Pulitzer Prize for Journalism (1966)
Peter Gregg Arnett (born November 13, 1934) is an American journalist born in New Zealand, who began his career working for National Geographic Magazine and later rose to fame and prestige as a journalist for television networks, especially CNN, and correspondThe Associated Press's war wave, receiving the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for his work in Vietnam.
Arnett's early years in journalism were in Southeast Asia, especially in Bangkok, Thailand, at a small English-language newspaper in Laos.[1] After that, he went to Vietnam, where he started working for the Associated Press news agency and wrote important articles about the situation in the country and about the war that drew the ire of the US government.[1] Physically fearless, Arnett participated in several operations alongside the American troops, including the account of the traumatic battle at Hill 875, where soldiers tried to rescue another group surrounded by the Vietnamese where almost all perished in the combat, during the rescue.
His frontline articles, reproduced in hundreds of newspapers around the world, focused primarily on stories with ordinary soldiers and civilians, and got him into trouble with the US government for being considered negative to the cause of the war, causing General William Westmoreland, commander of US forces in Vietnam, and President Lyndon Johnson, pressured the PA to pull him out of Vietnam, to no avail. His most famous report of the war was the statement, given on 7 February 1968 by an unidentified army officer, that 'the village of Ben Tre had to be totally destroyed to be saved'. In 2004, right-wing writer Mona Charen would say in her book Useful Idiots that the statement was fabricated by Arnett.[2]
He was one of the few Western journalists to meet in Saigon when the city fell to North Vietnamese armies in April 1975, and he was with the invading soldiers who explained to him how they had taken the city in their last offensive of the war. .
Gulf War
Arnett's worldwide fame, however, came with the Gulf War, when he worked as a reporter for the cable television network CNN, and was the only journalist to cover the war live from Baghdad in the early days of the North's bombing. American to the city. His dramatic reporting was often done against the background of explosions and air-raid warning sirens, seen and heard around the world. Along with Bernard Shaw and John Holliman, he did a series of ongoing stories from Baghdad during the first intense sixteen hours of the war on January 17, 1991.
Although around 40 international journalists were present in Baghdad at the Al-Rashid Hotel, at that time only CNN had the means to communicate with the outside world due to the new satellite phone technology, available only to the station. The other journalists in the city, as well as his two CNN colleagues, left Baghdad within days, making Arnett the only foreign journalist operating in Baghdad. His reporting on the damage done to civilian facilities by the bombings was poorly received by the coalition command which, before the war, with its constant use of the terms 'smart bombs' and 'surgical precision', intended to project an image that the civilian damage in the bombings would be minimums.
On January 25, the White House made a statement that Arnett was being used as a disinformation tool by Iraqi intelligence and CNN received a letter signed by 34 members of the US Congress accusing him of being an 'impatriotic' journalist.
Among his most controversial reports, the famous one about the bombing of a milk factory for children, supposedly identified by the intelligence of the Coalition forces as a bacteriological weapons factory.
During the beginning of the war, he also managed to conduct an interview with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
The Gulf War became the first war to be seen live and entirely on television, and Arnett had the merit, luck and prestige of being the only one, for five weeks, to broadcast a war seen from the 'other side' alone. .
Personal life and honors
In addition to the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism received for his stories in the Vietnam War, he was awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit by his country of birth and had the privilege of being the first journalist to broadcast a report on high definition television during his coverage of the US invasion of Afghanistan in December 2001.
Arnett was married for nineteen years (1964-1983) to a South Vietnamese, Nina Nguyen, with whom he had a couple of children. His daughter Elza is also a journalist and has worked at The Washington Post and Boston Globe..[3]
In 1994, he wrote the bestseller Live from the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35 Years in the World's War Zones, in which he tells stories of his work as a war correspondent in places as in the world such as Vietnam, Laos, Indonesia, Cyprus, Iraq and Afghanistan.References
1. ↑ a b The Death of Supply Column 21 Columbia Journalism Review
2. ↑ "Peter Arnett: Whose Man in Baghdad?", Mona Charen, Jewish World Review
3. ↑ Live from the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35 years in the World's War Zones.
As it turned out, it was the material circumstances and especially the political work of Peter during the Gulf War, the Iraq War, that forced Arnett to invent a new type of instantaneous journalism, without revision work, radical, visceral, without agenda, without agenda, without planning, without analysis, in short, a torrent of data that often did not contain information, other times it was information without context, a jumble of images and confusing reports like a movie without text, without script and without script.
It was the precarious circumstances that forged this type of journalism. At the same time that he fought against the control of information by the US Government military and was careful not to break any secret that would jeopardize the efforts of US troops, he could not have a very accurate idea of the eventual damage that his information could cause. cause to the cause of war.
But that was not his concern, but to survive in order to pass on to the spectators his testimony of the Gulf War. This he did.
The consequences of this journalistic technique were revolutionary! They have corrupted the foundations of journalistic information everywhere!
Informative journalism is formatted through agendas based around a group of basic questions essential for the integrity of information, which are the search for answers to the following questions:
to whom?
b) What?
c) When?
d) Where?
it's because?
f) How?
g) How many?
h) Which?
i) For what?
Any text or journalistic article has to answer and minimally cover these questions to deserve the title of informative text with consistency. Anything other than that doesn't deserve the certification of professional journalistic work, any average student of communication knows that.
I go further: scientific methodology requires, among other things to guarantee the internal validation of the text, whether it is a draft, a dissertation, or an annotation, that relative pronouns are duly replaced by nouns, and that no concessions are made to subjectivity, mainly to value judgments.
What we see today, and what we saw in Peter Arnett's invention, was, at the very least, a complete lack of commitment to the accuracy of the information that came in raw form, without formatting, without revision and mainly without meeting the requirements of scientific methodology and basics of structured and correct information.
The mistakes made during the avalanche of loose, spilled words by Arnett became a mantra for modern journalism that found itself free from providing information, or even organizing it: The pattern of modern journalism consists of the following script;
a) the news anchor presents the headline;
b) then the live journalist is stoned to intervene to detail the headline;
c) what is seen, then, is the repetition of the headline by the journalist-reporter, previously announced by the anchor of the newspaper;
d) the journalist-reporter starts interviewing the actors and witnesses about the fact that is the subject of the main headline, then the interviewee is accused and urged, induced by the reporter, to respond and confirm the facts and data already announced by the anchor headline and repeated by the reporter who challenges him live;
e) so other passersby are likewise urged to repeat the same facts induced by the intervention conducted by the live reporter;
f) finally an expert is introduced on the scene and led, induced, by the questions directed by the reporter or the anchor to repeat and confirm the same information and data cited by the anchor, by the live reporter, by passersby, by the occasional witnesses.
This process is repeated ad nauseum until the end of the news program or television documentary.
Previously, communication schools called, and still alert students, to the special type of visual and auditory media that is television and video media in general, which, unlike radio, have in the image their main informative force, the words. enter, or should only enter, as an auxiliary audio secondarily to explain and inform what cannot be deduced from the image, adding and detailing precisely the facts shown by the image.
When the opposite of this happens, what the communication masters call double representation happens: when the narrator restricts himself to describing what the image is already showing.
How many mistakes are made in this case of modern journalism inspired by Arnettian?
a) Dual representation;
b) Repetition of information, duplicity of information;
c) Lack of coordination, which implies a risk of contradictiontions and repetitions;
d) Lack of sequence of narratives. Lack of a thread in the narration;
e) Lack of accurate information on missing or incomplete items of journalistic information.
f) There is a lack of consistency in unreviewed, unchecked data and in a structured presentation of information.
This work method makes the information volatile, unreliable, disposable, ephemeral and disconnected from each other, which makes it useless as secondary reference material, as it does not use the field research method, as it lacks precision, method and planning.
The consequences of this process is that the cross-information from different sources differs in precision in relation to objective data, such as: time, date, quantity, volume, amplitude, in short, the accuracy of the data is totally compromised since there is no deadline or concern to check the sources and the data that are digested as they reach the Arnettian journalist-reporters.
The immediacy and immediacy of the dissemination of events prevail over the precision and over the content and formatting of the information.
Without a coordinator, without a director, without a scriptwriter, without a writer, without a reviewer and without a producer, the reporter assumes control and the center of the story, so we see a show of exhibitionism and narcissism parading in the place of the report where the reporter dominates the screen first. -plan for most of the space and time of the report, making it difficult and overlapping the images that should fill the space of the subject shown and illustrated there.
We have reached the era of the reporter-protagonist of journalistic material. In this new era, spectacle and vanity are what fill the aesthetic production, putting the journalistic material on the sidelines that becomes a mere pretext for the presentation and for the personal promotion of the journalist, eclipsing the characters, the scenario and the ongoing action that should totally dominate the screen, covering up the performance of the interviewees, aiming to show the astuteness and resourcefulness of the interviewer over the interviewee, in a complete inversion of interests.
Improvisation is the main strategy of the reporter in the field. Improvisation is the final stage that precedes, precedes and determines the final stage of the most complete decadence and organizational disintegration.
Before reaching this disorganized terminal stage, the organization has already become precarious, wandering through the firefighter stage that puts out fires, has already lost all control of its budgetary precautions, has lost control of planned functions and activities and, mainly, has lost control of expenses and revenue.
To escape this lack of control, the last word in organizational planning of the moment was created, which certifies companies according to their managerial competence, called CMMI: Capacity and Maturity of the Integrational Model of Business Administration.
CMMI consists of:
The Requirements Development process area identifies customer needs and translates those needs into product requirements.
The set of product requirements is analyzed to generate a high-level conceptual solution.
This set of requirements is then allocated to establish an initial set of product requirements.
Other requirements that help define the product are derived and allocated
to product components.
This set of product requirements and product components clearly describes the performance of the product, its design characteristics, and its verification requirements, so that the developer can understand and use them.
The Requirements Development process area provides requirements for the Technical Solution process area, where requirements are translated into product architecture, product component design, and the product component itself (for example, code and fabrication).
Requirements are also provided to the Product Integration process area, where product components are combined and interfaces are verified to ensure that the interface requirements provided by Requirements Development are met.
The Requirements Management process area maintains requirements. It describes activities to obtain and control requirements changes and ensure that other relevant plans and data remain current. In addition, it provides traceability of requirements from the customer to the product or product component.
Requirements Management ensures that changes to requirements are reflected in project plans, activities, and work products.
This cycle of changes can affect all other engineering process areas.
Thus, requirements management is a dynamic and often recursive sequence of events.
The Requirements Management process area is fundamental to a controlled and disciplined Engineering process.
The Technical Solution process area develops technical data packages for componentsthat will be used by the Product Integration process area or by the Supplier Contract Management process area.
Alternative solutions are examined in order to choose the optimal design based on previously established criteria.
These criteria can vary significantly for different products, depending on the type, operating environment, performance requirements, support requirements, and cost or delivery time of the product.
The task of choosing the final solution makes use of specific practices from the Analysis and Decision Making process area.
The Technical Solution process area builds on the specific practices of the Verification process area to perform design verifications and peer reviews during design and prior to final construction.
The Verification process area ensures that selected work products satisfy their specified requirements by selecting methods for their verification against specified requirements.
Verification is generally an incremental process, starting with verifying product components and ending with verifying complete products.
Verification also involves peer review, which is a proven method for effective and early removal of defects and provides valuable insight into the work products and product components being developed.
The Validation process area incrementally validates products against customer needs.
Validation can be performed in the real operating environment or in a simulated operating environment.
An important aspect for this process area is the alignment of validation requirements with the customer.
The scope of the Validation process area encompasses validation of products, product components, intermediate work products, and processes. Often these elements may have to be re-verified and validated.
Critical issues encountered during validation are typically resolved through the Requirements Development or Technical Solution process area.
The Product Integration process area contains the specific practices associated with generating the best possible integration sequence, involving the integration of product components and the delivery of the product to the customer.
Product Integration uses specific practices from the Verification and Validation process areas when implementing the product integration process. Verification practices make it possible to verify the interfaces and interface requirements of product components prior to product integration.
This is an essential event in the onboarding process.
During product integration into the operating environment, specific practices from the Validation process area are used.
Recursion and Iteration of Engineering Processes
Most process patterns recognize that there are two ways to apply processes: recursion and iteration.
Recursion occurs when a process is applied to successive levels of elements of a system in a systems structure.
The results of application at one level are used as inputs to the next level in the system structure.
For example, the verification process can be applied both to the complete end product and to major components, even to components that are part of other components.
The degree of recursion at which the verification process is applied depends entirely on the size and complexity of the final product.
Iteration occurs when process execution is repeated at the same system level.
By implementing a process, new information is created that feeds back associated processes.
This new information often raises issues that must be resolved before the process ends.
For example, there will likely be iterations between requirements development and the technical solution.
Issues that arise can be resolved by reapplying the processes.
Iterations can ensure quality before applying the next process.
As can be seen, the improvisations of the reporters' fieldwork cause irreparable damage to the quality of the journalistic work, and produce an extremely precarious level of quality for the spectator, who gradually brings down the television news programs.
The same can be said of the various auditorium programs and Talk Shows, which rely exclusively on the presenter's talent to fill in the gaps, surprises, unforeseen events and eventualities during the recording of the program, almost entirely formatted to produce snapshots of unexpected eccentricities that they become, with their bizarreness, the attraction of the program itself, where mistakes and gaffes become the macabre attraction of the media genre.
Improvisation is the key to failure.
Never improvise; if necessary, plan the improvisation; if it is unavoidable, rehearse the improvisation.
