:: How To Fabricate Racism

I live in São Paulo due to a circumstance I owe to Saddam Hussein. I'd better explain that. With the advent of the Gulf War, Folha de São Paulo created a special section to cover the events in the Middle East. Once the war was over, that section remained as part of the newspaper. International news got its own space in the paper and it was in this space that I came to work

My first war was the Yugoslavian one, during the days of its independence from Croatia. Our correspondent in charge of Eastern Europe was then sending his stories from Berlin because this business of covering wars from the front is too risky. Around three in the afternoon his dispatches started coming in, based on the news featured in the morning papers. This meant that newspapers were written yesterday, the actual news happened the day before yesterday and the Brazilian readers would read them tomorrow. The news agencies, more agile, sent us some others, fresh from the oven.

As editors, our job was to replace the lead of the reporting with hot material. At around five in the afternoon, those dispatches had already dropped to the bottom of the story. When Gabeira reported that the Yugoslavs were planning an attack, we already had the targets destroyed and the airplanes back in their bases. The war coverage was actually done in the newsroom at Rua Barão de Limeira, in São Paulo, a location that was, in a way, closer to the facts than our correspondent in Germany. In the end, sometimes not even a line of the original dispatch survived. But the story was published with the signature of "our special envoy".

In December 1991, the newspaper got another correspondent in Berlin. On one occasion, she sent an excited report about the Dubrovnik bombing by the Croatian Navy. The bombs fell in my hands. I called Berlin and asked the young lady to check her facts. Croatia did not have a fleet and would not have any reason to bomb its most beautiful city.

"But I can read it right here in front of me, with my very eyes, on television, the Croatian Navy is bombing the coastal areas". I asked her to check it further, since we still had an hour to close the section. Twenty minutes later, her tone was bashful. "Well, it's actually the Yugoslav Navy". The eyes of the brave war correspondent, as beautiful as they could be, were mistaken.

These memories come back to me on account of a mail from Andrea Gruber, a Brazilian residing in Vienna, who arrived at a melancholy conclusion: "During my whole life, following the news was a complete waste of time; I don't believe in anything anymore". Come on, Andrea, international news is a matter of faith.

In the 1990s, our newspapers used to publish every Monday or Tuesday an update on the slaughtering going on in South Africa. Every weekend we had about twenty or thirty black people dead. It became such a routine that the deaths were no longer worth headlines. A small note, usually nine lines, at the bottom of the page, was enough. With no information whatsoever about who was doing the slaughtering. Several times, the same sentence followed the beginning of the story: "Racist leader Eugene Terreblanche has declared that…" Readers were thrown thirty black corpses right on their faces, plus the news that a white leader, unfortunate enough to be named Terreblanche at birth, had said something.

For the reader, it became clear that the whites of South Africa, led by some guy called Terreblanche, were slaughtering the blacks. What was actually happening was that blacks were being massacred by blacks as a result of tribal rivalry, instigated by the weekend booze. This detail was omitted. If in South Africa blacks were wiped out, the murderers could only be whites. European whites and, therefore, racists. Because an African racist, by definition, doesn't exist.

One of the most disturbing cases of manipulation of facts took place during the European summer of 1993, in Holland. At the staff meeting, everyone was excited. A Moroccan girl, Naima Quaghmiri, nine years old, had died when she fell into a lake in Rotterdam. Two hundred people were reported to have watched her drowning without offering to help. The director held the telex up and shook it with fury. The idea was to produce a headline such as DUTCH RACISTS LET AN IMMIGRANT'S DAUGHTER DIE. Once more, the bomb landed in my hands. The news was absurd. Two hundred people do not watch passively as a child drowns. The lake, shown in the picture to be a kind of dam, was shallow. In the middle of the lake stood a fireman, with water by his waist.

Every piece of copy featured in an online newspaper, even when it doesn't have a printed signature, has an electronic signature so that the author can eventually be held responsible. I refused to write that obvious distortion of facts. I tried to show to my colleagues how incongruent the report was. But it was in vain. The intention was to denounce European racism. Another editor wrote the piece. Two days later, a new dispatch rectified the previous one. There had been no girl drowning and no two hundred Dutch watching. Naima had drowned many hours before. Policemen and firefighters had asked the vacationers to form a semi-circle, holding hands, and walk the extension of the lake and look for the corpse. The vacationers refused to do so.

I asked the editor if the report would be rectified. "It's not necessary"—he said—"Tomorrow nobody will remember this anymore." But journalism is the recording of the stories and it is in the archives of the past, I argued, that the researchers of the alleged tomorrow will search for information for their essays. "We only get to find out what really happened"—the editor said—"months later. That's the way journalism is".

When they start rummaging through newspaper archives, future researchers will learn that Holland was a small European country inhabited during the last century by white racists cruel enough to deny help to a Moroccan child who was drowning. This was confirmed by Folha itself. In 1994, in an article about racism, one of its editors again mentioned this story as if it had been actually true.

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Translated by Tereza Braga