Violence: as seen by the press

Media professionals, journalists, editors, investigative reporters, blog writers, their decisions on how to report on violent events in the media affect what you see and what you read. You may or may not feel that your questions are being answered, that your experiences are being taken seriously. How to talk to you about violence was the topic of an international seminar held March 26th and 27th in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Rio in many ways poses challenges that media professionals are met with in other settings around the world. Crime headlines revolve around homicides, clashes among well armed drug gangs and various types of policing strategies, while close to a third of the city's population, residing in shantytowns, feel they live in the shadow of the big media outlets. The Rio seminar discussions ranged from the use of police sources to new media tools for greater social inclusion.

“The media faces similar problems when violence makes news in areas of social exclusion”, said Michel LaBrecque, Canadian journalist whose years of coverage of Latin America included the 2002 murder of Brazilian journalist Tim Lopes in Rio de Janeiro, adding that "these areas in Canada concentrate multi-ethnic immigrant groups, while in Brazil it is shantytowns, home to migrants.” One such challenge was the coverage of the Montreal Nord riots, when  the Honduran teen Frederico Villanueva was killed in a police shooting in August 2008.

“You would think insecurity is not an issue in Canada, but it is. How do we as news professionals portray neighborhoods where crime occurs? Is our coverage fair to residents? Take that to another level, how does our coverage of violence affect how we portray foreign countries? We must ask ourselves these questions,” said Michel LaBrecque, from Radio Canada.

“As a foreign correspondent, it is much easier to sell a story on violence in Brazil, say, than any other topic. We must find a balance between clichés and reality. The same goes for Canada. When we look at security in Canada, we are living a paradox.”

According to Labrecque, at less than 2 per hundred thousand inhabitants, the Canadian homicide rate is at its lowest in 40 years, roughly half the rate of its neighbor, the US. And yet Canadians say they feel the country has become more violent. “Although statistically it is not a dangerous country, new forms of violence are arising,” said LaBrecque citing demonstrations against police brutality in Montreal that made headlines two weeks ago.

In Labrecque's view the big media tend to associate immigrants to violence and see them as supporting terrorism, black youths in particular are also associated to gangs.

“When I interviewed Brazilian rapper and filmmaker MV Bill a few years ago when City of God came out, he had similar complaints: 'Sure there is crime here, where I live, but there is also normal life and there are a hundred other interested things.' We the media, need to show complexity.”

Social exclusion and divorce from the media

It was precisely to show complexity that Mauricio Segura, Canadian writer and journalist, that he convinced the Montreal paper L’Actualité to allow him to go into Montreal Nord, scene of the riots, and post a blog on life from the inside, “it was being given very little coverage”.

“People seem to confuse alternative journalism and promoting the ideas of community. Alternative journalism can be made in favelas and in the hoods, but they are two different things. Can mainstream journalism report on areas of social exclusion? I think it can.  I used the blog Montreal Nord to give voice to a community that at the time was seen practically like a ghetto”.

Segura went in everyday, and soon found that members of the community were interacting with him on the blog, were giving him feedback, correcting information that came out in the big media, posting their own blogs, becoming local reporters.

According to Segura, the mainstream media’s divorce from local reality was evident in a few episodes, such as when the media gave inaccurate reports that locals were fabricating bombs.

“The community of Montreal Nord was sharply divided with respect to the police for example. There was no consensus.” And among teenagers Segura reports a general rejection for all figures of authority, from police officers, to city administration, teachers and school boards, explaining that this extends to the media: “They see the mainstream media as defending the interests of this sphere of society”.

Active in community organizations in the area, Segura believes young people's reluctance stretches even to the written word. “We designed a program for youths to use blogs as tools of self expression, it did not take off. What really took off was film and music. We proposed they make documentaries and they took to it immediately.”

One successful case to put the web at the service of communities whose experiences are not covered by the media is Rio de Janeiro's Viva Favela website. "In 2001 when we first came out with the idea of getting the stories from inside Rio shantytowns people thought we were crazy. I still remember the journalist who asked me how did I feel publishing stories on the web that are not going to be read by people who wrote them. They were wrong back then, they are wrong now. Cariocas in shantytowns are hooked on the net, and have been for a while," said Tião Santos, coordinator of the civil society organization Viva Comunidade, and former editor of the site.

"In the begining we combined local reporting with journalists editing stories for publication, it sometimes meant getting material in handwiting. Many of our first contributors have since gotten degrees in journalism, and it is important to us that we continue to train locals to tell their stories," said Santos. The site has been widely hailed as a unique window into the culture and history of Rio favelas, "it shows the complexity and richness of local life that is ignored in the mainstream media," said Santos, pointing out that they were able to break from the media equation that makes favelas synonymous with insecurity. 

“If you do work for the mainstream media, how do you approach communities affected by violence but disaffected with the media?” Asked a journalist from Brazil's Santa Catarina state: “We took a camera crew into a community to ask locals how they saw clashes among drug trafficking gangs, no one would talk to us.”

Danger, the fine line between getting and becoming the story

“You really need to develop a knack for it”, responded American free lance journalist Steven Salisbury who has been covering Latin America for a number of years, based out of Bogotá, Colombia. Recounting his experiences approaching members of armed forces in conflicted areas of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Colombia, he advocated the basic premises of reporting: “Be honest, do not politicize the news, look for contradictions and put information into context. You can ask the tough questions in sensitive situations, you just have to make sure that you do it in a nice way,” said Salisbury.

A sensitive situation, in Salisbury’s experience has meant approaching masked protesters in a march: “Speak in a calm voice, look them in the eye, try to make human contact, it goes a long way.” It can mean being alone in a camp of illegal armed forces, conducting an interview while trying not to be manipulated into becoming a vehicle for propaganda.

Journalists must use the tools at his or her disposal to walk the fine line between getting and becoming a story. “When I was trying to contact the paramilitaries in Colombia, leads evaporated almost as they appeared. It took me a while, but eventually I decided to literally look them up in the internet. I found the webpage of the Autodefensas Unidas, and wrote them. Something in my text must have caught his attention, because I got an answer from Carlos Castañeda, leader at the time.” It was the first step towards an interview conducted across the country in the heart of the jungle.

But friendly sources can turn. During an interview with teenage sicarios (hit men) in Colombia,  the atmosphere soured and they toyed with the idea of killing him, it was being reported on by mainstream media that appealed to them. A live journalist can tell their story.

What do you call a teen involved in a crime

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro Professor and Head of the Communications Department Ivana Bentes took issue with terminology used in the media. Much of the language used in the mainstream media, Bentes argues, contributes to criminalizing poverty: “Why use the term “epidemic” of crime, if not to generate insecurity.”

Bentes questioned borrowing terms from public health models, without providing comparable data from statistical studies. Bentes voiced concerns shared by audience and speakers: In Brazil, when a youth from a shantytown is involved in a violent act he is called “minor” when the youth in question coms from the more affluent areas of Brazil they are described as “children”. When 14 year-old with a gun goes on a rampage is described as a gunman in international media sources, “what are the consequences?” she asked.

A return to intimacy with readers

One aspect that Rio de Janeiro crime reporter and Reporter do Crime blogger Jorge Antonio Barros feels is key, is that news media have to recover the contact they once had with their readers:

“There was a time when newsrooms were constantly open to visits by members of the public, they went directly to a reporter’s desk, looking for help to solve their problems, say getting with their pensions.”

It was a time, according to Barros, when big city papers helped bridge the gap between the average citizen and institutions of the state:

Better crime reporting is not the solution

“Big papers are still sensitive to readers’ opinions, they look at the letters section with an eye out for editorial choices, but you take a blog like mine and you see a return to intimacy with readers. You get good and bad reactions, but you get input from readers.” Barros commented that much of the success of the crime maps series published in his blog was because it opened a venue for people anxious to report crimes but distrustful of the police.

Head of the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalists and O Dia Columnist, Journalist Fernando Molica believes that while newsrooms may have lost contact with readers, journalists have over the past 50 years gained independence from police sources in crime reporting. But in his view, the fundamental issue is not to improve on crime reporting. The goal now is to see violence and crime through the prism of Public Security. He argues that just as the twists and turns of unemployment figures and GDP indices are reported on and analised in the media, the same quality of coverage should be given to human security.

“Just as in the past newspapers stories on the price of foodstuffs evolved into coverage of, consistent data, we need to monitor public policy, we must report whether goals in violence reduction are being met or not, and why.”

The event was organized by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, UFRJ, the Consulate of Canada and the Consulate of the United States of America.

Photos: Comunidad Segura