News Agressivo

Throughout South America, as fledgling democracies struggle to govern in difficult economic times, an activist kind of journalism is increasingly filling the power vacuum. It is a passionate form of reporting that does not always follow American rules of objectivity.

* In Bolivia, the TV show The People's Court sends camera crews to stalk men accused of beating their wives. It also investigates exploitation of Indians, a topic ignored in the past.

* In Argentina, reporters have uncovered so many scandals involving government officials that the administration of President Carlos Menem has counterattacked, filing nearly 100 lawsuits against journalists (see "Argentina: a Fix on Corruption," CJR, May/June 1992).

* In Venezuela, a reporter's expose of corruption led to the resignation of President Carlos Andres Perez.

But nowhere is the trend more visible than in Brazil, where the press was unleashed after 1988, when a new constitution formally ended more than two decades of military rule.

Last December, an expose by Veja, the nation's leading newsmagazine, played a key part in the downfall of President Fernando Collor de Mello.

At the Rio daily O Povo Na Rua (People On the Street), city editor Antonio Carlos Cardoso sends reporters daily into slums, or favelas, to report on homicides -- in hopes, he says, of forcing official investigations, which the police are slow to make without pressure. Critics of this new brand of journalism note that O Povo banners each front page with gruesome close-ups of victims -- a practice Cardoso defends by saying that his newspaper is the only one that "shows how the poor live and die."

Each weeknight, meanwhile, television anchor Boris Casoy interrupts his narration of the news to turn to the camera and rail against government corruption and empty promises, lambasting policy makers as "shameful" and calling Brazil the "paradise of impunity." Casoy's trademark rage makes him a kind of tropical Howard Beale, the newscaster in the 1976 film Network famous for yelling "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore."

In a recent Brazilian political cartoon, an adviser tells President Itamar Franco that, to regain his popularity, he must be "more agile, straightforward, and decisive."

"You're right," the president replies. "The first thing I'll do is exchange my entire cabinet for those reporters at Aqui Agora."

Brazilians understood. Aqui Agora, Portuguese for Here and Now, is the heavyweight champion of South America's new subjective and aggressive brand of journalism. For U.S. viewers to understand the show, it helps to imagine a Tom Brokaw who is perceived by the working class and by the poor as their advocate, capable of doing what public agencies and politicians can't. Imagine Brokaw arriving in south central Los Angeles and being met with chants -- "NBC is here!" "Justice! Justice!" -- as he listens to local residents' complaints about the police, government agencies, or shady businessmen. Finally, imagine him accompanying them to the offender's office or home for an on-camera confrontation. And, sometimes, getting results.

"Aqui Agora's secret is it knows people's tastes, fears, wants, and ghosts," says a recent article in the French magazine Actuel. "It is populist, exaggerated, sanguinary, demagogic, theatrical, chaotic."

Critics of Aqui Agora call it Robin Hood's evil twin: "It exploits the poor to give to the poor. It's a circus," writes a columnist for the daily Folha de Sao Paulo. That was certainly true when the show debuted in 1991. Its network. SBT, a rival to the giant Globo network, was accused of sensationalizing the news for the sake of high television ratings by focusing on crime, violence, and gory car accidents.

Six months later the format changed. Crime stories are still featured, but reports on such issues as inflation, pollution, and the deterioration of schools are interwoven with segments on shantytown drug raids, prostitutes coerced by brothel owners to abort pregnancies, and transvestites being stalked by a serial killer. People like it. Aqui Agora's popularity -- the audience has grown to 25 million -- recently spurred SBT to expand the show into two segments, scheduled before and after the network's prime-time evening news thus competing with Globo's more traditional nightly news show, as well as with part of Globo's most popular prime-time soap opera.

"Our goal is to break with the orthodox, pasteurized, American style of television journalism that everyone in Brazil copies, for a format that is more alive and spontaneous." says Marcos Wilson. SBT's director of journalism. "We aim to show reality."

While that reality is often sensational. Aqui Agora also features serious muckraking with an innovative cinema verite style in which the journalist describes the news as it unfolds. And, quite often, creates and shapes that news.

This spring, for example, an Aqui Agora reporter interviewed residents of a working-class neighborhood about their five-year battle against a polluting industrial laundry plant. During the segment, reporter Jacinto Figueira suddenly declares, "Let's go to the owner's house and get this thing settled." Next, viewers see a lively discussion between the owner, safe behind his iron gate, and some fifty irate residents. When the businessman agrees to clean up the problem in five months, several protesters are visibly upset. But Figueira counsels them: "You waited five years, you can wait five more months."

On camera, Aqui Agora reporters have berated Sao Paulo meter maids for writing up bogus parking tickets, persuaded a reluctant university director to meet with students protesting a hike in tuition fees, and negotiated between rifle-toting police and land squatters armed with pitchforks.

Aqui Agora has also brought something new to Brazilian television news: consumer affairs. Each evening, like a preacher in a Bible class, Celso Russomano cites one of the 119 articles in the 1991 code outlining Brazil's first consumer protection laws, then shows how unscrupulous merchants violate them. In recent weeks he has cajoled a bus company into paying for losing a passenger's luggage, talked a caterer into settling with clients who had paid for goods they had not received, and had a showdown with Brazil's minister of social security.

In the social security story, a would-be pensioner had made twenty-seven unsuccessful attempts to register at a Sao Paulo office before writing to Aqui Agora. Russomano accompanies him on the twenty-eighth visit. When the reporter is told that the only person qualified to help them has left the office, "This is shameful!" he declares. "How many times does this man have to come here? Doesn't anyone tell the truth in this country?"

Russomano then attempts to interview the state social security director, who refuses to talk to him. "I would be ashamed to be the minister of social security," Russomano says in a standup shot. "You there in Brasilia, you too will someday be a retiree." That was enough to get Russomano an interview with the minister, Antonio Britto. several weeks later in the nation's capital. Britto lays the blame on a dwindling budget but promises to register any name given to him by Russomano. "We'll wait and see what happens," the reporter tells his viewers, as the minister looks on.

Like his colleagues, Russomano goes way beyond U.S. journalistic standards when it comes to moral and legal judgments. In a country where law is based on the Napoleonic Code, in which the burden of proof is on the accused, Aqui Agora sometimes acts like a people's court. "Do you want to go to jail?" Russomano asked one hapless merchant in July. Crime reporter Celia Seraphim, accompanying police on a raid on a pornography theater that was illegally advertising its shows with public posters, castigated the theater owner's "aggression" against public morality and broadcast some customer's faces.

In July, Aqui Agora cameras taped for eleven minutes the plight of a sixteen-year-old Sao Paulo receptionist named Daniele Alves Lopes. While reporter Sergio Frias describes the scene, Alves sits calmly on the fourth-story ledge of a building, ignoring the pleas of a security guard to come down. When firemen attempt to rescue her, she jumps. "My God, my God, my God," Frias says, as the camera follows her flight through the air, all the way to the ground, veering away only at the last moment.

That evening the suicide ran as the final segment and was, as usual for the last segment, promoted throughout the show, this time with a warning that adults shouldn't let their children watch. The next day a pollster noted that the young woman's death had added three points to Aqui Agora's ratings in the Sao Paulo area.

"Their spokesmen say it's freedom of information, that they are only presenting facts." wrote psychoanalyst Jurandir Freire Costa in the Rio daily O Jornal Do Brasil. "But the body of an unhappy girl lost in urban anonymity -- is that the reality of a suicide? Or is it lucrative sensationalism?"

Accusations of yellow journalism are regularly aimed at crime reporter Gil Gomes. Each night Gomes tells another story of a murder, usually committed in the slums of greater Sao Paulo. (Gomes rarely lacks material; in the first four months of this year, 1,741 murders were committed there.) Against eerie background music, he recites his script in a theatrical growl, tossing in editorial opinions such as "Like all cowards, he ambushed her" and "This monster deserves to spend the rest of his life in jail."

Gomes takes viewers to the scene of the crime, retraces the victim's steps, and interviews witnesses, distraught family members, police investigators, and, if they have been caught, the alleged killers. In at least one case he took along the mother of a murdered girl to the jail cell of her accused murderer.

In America, to be told you are too involved in a story is an insult. At Aqui Agora, it's a compliment. Last April, reporter Sergio Frias arrived at a Sao Paulo home to find unemployed laborer Juracyr Helio standing on a veranda, holding a gun to the head of a one-year-old hostage and surrounded by some sixty armed policemen. Helio, who had a long criminal record for homicide and rape, had sought refuge in the child's home after being shot three times in a botched robbery.

Frias soon coaxed the wounded man into a trade -- himself, the reporter, for the baby. With a microphone in his hand and a gun being held to his head, Frias was hostage, negotiator, and reporter -- all on the same story until it ended quietly ninety minutes later.

Even Gil Gomes dropped his nightly murder story to cover the drama, which was Aqui Agora's main segment that evening. While Frias was answering reporters' questions after the standoff, Gomes followed the wounded gunman into an ambulance. There he began what would have been an exclusive interview, except that Helio passed out from loss of blood.

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