Brazil's Man in New York

...More to the central point, while many journalists from the underdeveloped world have as little regard for verity and fairness as Francis, his performance is especially frightening because he is neither a government apologist nor a "revolutionary" ideologue Once he espoused the views of Leon Trotsky, now he is simply a nihilist, disdainful of all existing tendencies and traditions Prior to embarking on his present career, he was a novelist, and his esthetic predilections still govern his political judgments...

...Thus he plainly informs his public in his daily dispatches that his American colleagues are "swindlers," that people in the States are in general "ignorant and uncultivated," and that their society is "infinitely corrupt " He "would prefer to die than to live as a black in the US" The mutual destruction of the superpowers "would be a great rliet to most of the world" were it not for the global dispersion of the nuclear fallout John Hinckley offers a "microcosm of the American soul " All in all, Francis announces confidently, he is observing a society that "has reached its end ". As for the "Western notion" that news should be accurate, Francis appears to have taken to heart Lenin's dictum that the "facts" often have nothing to do with the truth He writes, for instance, that although "nearly 70 per cent of New Yorkers earn $7,000 per year before taxes an operation in New York's Memorial Hospital requires a pre-admission deposit of $30,000 " "Thirty per cent of Americans do not know who the President is," according to another piece of his In the 1960s, "there were prayers in all American public schools " In the '70s, the New York Times "robbed" the Pentagon Papers At present "the mafia families are installed in all three branches of the [Federal] government ". Before the alleged murderer of the Atlanta schoolchildren was apprehended, Francis' sources told him "the current word is that the assassin(s) can only be the police or the Ku Klux Klan, which are nearly indistinguishable in the South ' At the height of the Solidarity movement, "there was a systematic campaign in the American press for a Soviet invasion of Poland " Military action by the Kremlin was thought desirable, apparently, because it would surely have put an end to detente, and this was giving European businesses an advantage over their U S counterparts...

...Elsewhere, this intrepid truth seeker tells his audience that the number of Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis is usually greatly exaggerated, and the Nuremberg trials were illegal Hannah Arendt, he claims, brought forward "conclusive proof of the complicity of rabbis in the slaughter of their people Referring to present-day rabbis in Israel, he says they "are notoriously corrupt any Jew will admit, in confidence, that a rabbi will permit one to eat unkosher food in exchange for a bribe ". Francis' pejorative allusions to Jews turn up as well in articles that ostensibly have nothing to do with them Upon the death of John Cheever, the correspondent complained that though the deceased was a much better writer than Saul Bellow or Norman Mailer, "you won't find that evaluation in American literary journals, dominated as they are by the sons of immigrants, who consider the suffering and death of wasps irrelevant in the face of [their own] 'existential' obsessions " Reviewing a book by John Updike, Francis says that to fathom the "bourgeois philistinism" of U S culture, "one must understand its literary establishment, which is governed by professors, Jews who rose through the ranks and who consider their urban-Jewish-academic sensibility the quintessence of America and the world ". It should be noted that, notwithstanding the widespread sympathy among the Brazilian public for the Palestinian cause and ideology, active anti-Semitism is not a serious problem here Nevertheless, Francis' ability to keep his job for several years now must tell us something about the feelings of his readership...

...After careful scrutiny of the Israeli domestic scene, Francis concludes, "The foreign policy of the military state [i e Israel] stems from internal tensions that no politician will touch, preferring to create imaginary enemies that threaten the existence of the state " "Israel's greatest fear,' he posits, "is a genuine detente between the U S and the Soviet Union, since that would have to involve a resolution of the Middle East question, which would only be to Israel's detriment " Turning his attention to the Palestine Liberation Organization, he maintains "there would never have been Palestinian terrorism had the U S not armed Israel to the teeth ". Not only the Israelis play a pivotal role in Francis' demonology The "Jewish colony" in the U S , particularly that part of it employed in the mass media, is no less evil and contemptible During the flap over the Hitler diaries last spring, Francis informed Brazilians that the New York Times and the Washington Post-both, as is well-known, thoroughly dominated by Jews-were disputing the documents' authenticity because they made no reference to the Holocaust, and if it were discovered that the Holocaust did not happen Germany would have no reason to continue its reparations payments to Israel...

...Mark J. Osiel, a PhD candidate at Harvard, is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Sao Paulo...

...Although Francis works out of New York, much of his reporting deals with the Middle East His view of that region reflects the current anti-Israeli consensus in the Third World, and at times goes a bit beyond it There are the by-now obligatory comparisons of Prime Minister Menachem Begin with Hitler, of the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon with Auschwitz and Dachau In addition, the Jewish State is said to closely resemble Iran, both strive to enforce a theocratic order...

...One might add that his quirkiness extends to his prose Sic is introduced after every quotation Francis disagrees with, often appearing 10 times in a short article The one-word dismissal indicates that he considers a statement too vulgar or absurd, and relieves him of the responsibility to refute it Clearly, with Paulo Francis as a highly visible prototype of the sort of correspondent we might expect under the New Information Order, those who have begun the difficult task of rethinking the reporter's role had best keep thinking...

...FAREWELL TO OBJECTIVITY Brazil's Man in New York BY MARK J OSIEL In International forums of recent years, Third World spokesmen have been calling with increasing vehemence for a "New Information Order " Many Western observers see in these demands' no more than a pretext for censorship or new restrictions on the importation of American mass media, and it would be naive to deny such motives exist...

...The question, of course, is what exactly will replace the discredited standard of impartiality'' The answer may be found in an example of the new Third World journalism par excellence provided by Paulo Francis, who is among Brazil's best known, most widely read journalists, and is fond of belittling "the myth of objectivity ". Brazil is Latin America's greatest power both economically and politically, and one of a handful of developing countries where the media is relatively unfettered Francis is the New York correspondent for the Folha de Sao Paulo, the preferred newspaper of the liberal intelligentsia in the nation's largest city Admitting that the U S press is very good at gathering facts, he quickly adds that when it comes to explanation and interpretation, "it is the most dishonest in the world, excepting the Soviet " For Francis, value judgments make the newsman...

...When the dramatization of the siege of Masada aired on television, Francis called it a "nuisance," making a pun on the Portuguese word macada "The insanity of the Masada zealots," he commented, "was transformed into heroism in order to assauge the psychological torment of Jews who must live with the fact of their lack of resistance to Hitler ' A little further on he remarked, oblivious to the seeming self-contradiction, that zealotry is to be expected of the Jews because they "are a fanatical and bloodthirsty people" (a description from Edward Gibbon...

...Some proponents of "reform," though, have made a sincere effort to reevaluate the moral and social responsibilities of the press today They allege, with considerable accuracy, that Western news organizations offer a distorted view of poor countries, reporting their political upheavals and economic crises while ignoring both the deep, tenacious roots of their troubles and the periodic strides made toward overcoming them Then they go on to contend, more dubiously, that the reason for this injustice is the Western reporters' proclaimed commitment to objectivity, which they are convinced is a positivist delusion Knowledge is always spread in the service of interests, the argument goes, and the foreign journalists will inevitably filter information in a way that supports the views and designs of their own wealthy nations-frequently at the expense of a fair portrayal of the lands they are reporting from So the Third World press, in its effort to convey a more adequate picture to its readers, is fully justified in breaking with the conventions of the profession...