the freedom of
expression is at risk?

CLAYTON LEVY e EUSTÁQUIO GOMES

AOver the last two weeks, the Lula government, elected within a democratic context, has been placed under an unusual suspicion: that it was allowing itself to be carried away by the “authoritarian temptation”. The touchstone was the preliminary project for the creation of a Federal Journalism Council, along the lines of the already existing councils for categories of independent professionals such as doctors and lawyers. The outcry was general: the measure was interpreted as an attempt to control the media and freedom of information, with the additional risk that the task could be entrusted to a union arm of the government. The government defends itself with the argument that “society has the right to information provided with quality, correctness and precision, based on an ethical investigation of the facts”, as stated by the Minister of Labor, Ricardo Berzoini.

Other symptoms of government “directism” were evoked, such as the attempt to expel the journalist from The New York Times last May, the draft law that creates the National Cinema and Audiovisual Agency (Ancinav), the decree that intends to prohibit employees authorities to provide information to the press, the attempt to limit the scope of the Public Prosecutor's Office's action and, finally, the decree that would allow the government, without additional authorization from Justice, to disseminate in its executive bodies information about individuals and legal entities whose fiscal secrecy , banking and telephone services are broken.

On this and the following two pages, professors Francisco de Oliveira (USP), Fábio Wanderley Reis (UFMG), Roberto Romano and Reginaldo Moraes, both from IFCH/Unicamp, in the wake of the controversy's developments, assess the government's intentions.

Jornal da Unicamp – According to critics of these measures, what is behind the government's “regulatory package” is an effort to appropriate public information. In other words, the government would like to control the quality of information that reaches society and, at the same time, have free and privileged access to confidential information about citizens. How do you analyze this stance? Do you see any risk in this or are critics seeing ghosts?

Fábio Wanderley Reis – I believe that “some risk” certainly exists. I find it negative, above all, the fact that we simultaneously have several initiatives, which gives them the “package” character mentioned in the question, and the origins of the PT (and even some government experiences, such as events that occurred, for example, in the selection of professors during Olívio Dutra's government in Rio Grande do Sul) allow us to assume that sectors of the party cling to a sectarian ideological perspective and a weak commitment to the principles of liberal democracy and civil liberties.

Francisco de Oliveira – I don’t think critics are seeing ghosts. I think critics are just pointing out that this is a characteristic of the Lula government. In fact, the thing is more serious. States on the periphery of capitalism are condemned to be states of exception. They are pre-totalitarian states. To withstand the fire of unbridled globalization, they try to contain and control all limits of society and the economy. This leads to the trivialization of the Provisional Measure. Any crisis on the periphery becomes urgent and the State then uses these exception mechanisms. In the case of information, it is what is presented.

Reginaldo Moraes – Words are not innocent. Appropriation of public information? Who takes ownership? And who is expropriated? Who owns this information that is called “public” today? In this field, as the saying goes, he who can commands, he who has sense obeys. Any journalist who ventured to have an idea in his head – and which did not correspond to that of his boss – knows what we are talking about.

Do we really have government leadership, with the creation of this council? It's funny to see a detail of this bill sent to Congress – and it was not an initiative of the government, but of the Federation of Journalists, several years ago. It regulates the composition of the Council. And he... has no government representatives. Simple detail. The freedom of the press currently in use allows, for example, that hundreds of pages and hours of radio and TV broadcasts have been produced on this subject without certain little things having even been mentioned. For example, the councilors will be elected from among all professional journalists. They will not be appointed by the government.

Curiously, too, not even brief news was recorded about the fact that the National Congress of Journalists, recently held in Paraíba, unanimously supported the sending of the bill. TVs, newspapers and radios didn't report this news, not even to say that these journalists are crazy: better not to say it, right?

Critics are not seeing ghosts, no. They are very lucid. They are shooting at what they see. But they want us to think they're shooting at something else. The “information that reaches society” does not “arrive” – it is taken by someone. Someone who wants to remain in the shadows.

Robert Roman – I have an old position on the subject. In two books (Medeia's Cauldron and The Challenge of Islam) I deal with the following contradictory situation: the more governments become opaque to citizens, the more citizenship is subjected to the lenses of administrators and loses the ability to defend itself against espionage ( CIA or Abin, the name doesn’t matter), the Federal Revenue Service, etc. This problem is old and is as old as the modern State itself. All of today's international debates, in the academic and political world, about the reason of State face it. Thus, our government today is not even original. He resumes the practice of controlling citizens to obtain a monopoly on information, with the use of his “cadres” in para-state organizations, such as the Federation of Journalists, etc.

When governments want a monopoly on news and analysis, they leave the field of journalism and enter the field of propaganda. For Nazi theorists and all other authoritarian “left” or “right” indoctrinators, freedom, democracy, rights are only relative, never absolute. It is a way of affirming that freedom of the press, the rights of individuals, and everything that is most sacred in ethical and moral life, are relative to the rights of the government.

Current Brazilian leaders inherited an instrumental view of institutions and legal prerogatives. In his opinion, only the forms that allow political parties to remain in palaces should be preserved. His idea about the state world fits perfectly into the collectivist figurations of the 19th and 20th centuries. They are far from being adequate to the democratic rule of law. The attacks by the current head of the Civil House, the Minister of Labor, the Minister in charge of Communication and, most shockingly, the Minister of Justice himself against the press perfectly echo the words issued in 1985 by the then candidate for President of the Republic, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, on freedoms: “I think that individual freedom is subordinate to collective freedom. As you create parameters accepted by the collective, individualism disappears. In other words, there is no reason to defend individual freedom. What you need is to create mechanisms so that the vast majority of the community can participate in decisions” (Folha de São Paulo, 29/12/1985). The latest measures announced by the government are “mechanisms” supposedly to guarantee the voice of society, but in fact aimed at imposing theses favorable to occasional occupants of the government. An entire program is now implemented sine ira et studio, in an ideology that is embodied in normative and regulatory acts. Ghosts?

I would like to remind you that the most lucid and alert writing about coups d'état in world literature begins with the warnings of a ghost. I refer to Shakespeare's Hamlet. The unfolding of the play shows that the “reality” of the coup d’état was even more ghostly. The latter does not need to be bloody or military. It can appear as an effective poison, imperceptible to public opinion. I also remember the analyzes of researchers linked to the “Frankfurt School” about the way in which the Nazis took over the German press: they bought a newspaper, maintained the layout and gradually and cautiously introduced new content, those desired by the party. And most readers didn't notice the change. It’s the same thing that happens with the Brazilian government’s “disciplinary” measures in relation to the press. The doses are homeopathic but the aim is to expand the government's monopoly in the cultural world. When processes of this nature occur, the awakening is bitter. It is necessary to note the technique used by government supporters (including the Federation of Journalists): always repeating the same key and attacking people who refuse to submit to the dictates of the hour. Such methods are fascist and must be rejected while there is still time.

continues on the next page

Álvaro Kassab collaborated

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