02/03/2008

Natasha's story

By Mário Magalhães
ombudsman@uol.com.br

Folha did not give a lot of attention to the story, excluding it from the front page, but on Tuesday it had a splendid journalistic moment: it revealed an offense against a child by telling a moving story, and it opened the way to improving the life of one who needs help.

Reporter Afra Balazina told about a maid who stopped working mornings to accompany her daughter Natasha to school in São Paulo.

With cerebral palsy, the 9-year-old girl needs help to climb 13 steps, at lunch time, and to use the bathroom. The illness does not affect intellectual abilities, but only motor skills, of the good student. The public school does not have a teacher or assistant who can help Natasha. Nor does it have a ramp for wheelchairs. Instead of putting the class on the ground floor, it remained upstairs, which is reached by a staircase.

The mother can't pay someone to stay with her daughter. By herself she assumes the role of the state: to guarantee conditions to study. "I do everything I can to improve her life," Martinha said.

The story about the loving mother, besides soaking the newspaper with tears, exposes public administration, at all levels, how it so often (mis)treats children.

And how bureaucrats are incapable of solving simple problems - to transfer the class to a lower floor.

I wrote in my daily critique, "the presence of Natasha in a regular school is a gift to the other children. As a doctor said, they have a chance to live together with someone who is different."

Yet on Tuesday, by order of the state Education Department, the school moved Natasha's class to the ground floor. They promised a team to help the girl. The newspaper would do well to monitor this promise to see that it is carried out.

Without confirmation, movie scene becomes fact at newspaper

The Hollywood story came out Wednesday in Folha, reproducing an item from "Agora" (a daily newspaper owned by the Folha Group): "A doctor who was a kidnap victim drove three hours while she was threatened with a stiletto, had her wrists slashed, was pushed from a 15-meter-high bridge, and while she did not know how to swim, remained seven hours immersed in the South Paraíba River in Taubaté, São Paulo, clinging to plants to avoid drowning - was saved because two young people who heard her scream."

Except that the same day we learned that the "doctor" is not a doctor, although she works in the medical field in São José dos Campos. A little later, the local Santa Casa Hospital clarified that a 49-year-old woman appeared with her wrists slashed and her spectacular story.
Folha's problem was not in identifying her profession --it's difficult to get out of a lie like this. The mistake was to promote her version as fact. If there is no way of checking, you can't count on it.

It was necessary to underscore that the events were based entirely on the woman's word.

Readers have a right to know when an assertion is made by third parties, without proof, and that they are narratives for which the newspaper vouches. The police suspect that the woman tried to kill herself and invented the crime.

RECYCLING

Front page on Nov. 23, 2005:

"Brazilians are the most among those barred from United Kingdom"

Front page on Feb. 24, 2008:

"Brazilians are those most barred by United Kingdom"

The headline from Folha on Sunday was nearly the same as a headline on the front page in 2005. The newspaper knew about the old story but considered it "different data, updated." I believe that the information is the same. And that the headline deserved new information.

Considerations about corrections

Time to publish corrections in 2007

1-3 days: 54.55%
4-6 days: 15.30%
7-10 days: 10.86%
11-20 days: 9.57%
21-30 days: 5.43%
over 30 days: 4.28%

I received from Suzana Singer, managing editor at Folha for editing, a comment about correcting errors of information.

It said: "The ombudsman called attention, in his Feb. 10 column, to delays in publication of corrections. From the day in which the mistake came out until the correction, the average is 7.34 days (2007 review).

"Still, the graphic above shows that the majority of corrections (55%) are published in up to three days. This does not mean, however, that the newsroom is content with this performance --it is our objective to make corrections even more agile."
In context: no Brazilian publication corrects its errors the way Folha does. Providing a corrections section is not a sign of journalistic weakness, but rather one of strength. Everyone errs, but only some correct.

It is obvious that the average time to make corrections is inflated by the delay and lowered by slowness. These did not appear to be good results when more than 130 corrections in 2007 waited at least three weeks to come out.

In four years of tabulation, the average wait began at seven days and there it stays, without any advance.

Is it possible to improve? The most recent data indicate yes: in February 2008, the newspaper corrected 127 errors in information, a jump of 33% related to 96 the same month last year. The time between publishing an error and the correction was 6.88 days, less than the average in 2007. It could fall a lot more, to the benefit of readers.

My mistake

Worried about not personalizing my critiques, I committed an injustice last week by not identifying the editor of Folha who sent a message with the expression "and so what?" in response to a letter from a reader.

By not identifying him, I allowed all the editors to be suspect. I correct the mistake: the author was the editor of the travel section, Silvio Cioffi, in July. I considered the term abusive. The newsroom sent a new response, respecting the reader.

-Translation by John Wright