Herald of Bad News

10/10/2013 - 15h50

The edition in which Folha reported the National Household Survey, which annually provides a social snapshot of the country, is a full plate for those who believe that the newspaper only publishes bad news. All of the highlights plucked from the survey were negative.

The front-page headline said "Illiteracy and inequality are stagnating in this country" (Sept. 28). In the daily news section, there was an increase in the difference in income between men and women, with wages growing due to a lack of specialized labor and the cellular phone as the only type of telephone in half of homes. The analysis said that the results of the survey could mean "the end of the inclusive decade."

Other newspapers opted for headlines which pointed out positive and negative findings. "Median income gains, but inequality stops falling" (Rio's "O Globo), "Illiteracy stops falling in the country; employment and incomes rise" ("Estado de São Paulo"), "In all regions there was increase in income, but inequality remained stagnant" (Globo TV nightly news).

With its characteristic penchant for catastrophe, Folha made a myopic reading of the survey, which is very important for its reach - 363,000 people were interviewed about education, work, housing and access to consumer goods.

The most surprising number was that Brazilian incomes grew in 2012, a year in which the GDP increased only 0.9%. At Folha, this phenomenon was cited only in the middle of a report about inequality.

	Bruno Poletti/Folhapress
	Folha focuses on only negative data from the National Household Survey, despite the survey showing an increase in income in 2012

It was left for columnist Vinicius Torres Freire the next day to call attention to the fact that Brazil was richer "and we didn't know it." "It's possible to say that the poverty rate fell markedly last year," Freire wrote.

The calculations of Mercelo Neri, 50, president of the Institute of Applied Economic Research (Ipea), showed that 3.5 million Brazilians crossed the poverty line in 2012. "In the scope of transformations, it was the best National Household Survey over the past 20 years," Neri said.

Inequality really stopped falling, but it was because the richest people (1% of the population) got richer (income rose 10.8%), at an even faster rate than the poor (10% at the base of the pyramid) became less poor (income increase 6.4%). It's clear that you should not despise the social abysm, but it can't be ignored that there was general improvement last year, which is a mystery to be explained by economists.

If the newspaper underestimated income data, it gave too much space to the fact that illiteracy has stopped falling. On this point, it kept company with other newspapers and TV.
After 15 years of continuous decline, the illiteracy rate went from 8.6% to 8.7%. The laughable difference might be only a statistical fluctuation. And the fact that the rate has stopped falling is unimportant, according to experts.

Brazilian illiterates are concentrated mainly in the oldest (60 and up) age group. The oldest people, who did not have access to school in their youth, are the most difficult group to teach literacy. "Among the youth, the proportion of illiterates keeps falling. The conclusion is that, while our education has lots of problems, this is not one of them," explains Simon Schwartzman, 74, president of the Institute for the Study of Labor and Society (Iets).

The attention paid to the difference between remuneration for men and women also was misplaced. In 2011, Brazilian women received 73.7% of the wages of men. The year before it was 72.9%.

Besides not being a very significant variation, it could be a sampling problem. "Women are not necessarily earning less than men. If they already have lower average wages, all you need to do is increase the female participation in the labor market to increase the difference between the sexes," asserts Marcio Salvato, 44, professor of economics at the Brazilian Institute of Capital Markets (Ibmec).

Among consumer goods, the newspaper focused on cellular phones and motorcycles. Wasmália Bivar, 53, president of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), emphasized the presence of a washing machine in 55% of homes. "For the lives of the poorest families, it is very significant because it gives women more free time."
It's not easy to choose what is most relevant in an extensive study such as the National Household Survey, but it's pointless to adopt the criteria of using only the worst numbers. Journalism should have as its main concern what's going wrong and pointing out the problems. It's just that the necessary critical bias can't prevent highlighting what in fact is the most important.

Translated by JOHN WRIGHT
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