Media, Political Scandals

Por meio da análise do conteúdo de 38 matérias publicadas no Portal Folha.com, o artigo examina o processo de mudança na imagem pública do ex-senador Demóstenes Torres, iniciado após vir a público, em 2012, um conjunto de acusações de corrupção contra o então parlamentar. Levando em conta o enquadramento dos textos, a investigação apontou que a imagem positiva antes cultivada pelo político acabou se tornando elemento fundamental no processo de cassação aberto contra ele, o que destaca, dentre outras questões, a fluidez da imagem pública e o papel do Jornalismo na construção de impressões que a esfera civil tem de personalidades de diversos campos.

Abstract: By studying 38 pieces published on Folha.com website, this article examines the process of transformation of Demóstenes Torres' public image carried out by part of the Brazilian press. Such a process began after accusations of corruption that emerged in 2012. The investigation pointed out that his previous public image (as a representative who defended citizens against condemnable political behaviors) turned into a completely different one. One believes that such a conclusion reinforces the idea that public images are fluid and the role of journalism as one of the main image's builders.

This research takes as starting points the ideas that communication becomes a key tool either to worsen or to mitigate any crisis, and that when a public crisis has not been properly closed it takes hold in a series of acute stages. A good example of this situation is the communications
crisis suffered by the Spanish Popular Party (PP) in the wake of the ‘Bárcenas scandal’, a case of political corruption inside the PP involving its former treasurer. This matter becomes the object of analysis in this research, as it represents a scene common to most of the political parties in Spain during recent years. The aim of this research is to shed light on both the PP’s communicative response to this corruption
crisis during its two acute stages (both in 2013) and the media coverage of this political scandal. To achieve this objective the communicative actions of the PP during the two stages are analyzed with a qualitative content analysis. All the pieces of news published by El País and El Mundo regarding the ‘Bárcenas scandal’ are analyzed with a quantitative content methodology. The results show that political corruption scandals lead to the press losing its confidence in political parties, and that crises that are not properly solved result in become entrenched.
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La investigación parte de la idea de la comunicación como un elemento nuclear, capaz de agra-var o de mitigar una crisis y de que las crisis públicas cuando no se logran cerrar de manera adecuada se enquistan y presentan una sucesión de fases agudas. La crisis de comunicación vivida por el Partido Popular tras la publicación del llamado caso Bárcenas, que afecta al que fue extesorero nacional de esta formación política, es un ejemplo de esta situación y constituye el objeto de estudio de este trabajo. Se trata de un caso con cierto recorrido en el tiempo pero cuya actualidad no ha mermado. De hecho, en cierta manera representa un escenario común en la mayoría de las fuerzas políticas españolas en los últimos años. La investigación busca conocer cómo fue la respuesta comunicativa del PP ante este escándalo durante dos de sus fases agudas en 2013 y cómo fue la cobertura de la prensa. Para ello, se han analizado mediante el análisis de contenido las acciones comunicativas del PP en ambos perio-dos (cualitativo) y todas las noticias publicadas en El País y El Mundo sobre el tema en esos días (cuantitativo). Los resultados muestran que los escándalos de corrupción política conducen a la pérdida de confianza de la prensa en los partidos políticos y también ponen de manifiesto el enquistamiento de una crisis en sucesivas fases agudas cuando no se cierra adecuadamente.

"The term “Malasanità” has been used by italian newsmedia to label health and medical malpractice for over twenty years. This term, which could be not effectively translated in English, aims to complain and to summarize a wide variety of undesirable situations involving health organisation and medical care.
This term has become a popular metaphor to define the ways in which italian media address health care related issue, to define health care as social problems and to point at possible resolutions.
This is the first book dedicated to “Malasanità” as it’s depicted by media, a first attempt to investigate relationship among emergency-language news, media portrayals of health scandals and their impact on public opinion and health organisations behaviour.
The anatomy of this kind of media scandal in which are involved health facilities, made it possible to test an analytical model. It’s a litmus test on opportunities and costraints in media built health crises: the way media addres health as social problems is an emblem of how they build a framework linking causes, risks and responsibilities, that’s enough powerful to affect health policies and public understanding of health issues.


The case

The opportunity for an empirical investigation on journalistic malpractice in media representation of health issues was given from a relavant health scandal, which has attracted some media fanfare.
In early 2007, Policlinico Umberto I of Rome, the most important hospital in the city, is the subject of a tight journalistic controversy that looks like the latest episode of “Malasanità”. The case is launched from a journalistic enquiry by the undercover journalist Fabrizio Gatti, published on “L’Espresso”. The stumbling-block is the state of decay and dirt in some premises of the Hospital, that were first reported in Gatti’s investigation to raise an immediate interest by other media, feeding a wide coverage of the story and polarizing attention of the entire italian media system, from the "Corriere della Sera" to the populistic infotainment strip "Striscia la notizia", which followed the first news originating a media hype.
As it occurs in every crisis or scandal, health malpractice is literally staged by media as a news drama, providing allegorical images of evil for their audience, which is lead to face and cope anxiety and indignation which could be mitigate only trough symbolic punishments for guilty. Media construct a representation of facts and allegation that at the same time provides information, reassurance, punishesment as well as fun.
The "Policlinico case" thus provides an opportunity to analyze storytelling dynamics, agenda building, and definitions of social problems and related public policies, highlighting intertwined links between events, media attention, collective imagery and health malpractice.
Some stylistic peculiarities, as characters building, articulation of roles on the stage, structure of the story allows to reconstruct events occurred in “Policlinico case” as a Greek Classical Tragedy, which doesn’t only provide a  fascinating metaphor, but helps to develop a coherent and explicit descriptive model of media behaviour in crisis contexts.


The book

This book was built using greek tragedy as a shared logical and descriptive framework, drawing from a common empirical data “warehouse”. Research starst out from a shared theoretical landscape and initial hypothesis to investigate media contents and behaviour, providing some analytics observation to points out a critical reflection about relations  between contemporary media and public policies, medial portrayals of reality and social imagery.
When a scandal occurs, the increasing of media attention seems to be more driven from self-referred media needs (as the imperative “cover all the news other media cover”) than from a genuine effort to investigate facts to allow their readers to form an opinion, and consequently attention tends to be depleted within a few days, according to a common pattern in different case. In these media hypes emergency quickly lights, and quickly tends to be closed by a sort of "symbolic sanction" for guilty gave out by media.
As in classical tragedy choir, media move from a single coryphaeus (chorus leader) claims to be followed subsequently by other singers on stage: interpreting a “biased” moral role, media tends to create scapegoats, sometimes persisting on subjects that do not seem able to face journalistic attacks and effects arising from their stigmatization.
Emphasis on scandals does not necessairly produce a deeper awareness and understanding of problems. Media pretend to be watchdog, but they actually end to growl only as junkyard dogs do. By this point of view, the insisting coverage by newspapers, tv news and talk shows does not mean that media are performing a deepening function: the widening of the spectrum of the debated issues, adds more and more new ones, leaving facts in the backstage and flooding audience understanding in a chaotic disputation between opposite opinions.
This results is a superficial reading of the facts, wich can have severe consequences in how patients move on "health market", as in the process of health policy formulation. Policies are likely to be crushed on emergency issues, and priorities may be dictated more by the media that the actual clinical, scientific or organizational needs.
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