{"id":40952,"date":"2017-12-28T11:30:52","date_gmt":"2017-12-28T14:30:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rioonwatch.org\/?p=40952"},"modified":"2023-01-12T13:58:24","modified_gmt":"2023-01-12T16:58:24","slug":"best-and-worst-international-reporting-on-rios-favelas-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/?p=40952","title":{"rendered":"Best and Worst International Reporting on Rio’s Favelas: 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Por<\/strong>tugu\u00eas<\/strong><\/a><\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This is the latest contribution to our media watchdog series on the\u00a0Best and Worst International Reporting on Rio\u2019s favelas<\/a>, part of\u00a0<\/em>RioOnWatch\u2019s ongoing conversation on the\u00a0media narrative<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0media portrayal<\/a>\u00a0surrounding favelas.<\/em><\/p>\n

After a seven-year crescendo of English-language coverage of Rio de Janeiro\u2019s favelas building towards the 2016 Olympics<\/a>, perhaps the most noticeable aspect of favela coverage in 2017 was the sharp drop in quantity. The demand for Rio news from international news desks has diminished, and many of the foreign correspondents and freelancers who moved to the city ahead of the mega-events have since left<\/a>. In this context, there are worrying signs of a return to trends in which the majority of international favela coverage is reactive reporting on incidents of violence. This kind of coverage is not always the explicitly stigmatizing, inaccurate journalism<\/a> that we typically feature in our worst reporting analyses, but a disproportionate emphasis on violence<\/a> is still an insidious form of stigmatization.<\/p>\n

For this reason, our take on this year’s reporting starts with a general analysis of the coverage that exploded around an outbreak of violence in Rocinha<\/a>, before deconstructing a few of the worst examples of favela reporting and celebrating some of the year’s best. Compared to 2013<\/a> when we struggled to identify a clear cohort of excellent favela coverage to highlight, 2017 brought a number of pieces that stood out for originality, in-depth analysis, and stigma-busting content, and offer some hope for global favela coverage going forward.<\/p>\n

Spotlight on Rocinha<\/h3>\n

With the deployment of the army to Rocinha<\/a> on September 22 after five days of shootouts, texts and images by AFP<\/em>, the AP<\/em>, and Reuters<\/em> were picked up and republished by publications from around the globe. The death of a Spanish tourist at the hands of police<\/a> in October received similar attention, as did the recent capture of a trafficker<\/a> tied to the Rocinha power dispute. The Google alerts we monitor showed how each chapter in this story reverberated for weeks across seemingly countless websites. The vast majority of these platforms had not published anything else about favelas this year, leaving their readers with images of favelas centered on drug traffickers’ violence and dangers for tourists.<\/p>\n

On the positive side, AFP<\/em>, the AP<\/em>, and Reuters<\/em> largely avoided the tired descriptive clich\u00e9s that we have criticized in past analyses. In fact, Reuters<\/em> reported<\/a> that \u201cthe tight-knit neighborhoods are home mostly to working class people, but have suffered from decades of being ignored by the government, creating vacuums filled by gangs.\u201d While Reuters<\/em> and the\u00a0AP<\/em>\u00a0used<\/a> the inaccurate translation of \u2018slum\u2019<\/a> for \u2018favela,\u2019 AFP<\/em> managed to avoid<\/a> problematic terms, by instead describing Rocinha as a \u201cbuilt-up community\u201d and \u201ca teeming collection of small houses on steep hillsides.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, none of these three wire reports mentioned concerns about the use of armed forces to occupy, even temporarily, a neighborhood that has already struggled with police brutality and violence<\/a>.\u00a0And across other international coverage, journalists reported that the military \u201crestored order<\/a>\u201d and got the favela \u201cback under control<\/a>,\u201d without acknowledging many favela activists’ critique that tanks position residents as an ‘enemy’ population<\/a>, “[serving] for everything except to protect the resident,\u201d as one Rocinha resident wrote in September<\/a>. Also missing from most English-language reports was an acknowledgement that the government and media reactions to shootouts in favelas outside the\u00a0South Zone<\/a> are considerably more muted. All these concerns were raised by favela residents on social media but residents\u2019 perspectives have, in general, been sorely missing from most international coverage of the recent months\u2019 events in Rocinha. This trend must change, as the inclusion of favela voices in the public security debate is essential for the development of more productive policies<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Finally, across the Rocinha coverage, we\u2019ve noticed inaccurate translations for \u2018favela\u2019 like \u2018shantytown\u2019 in this NPR<\/em>\u00a0report<\/a> and \u2018slum\u2019 in this Wall Street Journal<\/em> article<\/a> are creeping back into use in publications that had previously abandoned them. Prior to the Olympics, for instance, the Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u00a0adopted the phrase\u2014\u201cworking-class neighborhoods known as favelas\u201d\u2014which we highlighted as a good example<\/a> of how to translate \u2018favela\u2019 for English-language audiences.<\/p>\n

Worst Reporting<\/h3>\n

The truly worst reporting on favelas this year was mainly limited to publications from which we have come to expect nothing else. The Sun<\/em> used this year\u2019s conflicts in Rocinha<\/a> to randomly reference a celebrity, recalling how UK TV personality Joey Essex \u201cthought [he] was going to die\u201d when he visited Rocinha in 2014. \u201cHis fears have been proved well-founded after yesterday\u2019s massive military operation,\u201d the\u00a0journalist writes, casually disregarding the passing of time and the fact that September\u2019s shootouts didn\u2019t represent conditions in Rocinha for most of this year, much less the situation in 2014 when security was generally stable in South Zone favelas.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A number of publications took note when Madonna received criticism on social media for posing for a photo with heavily armed police in Provid\u00eancia<\/a>. But the Daily Mail<\/em> outdid the rest by mistakenly identifying the favela as Rocinha<\/a>, and accordingly claiming Madonna had visited the same favela where a Spanish tourist had just been killed and where the army was deployed the month prior. The mix-up of two of Rio\u2019s most famous favelas reflects a disregard for the diversity of Rio\u2019s favelas, which paves the way for the logical fallacy that if there is violence in one favela, other favelas must be violent too.<\/p>\n

High Times<\/em> managed to report<\/a> on the right favela but the wrong part of the city, implying all favelas are in \u201cthe north of the city.\u201d The article labels Rocinha as \u201cthe most notoriously violent of Rio de Janeiro\u2019s favelas,\u201d which seems to be a label some reporters will apply to whatever favela they happen to be writing about that day. The author states that \u201cthe cocaine trade is virtually the only economy\u201d in Rocinha and its neighboring favelas–this about a community that boasts\u00a06529 businesses<\/a>. Anyone who visits a favela knows such a claim to be false: the wide range of businesses on display contribute to the\u00a0R$38.6 billion in commercial activity<\/a>\u00a0that Brazil’s favelas are estimated to generate each year.<\/p>\n

Best Reporting<\/h3>\n

AFP<\/em>\u2019s innovative multimedia report, \u201cStray Bullets\u2014Violence and Broken Lives in Rio de Janeiro<\/a>,\u201d features video interviews with the family members of six victims killed by stray bullets, and with two individuals who were injured. The videos are beautifully shot, focused closely on the speakers as they speak openly about their pain and loss. The narratives capture emotional complexity, such as that of the police officer who hasn\u2019t felt pride in his profession since his two-year-old daughter was killed but who wants to return to the job to \u201cdefend society as best as possible.\u201d The project also contextualizes these individual stories with data on shootings, injuries, and deaths in the neighborhoods of the featured families as well as across Rio. Although the claim that \u201cclashes between police and heavily armed drug traffickers can erupt across Rio de Janeiro anytime and anywhere\u201d risks minimizing the spatial concentration of violence that disproportionately threatens poor, predominantly black communities, this report is a productive and moving spotlight on urban violence.<\/p>\n

Jo Griffin\u2019s article titled \u201cOne man, one city, three evictions: the human cost of Rio\u2019s growth<\/a>\u201d and the accompanying video explore the phenomenon of evictions<\/a> over the decades in Rio through the lens of one man\u2019s story. Produced for Place<\/em>, a Thomas Reuters Foundation initiative, the piece focuses on Altair Guimar\u00e3es who was forced to move by the government in 1969 from Ilha Dos Cai\u00e7aras<\/a> (in the South Zone), in the early 1990s from City of God<\/a>, and finally in 2015 from Vila Aut\u00f3dromo<\/a>. Apart from telling a tumultuous human story, this article underscores that the recent wave of evictions<\/a> ahead of the Olympics must be understood in the context of the historical pattern of favela removals when the City wants to clear land for development<\/a>. It is also important historical context to emphasize in light of the current eviction threats<\/a> facing low-income communities.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Americas Quarterly<\/em> has stood out this year for consistently high-quality and original coverage pertaining to Rio\u2019s favelas. Soledad Dominguez\u2019s profile of MC Martina<\/a> from Complexo do Alem\u00e3o<\/a> acknowledges \u201cthe racism, the violence, the inequality\u201d she confronts on a daily basis, but contrasts them with the pride the 19-year-old rapper feels towards her community, leaving readers with a realistically complex notion of the neighborhood. Jill Langlois\u2019 feature on Bistr\u00f4 Esta\u00e7\u00e3o R&R<\/a>, a bar selling artisanal beer in Alem\u00e3o, is jam-packed with stigma-busting content. \u201cI always say that people who are poor, black and favelada are born entrepreneurs,\u201d one of the bar\u2019s owners states in the article.<\/p>\n

A regular on our best reporting list, The Guardian<\/em>\u2019s \u2018View from the Rio Favelas<\/a>\u2019 series by favela-based authors returned for the one-year-since-the-Games milestone with analyses of Rio\u2019s Olympic legacy<\/a> by three favela journalists: Daiene Mendes from Complexo do Alem\u00e3o, Thais Cavalcante from Complexo da Mar\u00e9<\/a>, and Michel Silva from Rocinha. The journalists continued their trend of contextualizing security and violence in broader assessments of mega-event legacy promises or corruption, and also highlighting local successes like growing entrepreneurship<\/a> or the budding youth movement organizing around drug policy<\/a>. This year\u00a0The Guardian<\/em> also published a fourth piece by a favela resident, Vila Aut\u00f3dromo activist Maria da Penha<\/a>, whose personal account of resisting eviction is an essential testimony to the real cost of the Rio Olympics.<\/p>\n

Honorable Mentions<\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

With so many international media outlets jumping to cover violence in Rocinha, articles that stood out for their productive originality included Misha Glenny\u2019s in-depth analysis<\/a> of \u201ca city in chaos\u201d for The Intercept<\/em>, Tiago Coelho\u2019s close coverage for Piau\u00ed<\/em><\/a> on how shootouts prevented some Rocinha students from taking college application exams, and Kiratiana Freelon\u2019s smart look<\/a>\u00a0in Next City<\/em>\u00a0at how tour guides from favelas are organizing in spite of deteriorating security’s threat to favela tourism. Meanwhile, the HuffPost<\/em>\u2019s Travis Waldron responded constructively<\/a> to the Madonna photo \u2018scandal\u2019 by contextualizing it in informative data on police violence in Brazil.<\/p>\n

Andrew Purcell and Mimi Whitefield produced excellent coverage of favela-based community media for OpenDemocracy<\/em><\/a> and the Miami Herald<\/em><\/a>, respectively. WIRED<\/em>\u2019s report on how \u201cRio\u2019s favelas are crowdsourcing crime data to keep people safe<\/a>\u201d offered fascinating detail into how Rio’s violence-monitoring applications actually work. And Jennifer Chisholm\u2019s article for NACLA<\/em><\/a> explored how neighborhoods currently threatened by eviction are framing their sustainable relationships with the land as an argument for their permanence.<\/p>\n

Finally, although not favela-focused reporting, we\u2019d also like to highlight the Olympic legacy coverage by Anna Jean Kaiser for The New York Times<\/em><\/a> and Andrew Purcell for The Age<\/em><\/a>, as well as Juliana Barbassa\u2019s explanation in Americas Quarterly<\/em><\/a> of why the Rio Olympics were a \u201craging success\u201d for the elites who sought to profit from them. NPR<\/em>\u00a0continued to push forward conversations on race in Brazil with an enlightening podcast titled \u201cBrazil in Black and White<\/a>.\u201d We also recommend Jonathan Watts\u2019 in-depth overview<\/a> of Brazil\u2019s Lava Jato corruption scandal in The Guardian<\/em>, which is a useful explainer of an incredibly complicated mess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas This is the latest contribution to our media watchdog series on the\u00a0Best and Worst International Reporting on Rio\u2019s favelas, part of\u00a0RioOnWatch\u2019s ongoing conversation on the\u00a0media narrative\u00a0and\u00a0media portrayal\u00a0surrounding favelas. After a seven-year […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":40958,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2315,1288,2242,1463,1282,329,2200,328],"tags":[1361,1653,1845,1900,1366,12,2634,1910,453,194,30,1385],"writer":[921],"translator":[],"illustrator":[],"photographer":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-40952","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-legacywatch","8":"category-highlight","9":"category-democracy","10":"category-perceptions","11":"category-research-analysis","12":"category-solutions","13":"category-toolkit","14":"category-understanding-rio","15":"tag-endfavelastigma","16":"tag-community-media","17":"tag-media","18":"tag-media-narrative","19":"tag-analyzing-media-portrayal-of-favelas","20":"tag-rocinha","21":"tag-series","22":"tag-series-best-worst-reporting","23":"tag-stigma","24":"tag-tourism","25":"tag-urban-violence","26":"tag-violence","27":"writer-rioonwatch"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40952\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40952"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fwriter&post=40952"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftranslator&post=40952"},{"taxonomy":"illustrator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fillustrator&post=40952"},{"taxonomy":"photographer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fphotographer&post=40952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}