Environment, Europe, Headlines, Human Rights, Press Freedom

PORTUGAL: Controversy Burns Over Sensationalist TV Coverage of Fires

Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Sep 14 2005 (IPS) - The heavy live television coverage of the forest fires that have swept Portugal this summer has sparked critics’ complaints of sensationalism and warnings of the danger of encouraging arsonists.

Newscasts on the country’s three TV stations invariably begin these days with journalists reporting live as fires rage in the background.

The coverage goes to the extreme of including live interviews with people who have just lost their homes and everything they owned. The competition for ratings is “literally incendiary,” in the words of Eduardo Cintra Torres, the country’s leading TV critic.

This year, Portugal has held firmly on to the dubious title of European champion of forest fires, exceeding last year’s nearly 130,000 hectares that went up in flame, although without yet reaching level of 2003, the blackest year for Portugal (and all of Europe) in the last half century, when 425,000 hectares were consumed by fire.

Between Jan. 1 and Aug. 30, 240,000 hectares of forested areas were destroyed by fire – especially significant given Portugal’s modest size: 89,000 square km of mainland territory and 3,000 hectares in the Azores and Madeira islands in the Atlantic Ocean..

In eight months, 15 people lost their lives – 11 fire fighters and four civilians – 151 rural homes and 882 farm buildings burnt down, and the company Portugal Telecom lost 9,000 telephone poles and 1,000 km of telephone wire.

In the same period, the police arrested 118 suspected arsonists, compared to 67 arrested in 2004 and 62 in 2003. That disturbing increase has fuelled the debate on the risk of encouraging pyromaniacs with vivid images of fires.

In an op-ed column published on Jun. 13, at the start of the most devastating wave of fires, Cintra Torres suggested that TV stations should “reduce their mad coverage of the fires” because “the more TV screens we have in flames, the more fires there are in the forests,” he said.

Three months later, “the stations are showing as many images of fire as they please, even against the public’s wishes,” said the critic, citing an Aug. 18 opinion poll.

The state-run Radio Televisión Portuguesa (RTP) has taken on the challenge and proposed that the private stations agree to a kind of self-regulation with respect to the coverage.

But no agreement has been reached, because in a country that experienced a 48-year dictatorship from 1926 to 1974, the media easily cry “censorship!”, even in cases when their only aim is to be allowed to exploit the most sensationalist images and boost ratings.

The proponents of self-regulation cite the ongoing debate on the media’s role in encouraging “copycat suicides”.

Cintra Torres pointed out that over a century ago, most of the media basically agreed to avoid reporting suicides in order to prevent the imitation effect. “That is what is being suggested today (with respect to TV coverage of the fires), but there is wide opposition.”

The RTP, concerned about its image as an objective media outlet, has suggested that the directors of the private Independent Television (TVI) station and Independent Communication Corporation (SIC), another station, “reflect” on the question of broadcasting images of the fires.

The initiative was first set forth by a Left Bloc (BI) lawmaker, Francisco Louça, who noted in a parliamentary debate late last month that TV stations in the United States and several European countries do not show the flames up close, but only in aerial images, while reporting on forest fires.

Up-close images “are an incentive for pyromaniacs,” said Louça, head of the BI, who is running for president in the January 2006 elections.

Interior Minister Antonio Costa responded to Louça that “it would be a mistake for our political leaders to take a public position on this matter.” But he acknowledged that in other European countries, “fires are given a different kind of coverage.”

In neighbouring Spain, “there is a pre-established agreement according to which the flames are not shown, and of course a news anchor does not appear against a burning background,” said Costa.

José Luis García, a researcher at the University of Lisbon Institute of Social Sciences, said images of fire on TV have great power over pyromaniacs.

But he said the debate could easily be buried by the central powers that dominate modern society: technology and the market, which “are not at the service of human needs; it is our needs that are dictated or conditioned by technology and the market,” while the decisions taken by TV stations “are subjugated to the market by means of advertising.”

In the face of the dilemma of how to report on fires without inciting arsonists, García said coordination with the SIC and the TVI are not essential, and that “it would be good if the RTP went ahead with its own proposal (for self-regulation), because it is fundamental to begin to set an example of sober reporting.”

But sociologist and former Le Monde journalist José Rebelo told IPS that although the TV stations should reach some kind of agreement “not to go beyond certain limits,” the images should not be totally banned “because the flames exist, and it is necessary to show them.”

He added that the failure to broadcast the images would also end up being manipulative.

The limits “cannot be scientifically determined, but must be based on common sense,” and it is the directors of the TV stations who must make the distinction, he argued.

The question is “whether the aim is to provide news coverage or to create a ‘show’ based on a realistic staging of an event,” said Rebelo, who underlined that “on TV, the show ends up being essential in terms of ratings.”

Hans Hübner, a German public TV reporter who was invited after the fall of the dictatorship in Portugal to provide advice on adapting the RTP to a democratic system, said he was frustrated with the results of the work that he carried out between 1975 and 1980.

“Twenty-five years on, RTP TV news is of terrible quality, with newscasts that last over an hour and are filled with irrelevant dramas that play on people’s emotions, looking more like a Brazilian soap opera than a newscast,” he told IPS, after reporting on the fires in late August and early September.

That view is shared by his Portuguese colleague Luciano Alvarez, who recently wrote in a column in the Lisbon newspaper Público that Portugal’s TV stations are “dramatising calamity, using the people who are suffering, filming them in moments of desperation, while the reporter interviews them in front of a sea of flames.”

Should these images be aired? “This is so obvious that it is almost ridiculous to be discussing it,” said Alvarez. And it should not be the government but “the TV stations themselves that together find the common sense route” to deal with the issue.