As President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva explained in a speech at the meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), the indifference of the world's rulers to the genocidal bloodbath that the Israeli government is promoting in the Gaza Strip is shocking. The world watches, without breaking from its routine, the shooting of hundreds of unarmed and hungry civilians during a chaotic food distribution, the daily massacre of women and children, the invasion and bombing of hospitals, the murder of United Nations agents, the experiments on this human being something to help. Children who had witnessed their parents being killed wandered through the rubble of the streets, completely disoriented; Mutilated women beg for death in order not to be operated on without anesthesia, the wounds of their souls bleeding as much as those of their flesh. Western news portals are taking a supposedly ethical measure to avoid disseminating the horrific images that reach us via social networks.
In light of the murder of more than seventy journalists, the media continues to try to maintain the untenable narrative that what is happening in Gaza is a war between Israel and Hamas forces, who are strangely least likely to that they will be killed in the conflict. If Hamas must be held responsible for triggering and providing a pretext for the destruction of its people, then attempting to cover up the ethnic cleansing operation carried out by the Zionist government is a crime that stains the hands and conscience of Western journalists becomes.
The disgraceful headline in Jornal O Globo, which turns the coldblooded murder of starving people into a mere insurrection that claims lives and blames the victims for their own deaths, is a fact that illustrates the ethical bankruptcy of the country's mainstream press. By attributing to Hamas the version that it is another Dantesque crime committed by Israel, press agencies such as Folha de São Paulo, UOL, O Estado de São Paulo make it clear that they are providing completely biased and inhumane coverage of the genocide.
Since they once again represent a real opposition party to the Lula government, whose reporting also lacks any ethical principles or even appreciation for journalism, they cannot admit that our president was one of the only ones who denounced Israel's disproportionate response from the start , his continued disobedience to international laws, his disregard for every rule of international law.
They are acting with regard to Gaza as they have acted with regard to the growth of the Brazilian economy, since the Urbulian predictions of their economists have not come true. The GDP growth, well above the expectations of the market entity on whose behalf these press organizations speak, of 2.9% in 2023, instead of being treated decently like a journalistic article, triggered a flood of opponents in the headlines, where the desire that something could go wrong for the government, that is, for the country's population, can hardly be hidden. All the headlines, as if orchestrated, reported the increase in GDP, followed by a “but” with which the fans' wishful declaration against the country began, so that they are right, because it is a press that does not just report it not about the facts, he is often contradicted. We stuck to a neoliberal prescription that was exceeded even in central countries and saw O Globo's strange research among economists to understand how the fact that the Lula government again provided for a real increase in the minimum wage, not as recommended inflation increased due to the recipe. neoliberal, on the contrary, it accompanied its downfall. They are perplexed because their recipe doesn't translate into reality and are always trying to convince everyone that this will happen in the future.
We have the strange phenomenon of the press soothsayer, the press seer, who reports future predictions that are almost always catastrophic in order to avoid having to deal with present reality. Just like the disastrous Economy Minister of the previous government, who received complaints from the same press organizations, the visionary Paulo Guedes who managed reality is a disaster (and who hides in the bushes to see if they don't remember that he attended a meeting where a coup was planned and did not denounce the conspiracy), did not get his catastrophe predictions right, the newspapers, magazines and portals have to do narrative and headline exercises in order not to admit that this was just fanfare and desires against the country, its “authoritative” analyses.
The ethical misery we witness every night as Jornal Nacional struggles to maintain its positive position towards Israel by representing the facts and distorting in the narrative what is seen in the images of the massacre produced by the Israel Defense Forces themselves delivered in their genocidal fanaticism is deplorable. The inhumane statements made by the top leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu's government, such as the Defense Minister's statement that the Bread Line massacre was an excellent action by Israeli soldiers, are exposed without any critical approach. The constant disrespect and harassment by the diplomacy of the farright government of Israel towards Brazil and its government, supported by our press organs, shows that the neoliberal phase of capitalism has led to enormous economic misery, in addition to high rates of economic misery, and brutal concentration of wealth and income , a deep ethical and subjective misery in the face of the process of individualization and loss of empathy, aggravated by the logic of competition, meritocracy, identity and the singularity.
Only a humanity without empathy can remain insensitive to what is happening in Gaza and in so many other places in the world such as Ukraine, Haiti, Sudan, Niger, etc. Only ethically poor, insensitive media and journalists can assume that this is collective revenge, that the extermination of thousands of people (the Holocaust did not begin with the deaths of millions, it began with the deaths of a few, dozens and was the complicit silence of the world's governments that caused the killing to reach this level) can be justified in some way.
The US government's position on the killings in Gaza, which our press takes without any critical sense, is ethically shameful and politically disastrous and could mean Biden's defeat in the next election. The private grumblings against the Zionist government and the promises of a ceasefire that the partner solemnly ignores while simultaneously unloading weapons for the ally and promising airdrops of food for the Palestinians testify to this ethical fragility that now dominates human relationships, including international ones Relationships.
Neoliberalism has exacerbated individualism, selfishness, narcissism and the desire for distinction and uniqueness. The counterculture of the sixties of the last century, characterized by libertarian desires to transcend and break the most traditional standards, can be read as one of the first fluctuations of that subjective order in which we immerse ourselves, in which we gain much, in view on individual freedoms, but at the expense of a society that cares little about the collective and has little interest in broader social concerns.
The narcissism of small differences, to use a Freudian expression, has been important for the achievement of certain achievements in the field of individual rights and human rights, but on the other hand has also led to the emergence of a social order lacking solidarity in which… The level of empathy towards others has drastically decreased. Neoliberalism explains journalism in which journalists assume the immediate interests of the entrepreneur as if they were their own, and in which staying in the job and individual development are prioritized over collective interests and human empathy. To achieve this, it has become the maxim to get along, regardless of what one has to do that harms the collective and others.
Those who, like me, have criticized humanism as inhumane and exclusionary, since Western humanism has excluded twothirds of people from the image of man, are afraid of having to return to the most basic humanistic and humanitarian discourses. . , faced with the horror of the worldwide rise of fascism, faced with the terrible face of a humanity that is incapable of even recognizing itself in the face of the other, the other. I always wonder what motivates an eighteen year old to pull the trigger and shoot a child, an old man, a pregnant woman, a doctor saving lives in a hospital? What a stage of dehumanizing hatred, reaching the point of invading homes and burning entire families, as Hamas fighters did and as Israeli soldiers do today. Given this situation, I can understand and sympathize much more with the young soldier who burned himself in front of the Israeli embassy, setting himself on fire and calling for the liberation of Palestine, than with the gesture of a soldier shooting at a hungry crowd. And even less than in relation to a journalist, an editor, who, comfortably in his air conditioning, produces a headline that reads: “Uprising in northern Gaza during food distribution ends with more than a hundred people dead”. Given this moral and In ethical misery, the disappointment and disbelief is immense and all that remains is the outrage at the humiliation, but (long live the opponents! Rhetorical resource of opponents and adversaries) That is what we have at the moment as “journalism”.
*This text reflects solely the author's opinion.