voltarOFF THE AIR
The Brazilian media have historically been characterized by a great fascination for the “sensationalism” of the news. By the early 1970s the phenomenon had already become the subject of academic study. In this scenario, Rio de Janeiro is certainly the symbolic city of a trend, rooted above all in the so-called “detective” journalism, the one that follows news related to crime and carries out journalistic coverage of the numerous police operations in the “favelas”. The war on drug trafficking, systematically planned by the institutions, offers the local press a fertile ground to build their own media theater. The relationship between urban violence and its media narrative is a crucial issue in every type of society and for this reason several Brazilian sociologists have developed theories that could help the understanding of the phenomenon. In Rio, the tendency of newspapers and televisions to a “sensational aesthetic” is mainly attributable to the different forms of violence that the city is a victim of. There is a familiarity with daily violence in which both information workers and readers / viewers are reflected. This common denominator pushes the journalistic narrative to appropriate the popular imagination on violence to strengthen its social role, make its message more understandable and make its presence necessary. Beyond the academic and sociological debate, the fact that remains in Rio is that journalists, videographers and photographers meet every day to provide documentary evidence for the gunfights between law enforcement and drug traffickers. With every police operation in the favelas, information workers invade the place like an informal army, casually wandering among weapons of war, soldiers, special forces and law enforcement agency. Some fully equipped, with bulletproof vests and other military equipment that the same newsrooms provide, others wearing everyday clothes, as if they had come to cover a simple news story in the city. A sort of “ragtag army” of information, made up of anonymous heroes who in spite of everything, move in real war scenarios so that the media show can go on.
