Money Matters: Journalism, Elections and Politics

I had set out this morning to try to untangle the complexities of multiparty systems, particularly Brazil’s, which is not unlike Israel’s: there are two dominant parties but the smaller parties (some of which are quite major) play very important roles both in elections of executives and in which party controls state and federal houses of congress.

But either my brain is not yet ready to go into the complexities of parties and alliances or I was truly stricken by the headline on today’s Folha de São Paulo. It read:

Gastos do governo sobem 14,5% no 1º tri

SHEILA D'AMORIM
DA SUCURSAL DE BRASÍLIA

Os gastos do governo federal cresceram 14,5% nos três primeiros meses de 2006, ano eleitoral, segundo dados divulgados ontem pelo Tesouro Nacional.

Roughly translated, this would mean:

Government expenditures rise 14.5% in 1^st quarter

The federal government´s expenditures rose 14.5% in the first three months of 2006 (an election year), according to statistics released yesterday by the Treasury.

Headlines like this are not remotely rare in Brazil. In fact, all newspapers and television news programs run this kind of story several times every month. Every other year you get this exact headline—stories linking rising government expenditures to elections. This particular story talked about increased spending in national programs—general social services, the “Bolsa-Família” (a public assistance program that provides food to the working poor), the central bank and various ministries (equivalent to government departments in the U.S.) for discretional spending. Of course, tomorrow’s front page will probably declare that the budget surplus for the federal, state and local governments in March reached a record high. The media will most likely not tie the record surplus to the increased spending.

During municipal elections, these kinds of headlines might note increased expenditures in municipalities where the mayor is from a party of the ruling party or coalition. Between election years, journalists will look in particular states and towns, examining government-funded programs and linking them to areas where certain parties are in power. This is because in Brazil there is always the sense that no government programs are funded without an eye to elections. All such allocations, they feel, are tied to electoral politics. The idea is that such funding rewards people who elect the ruling party and demonstrate to the losers that they, too, could have their piece of the pie if only they would elect the right woman or man.

In the U.S., such stories may seem crude or tacky. Analysts think that stories like this might make the electorate angry and cause a backlash against the government. Most importantly, U.S. Americans like to deny that there is a direct connection between budget allocations and electoral politics. It is therefore almost unheard of for journalists to carefully sift through all government programs and link where they are spent to the particular districts of certain partisans. You occasionally see this done for one politician—there will be stories about a congressman who is particularly effective at bringing money to his district—but it is not nearly so common. Newspapers do not have dozens of front-page stories every year about how much the government is spending and where and how this might be related to electoral politics. In Brazil, there would be lead stories on the evening news if the government decided to eliminate funding of Indian Health Service clinics off of reservations even though 64% of all American Indians do not live on reservations. Journalists would tie these cuts to defense spending and to the lack of political power that American Indians have (and their party politics). In the United States, this happens without notice.

I am not saying that the Brazilian way is better, but it is certainly different. Brazilians living in the United States find U.S. American journalism to be mediocre at best and irresponsible at worst. U.S. Americans in Brazil are shocked to see that Brazilian politicians fund public programs based on votes.

This is, of course, why I find it so important for people to learn different languages and to travel to other countries: so that they can learn about different perspectives.