Cervi: ‘When religion focuses on material power [...] it has already lost its essence’

I was happy every Monday afternoon this semester. In an elective course at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), in a very small class, I got from Dr. Emerson Urizzi Cervi the impulse so dear to me for discussing journalism. Cervi has a sober journalist’s manner that reminds me of the newsrooms that did not succumb to the dazzle of the internet.

Sgarbe: Dear Professor Cervi, readers of this site would be annoyed if I did not tell them that I wrote to you when I was still in high school and dreamed of being a journalist. I remember being interested in political communication. Well, as is the way of self-contracts, here we are about to write the first article for your appreciation. Having overcome the main affective aspect of this conversation, I fall into the next. That is, the cold affect that watching television journalism causes me. It is that it is not, evidently, a personal taste, but a collegial, collective, community dimension of journalism. Despite my conviction that mass journalism as we conceived it decades ago is not possible, it is possible and necessary, it is fair and necessary, that television journalism turn to the basic literature of what is news. I refer directly to the “new generation,” which has at its disposal excellent reporters, and through whom, via interpersonal relations, the DNA of journalism can be passed on. I am very seriously suspicious of any journalism that does not clearly bring the “commercial-editorial” dilemma. And my first question is: which came first? The egg or the serpent? Is spineless journalism the fruit of a spineless community?

Cervi: Sgarbe, journalism is a human activity, constrained, limited and enhanced by the social context in which it is found. Twenty-first-century journalism will not be the same as twentieth-century journalism, which cannot be compared with that of the nineteenth century, simply because the society of each moment in which journalism is embedded is specific. We need to avoid some exaggerations if we want to understand journalism’s role in 21st-century society. The first is technological determinism. It is not technology that shapes journalism, but journalism that makes use of the available technologies to shape itself. The second is the excess of journalism’s centrality in the world.

Journalism is a professional activity and a social institution that is part of the so-called intermediary institutions. Journalism, by nature, mediates the relationship between people and people, people and institutions, people and more abstract social concepts.

So, journalism does its role well when it manages to mediate social relations in a relevant way, that is, in a consequential way. Historically, mass journalism is an intermediary institution for social stability. It presents the expected rules and behaviors (of course there are cases of journalism used for revolutionary ends, but that is not the rule). However, and here is an important element, the good consequence of the intermediary role depends not only on who mediates but on the expectations of those at the “ends” of the mediation processes — outside the direct scope of journalism — the sources, on one side, and the public, on the other. If we want answers about 21st-century journalism we must necessarily ask the sources and the public what they expect of 21st-century journalism and not journalists directly.

Sgarbe: When I read your paragraph, I thought “I have to come back with at least a few interviews, in which I ask people what they expect from journalism.” Evidently that is not the case, but I had the reporter’s impulse. I understand that to keep journalism alive, as was done in other eras, we will have to deal with communities absurdly different from those we had ten or twenty years ago. Those rapid changes, justified at times by technological contribution or even by the gravity of a pandemic, have little to do with cellphones and vaccines themselves — items that are far more symptom than cause. After the fascist uprising and Covid-19, we are in a postwar. Let us go back a little. After the First World War, we experienced the art avant-gardes, among other less gentle effects. Psychoanalysis and religious fundamentalism also came out of there. It happens that, in the case of those last two, the results were completely different. For the first, the conclusion is that the end is inevitable and desired, while the second clings to the hardness of a few phrases that encourage waiting for the Messiah’s return. I understand that, as history is expected to repeat itself, our now has traits of those drawings. It is utopian, but it would be very good if individuals were able to deal with their internal problems before going to the public stage. Perhaps in a thousand years. There are many scenarios and microscenarios on the screen, so I am aware that the following cut is imprecise. We polarize more or less like this: on one side, the academic chair, the cult of scientific inquiry (a few hours ago, I said that by believing in science without restrictions we make science a religion — it went down badly with the group, but I do not mind, in this case); on the other, the powerful God who will take revenge on the wicked and will distinguish us from the perverse. I think both are way off, for this reason: what does all this serve if what is sought is not peace? It will be very hard to get answers from those people about journalism. Meanwhile, my bet is on precision journalism and on a brilliant capacity for dialogue and good humor — with whomever.

Cervi: Well, if I understood you correctly, we widened the discussion, leaving journalism proper. If so, I agree with your proposal. If we take journalism for what it is: a professional activity with collective impact as its end, we will realize that it can only be understood if placed against other institutions, groups and social norms.

The collective end of journalism is meeting society’s demands for information.

When that end is successful, journalistic information serves as a social amalgam that gives shape to and unites other social institutions. In other words, the end of journalistic information is social cohesion, not distension. The typical 21st-century phenomenon is that journalism as an end faces competition from the spread of content and information with the opposite aim to that of social cohesion. An interesting discussion would be that of freedom as a right. Like any other, there are no absolute rights in any society. At the limit, even the right to life is not absolute in many societies. What happened in the 20th century is that the struggles for the right to expand and democratize information, which are means, left the ends, which is social cohesion, in the background. We need to put the discussion of the ends of freedom of expression back into public debate. I understand that is not what you proposed, so I stop here. Your proposal was to look at contemporary social conflicts from the micro level, the individual. And, in that case, you point to which institutions have the most impact on social behavior from the individual: the church, notably. Religion has the capacity to pass from the private to the public sphere without the need for any filter. We will only understand personal conflicts in the early 21st century when we think about how religions are addressing the differences between spiritual power and material power. When religion focuses on material power it is because it has already lost the essence, which is spiritual control. From there it tends to be ever more involved in worldly themes and less in spiritual ones. All of society loses, but, mainly, religion is the main loser. Treating individuals’ crises, conflicts, dissensions, the formation of social bubbles from the role of institutions has greater explanatory capacity than falling into technological determinism, which tends to be a dead end.