When your English-language news service cites "local press sources" in reporting from Brazil, you want to make sure that the press sources are not this one.
CORRECTION: I originally said the Estado news agency reported "155 kilos" of marijuana seized. That was a typo in my subtitling of the news clip. The Estado reported 115 kilos seized.
I need a good copy editor to back me up.
No better illustration of the kind of journalistic Rashomon underway in Rio de Janeiro this week exists than this closing segment from TV Record Rio's Rio no Ar ("Rio on the Air") morning happy-talk show from June 29.
The Estado de S. Paulo was reporting that 40 kilos of cocaine and 115 kilos of marijuana had been seized during Wednesday's raids, for example.
TV Record, however, reports 30 kilos of cocaine and 113 kilos of marijuana.
If I am not mistaken, TV Record and the Agência Estado were at the exact same freaking press conference.
Using New York wholesale brizola prices as reported by the DEA — and note I am relying on memory here — that would be a difference of some US$300,000 in the amount of cocaine reportedly seized.
Judges busted for selling favorable verdicts to mafiosos reported got retainers of up to US$10,000 a month.
So in other words — this is a pointed way of putting this, but so what? The burden of transparency falls upon the State — the Estado's reporting and TV Record's reporting may be off by as much as a roughly estimated ten corrupt judge-months
Other news agencies reported 5 hours of combat in the hillsides.
TV Record reports 7 hours of combat in the hillsides.
In reporting the arrival of six fresh corpses at the Vargas hospital, TV Record omits to mention that the man told other reporters he was waylaid by armed men, then was stopped by PMs at the checkpoint at the entrance to the Complexo and told to take the corpses to the state judicial police precinct.
Reportedly, it was the state police who then sent the van on to the hospital.
Other reports affirmed that the armed men in this incident were traffickers.
TV Record does not make that claim, saying only that the driver was "waylaid by a group of armed men," whom the announcer refers to as "criminals."
There are, you know, according to news reports, other groups of non-uniformed armed men in the Complexo do Alemão.
We await confirmation of their presence and news of their doings, if any.
TV Record says there was no movement, "not even in the most remote parts of the community."
If its reporter ventured into "the most remote communities," he did not record the event.
He states that he is reporting from "the neighborhoods surrounding the Complexo."
I am continuing to subtitle local coverage of this incident pra inglês ver.