Can the poor exercise deliberative agency in a multimedia saturated society? Lessons from Brazil and Lebanon

ABSTRACT

There are many ways of amplifying the voices of the poor in today’s multimedia saturated societies. In this article, we argue that the dominant portrayals of poverty in the media privilege voices that exclude the poor from authentic and consequential deliberations that affect their lives. We make a case for amplifying the poor’s deliberative agency – the performance of political justification in the public sphere – when creating media content. Through two illustrative examples, we demonstrate that amplifying the poor’s deliberative agency is both normatively desirable and politically possible. We begin with the case of Brazil where we discuss how slow journalism drew attention to the diversity of the poor’s political claims about a mining disaster, followed by the case of citizen journalism in Lebanon where a protest movement shifted the dominant arguments about the garbage crisis from an issue of the dirty poor to an issue of the corrupt elite. Through these examples, this article makes a normative case for portraying poor communities as democratic agents who are bearers of ideas, reasons, justifications, and aspirations. We argue that this portrayal is essential for promoting virtues of deliberative democracy – inclusiveness, pluralistic reason-giving, and reflexivity – that are very much needed in contemporary times.

KEYWORDS:

• Deliberative democracy
• political participation
• poverty
• deliberative media
• democratic theory

Introduction

There are many ways of amplifying the voices of the poor in today’s multimedia-saturated society. Every day, we see humanitarian organizations appealing to us in our newsfeeds to support children suffering from malnutrition. Online streaming services offer a selection of critically acclaimed films that expose the horrifying experiences of poor families finding ways to make ends meet. Occasionally, we are invited to come together, watch a concert, and wear a wristband to make poverty history. These examples, among others, demonstrate how audiences with increasingly short attention spans can be drawn to the pressing yet often neglected issue of poverty. Questions, however, remain: what kind of voice is being amplified in these portrayals of the poor? What civic relationships do these voices create and sustain?

In this article, we argue that dominant portrayals of poverty in the media continue to privilege voices that exclude the poor from authentic and consequential deliberations that affect their lives. While creative efforts to represent the poor in everyday discussions have merit, we argue that it is crucial to amplify a particular kind of voice if the public sphere were to be truly inclusive and sensitive to good reasons when discussing the issue of poverty. We make a case for amplifying the poor’s deliberative agency in creating content, particularly for news media. Deliberative agency refers to citizens’ performances of political justification in the public sphere (Curato and Ong 2015). It is deliberative as far as it enriches the epistemic diversity and reflective quality of the way discourse is contested. It is agentic in the sense that political justifications are expressed in creative, contingent, and embodied ways. We argue that news media is a key (though certainly not the only) site for the performance of the poor’s deliberative agency for it is in the news where citizens’ expectations, capacity for argumentation and affective concerns are legitimized (Rosas and Serrano-Puche 2018). We argue that a voice that places deliberative agency in the foreground performs a distinctly democratic function in challenging unequal discursive relationships that hinder authentic public deliberation on issues of poverty.

We develop this argument in three parts. First, we examine the ways in which the poor is portrayed in the public sphere and analyse the deficits of these portrayals using the lens of deliberative democratic theory. Deliberative theory, we argue, provides a normatively robust approach when making sense of news media’s role in building capacities for an ‘enlightened public’ to produce well-considered public opinions that shape collective decision-making (see Habermas 2006; see also Wessler 2018). In the second section, we make a case for amplifying the poor’s deliberative agency and argue that it is normatively desirable and politically possible amidst limiting conditions of inequality not only in terms of material resources but also in terms of recognition and esteem. In the third section, we present two illustrative examples on slow journalism in Brazil and citizen journalism in Lebanon. Both cases demonstrate deliberative agency in action despite major constraints on the democratic quality of news media.

Dominant portrayals of poverty

It has long been recognized that poverty is as much an issue of material deprivation as it is an issue of voicelessness (Lister 2002). When the poor are subject to ‘rudeness, humiliation, shame, inhumane treatment and exploitation at the hands of institutions of state and society’, they are disempowered from exercising their capabilities to pursue things they value (The World Bank 2001). In this definition, being poor cannot be reduced to the failure to earn enough income to sustain material needs, but also linked to psychological conditions of powerlessness, dependency, and voicelessness. Consequently, institutional responses to poverty now include programmes designed to give voice to poor communities that empower them to overcome their lack of autonomy (Cabañero-Verzosa and Garcia 2011). Community-driven development programmes and village-level deliberations are some examples. By promoting virtues of inclusion and public justification, the poor, at least in theory, are no longer treated as recipients of aid but as active citizens who seek ‘to influence, control, and hold accountable institutions that affect their lives’ (Narayan-Parker 2005, 5). These initiatives without a doubt are imperfect. Many scholars are right to question the political motivations and unintended consequences of participatory initiatives (see Cooke and Kothari 2001).

Nevertheless, these initiatives demonstrate a shift in paradigm in development work and political practice. First, these developments recognize that deliberation is a universal human capacity, but one that is unevenly distributed across different socio-economic groups and policy regimes. Creating bespoke forums where the poor can develop their ‘oral competencies’ is a way of correcting this imperfection in liberal democracies (Sanyal and Rao 2018). Voice and political influence may be uneven in the public sphere, but at least in discrete deliberative forums, the poor have some power to shape decisions that have impact in their everyday lives. Through deliberative forums, communities can, for example, deliberate and decide whether the community budget should be spent building a well or a bridge. These forums can also serve as avenues for accountability, where the poor can meet public officials face-to-face to enquire into the slow and selective distribution of welfare services. These, among others, are examples of policy interventions that seek to redistribute political power, albeit temporality. Second, when discursive spaces that promote inclusiveness and deliberation are set in place, the poor can challenge the legacies of status subordination and assert their roles in public life. A range of studies have demonstrated the track record of these forums in not only enhancing the delivery of public service but also in generating a sense of political efficacy among marginalized communities (see Wampler 2007; Nabatchi 2010). The question, therefore, is not whether the poor can deliberate. The empirical literature has long established that under the right conditions, poor communities are able and willing to take part in deliberative decision-making (see Sanyal and Rao 2018; Steiner et al. 2017). The broader question is whether democratic institutions can create conditions for the poor to take part in deliberation outside their immediate discursive enclaves, step in to the wider public sphere, and challenge the distribution of discursive power that perpetuates humiliating, discriminatory and disempowering representations of the poor. This, we argue, is an important step towards creating more inclusive democracies that bridge the discourses of the poor to the (privileged) public sphere.

The news media is one institution that plays a key role in creating conditions for the poor to take part in deliberations in the wider public sphere. News media are ‘gatekeepers of the public agenda’ as far as they provide information on collective issues and the space in which these issues are debated. They shape a nation’s discursive environment that defines which topics are worth discussing and which personalities are worthy of public attention (Williams and Delli Carpini 2020). The ‘representational absence’ of poverty in news media is a clear example of how this institution, through wilful disregard or amplification of privileged voices, denies and deflects the political presence of seemingly expendable members of society, therefore excluding the poor from broader public debates (Chauhan and Foster 2014, 398). Some studies find that working class people are invisible in popular television programmes, while the voice of the poor, particularly women, are muted in news stories (Bullock, Fraser Wyche, and Williams 2001; Streib, Ayala, and Wixted 2016). Poverty is normalized when it is no longer problematized. It becomes a background context to breaking news, whether it is a fire, a landslide or a hurricane. Questions about the deeper causes of poverty and attempts to assign accountability become marginal to the agenda. Indeed, this has been one of the strongest critiques against participatory approaches to poverty reduction. They create possibilities for the poor to identify their preferences and justify their demands, but they are steered away from broader public conversations that litigate injustices that perpetuate poverty.

Meanwhile, when the poor do make an appearance in the public sphere, they are often portrayed as a deficient other. Entman’s (1993) landmark research on framing poverty is as relevant today as it was over two decades ago. Media framing of poverty often reduces the poor as victims of misfortune who need care or enemies that threaten social order who need to be punished. These stories, we argue, are told from the position of representational privilege where the storyteller imposes disempowering representations over the poor. The ‘crying old woman’ and ‘the snotty child’ are evocative images because they use familiar tropes of suffering, even though realities in the slums do not always correspond to this portrayal (Awad, Domínguez, and Bulnes 2013, 36). As Isabel Awad and colleagues observe, urban poor community leaders in Chile often encounter ‘journalists who seem disappointed when they see a clean slum and who specifically seek images of children with dirty noses or without shoes’ (Awad, Domínguez, and Bulnes 2013, 36). Suffering makes good copy (Wasserman 2013). Audiences see suffering in humanitarian appeals and feel-good magazine features of triumphs amidst adversity. Suffering evokes moral responses. It builds a sense of common humanity and cultivates kindness, but at the same time depoliticizes asymmetrical relationships between the giver and receiver of kindness. In this portrayal, the poor has diminished agency, unable to take control of their lives because of unfortunate events, waiting for the compassion of distant audiences.

While the portrayal of the poor as victims evokes sentiments of pity, the portrayal of the poor as enemies stokes sentiments of fear. The ‘undeserving poor’ – the welfare scroungers, the kids getting high on glue, the thugs in the street corner – have been over-represented in the news media. What little space is afforded for the poor to appear on national television often comes in the form of a talk show, focusing on themes of infidelity, teenage promiscuity and poor parenting (Streib, Ayala, and Wixted 2016, 2). Viral photos of a mother leaving her baby in a car to go clubbing or young boys high on crystal meth smashing shop windows are images that stir moral panics, which, in turn, give weight to political claims of rolling back welfare, adding conditionalities to aid packages, or being tougher on juvenile crime. These portrayals depict the poor as dangerous others unworthy of entitlements as members of a political community. Here, the poor’s agency is not diminished but questioned. They are ‘strangers in our midst’ who cannot be trusted with full rights of citizenship (Lister 2015, 144; Reicher and Stott 2011).

The frames of victims and enemies, of course, are ideal types. They have variations depending on the genre, considerations in production, and the audience imagined to consume such content. And, indeed, as will be discussed in the illustrative cases below, these portrayals can also be challenged. Audiences are not passive recipients of information but are active agents in interpreting, reinterpreting, and in some instances, co-producing media content. The purpose of reviewing these portrayals is to underscore the argument that poverty’s material and symbolic aspects are interdependent (Lister 2015). Defining poverty cannot be reduced to levels of income or material deprivation but as Nancy Fraser argues,

Cultural norms that are unfairly biased against some are institutionalized in the state and the economy; meanwhile, economic disadvantage impedes equal participation in the making of culture, in public spheres and in everyday life. (Fraser 1995, 68)

Fraser’s emphasis on equal participation in making culture, public spheres and everyday life opens doors to critique these portrayals from the perspective of democratic theory. The deliberative tradition, in particular, offers a critical lens by which their deficits can be challenged. Put simply, deliberative democracy is a normative theory and a political project that places ‘meaningful communication at the heart of democracy’ (Bächtiger et al. 2018, 2; Curato, Hammond, and Min 2018, 2). As a normative theory, deliberative democracy conceives an ideal polity as one where ‘people come together, on the basis of equal status and mutual respect, to discuss political issues they face and, on the basis of those discussions, decide on the policies that will affect their lives’ (Bächtiger et al. 2018, 2). Such normative lens draws our attention to at least two deficits of how the poor are currently portrayed in the mediated public sphere.

First, the principles of equality and mutual respect are compromised when dominant frames reduce the poor as victims or enemies. Deliberative theory alerts us to questions of whose stories are told, whose voices are amplified, and who has the power to decide on what the public sees and hears. While small-scale deliberative forums discussed earlier respond to this challenge by convening a representative sample of participants from marginalized backgrounds to avoid the amplification of the voices of the usual suspects, news media remains vulnerable to the uneven economy of representation. The bias for portraying the poor either as diminished citizens or undeserving other fail to recognize their status as peers in social life and instead perpetuates poverty as ‘a shameful and corrosive social relation’ (Lister 2015, 141). Democratic life cannot be built on this social relation.

Second, the simplification of poverty to dominant frames disables the public sphere from engaging in reflective discussions that public deliberation requires. The portrayals of the poor as victims and enemies thrive based on spectacle and shock value, which elicits quick reactions and ill-considered judgments. This comes at the expense of unpacking the background of a story, learning about the political origins of the poor’s suffering, and understanding perspective of those who are actually experiencing poverty (Lugo-Ocando 2019, 5). All too often, we see policies quickly reacting to emotive portrayals, arguably the most iconic of which is the decision to ‘build a wall’ to protect the United States from Mexicans fleeing from violence at home. Meanwhile, in instances when public deliberation on poverty is indeed taking place, those with direct experiences of being poor have little space in these conversations. The poor may be present in the discussion, but they are often used as props or data source used by experts who make arguments on their behalf (Beresford and Croft 1995). This, as we argue in the next section, is insufficient if the poor were to reshape the public sphere to value their voice.

What then can deliberative democracy offer to address these deficits? Indeed, deliberative democracy is not just a normative theory useful in critiquing society. As we mentioned in our definition, it is also a political project that offers possibilities for reform. Earlier, we discussed how deliberative norms have been used as basis for voice and accountability projects embraced in field of development practice. But interventions need not remain on the level of micropolitical deliberations. Deliberative democrats have long called for the macropolitical public sphere, particularly the media, to be conducive to inclusive and reflective discussions that allows polities to be sensitive to good reasons (see Bohman 2007; Lafont 2014; Maia 2018). We argue that one approach to this challenge is to amplify the poor’s deliberative agency.

Deliberative agency

We use the term deliberative agency to refer to performances of political justification in the public sphere. There are three components to this definition. First, we use the term ‘performances’ to emphasise that speech and action do not necessarily have to conform to the ‘traditional’ ideal of deliberation where reasons are exchanged in a calm and systematic manner. Expressions of deliberative agency are contextual (Bächtiger and Parkinson 2019). Some performances are appropriate in some contexts and irrelevant in others. The case of village-level deliberations in India, for example, presents instances when some participants publicly shamed officials and accused them of embezzling funds (Sanyal and Rao 2018). Shaming is far from the calm and measured portrayal of classical accounts of deliberation but it is appropriate in a situation where discursive inequalities need to be confronted by strong claims to accountability. There is space in deliberative democracy for a range of speech styles and embodied forms of claim-making, contrary to the impression that only gentlemanly rules of discussion apply (Sanders 1997).

Second, ‘political justification’ is what makes deliberative agency deliberative. There are many forms of agency associated to the poor. Narrative agency, for example, refers to the practice of creatively telling stories that can draw public recognition (see Polletta 1998). #BlackLivesMatter’s turn to the digital, for example, is a practice of narrative agency, where activists embrace the social media as the only ‘strategic outlet’ for self-representation of ‘racialized bodies’ considering protests are often disparaged as ‘rioting’ or ‘looting’ (Bonilla and Rosa 2015, 8). The poor also practice affective agency through ‘sentimental political storytelling’ where actors use their social circumstances to evoke sympathy and produce institutional effects (Wanzo 2009). While deliberative agency shares overlaps with narrative and affective forms of agency, deliberative agency is distinct in its emphasis on justification. Justification may take many forms. It can be emotional or dispassionate. It can be visual, textual or auditory (Curato 2019). Key to the practice of political justification is its orientation to relate to each other ‘as equals who are exchanging reasons to reach a shared practical judgment’ or what David Owen and Graham Smith refer to as ‘deliberative stance’ (Owen and Smith 2015, 228). Justification is a performance of equality, such that the poor assert their identity as citizens who are not only bearers of stories, as in the case of narrative agency, or bearers of interests as in the case of affective agency, but they are bearers of reasons who can engage others as interlocutors.

Finally, the term ‘public life’ is central to our definition of deliberative agency. Publicity is one principle of deliberative democracy for it is by publicly expressing reasons that citizens open their views to scrutiny. One weakness of the participatory development projects mentioned earlier is that they take place in discursive enclaves which reinforce the ‘otherness’ of the poor from the wider society. These village forums may build the deliberative competencies of the poor when engaging with fellow members of the community and state bureaucracy, but they do little to empower the poor to break through the conversations unfolding in the wider public sphere. This leads us to our argument as to how news media should serve as conduit to amplify the poor’s deliberative agency.

We offer two normative reasons why it is desirable for the news media to amplify the poor’s deliberative agency. First, the news is, to use Arendt’s (1998) term, the ‘space of appearance’ where the poor can appear to others who may not necessarily directly encounter the poor in their everyday lives. News media has the power to portray the poor not just as objects of pity or objects of fear but as citizens whose knowledge, experiences, and discourses are valuable input in public conversation. News media can facilitate the inclusion of the poor in today’s media-saturated societies and overcome status subordination by giving them access to self-representation. Why, one may ask, does self-representation matter? Is not enough that the poor’s interests are represented in the news, or that there are so-called discursive representatives like celebrity humanitarians who can speak on behalf of the poor? While we see nothing wrong with the representation of poor people’s viewpoints in the news, we take issue when the poor themselves are generally absent in these discussions. What this creates, we argue are two categories of citizenship – those who experience poverty, and those who can talk about the poor’s experiences of poverty (see Phillips 1995). These categories, we find, is corrosive for the principle of political equality when viewed from the perspective of voice and recognition, in that the poor are withheld the opportunity to be seen and heard on their terms. It perpetuates the bourgeois model of the public sphere that rests on significant exclusions, where only individuals of a particular status are considered worthy to appear in the public sphere (Fraser 1990). As Peter Beresford and Suzy Croft put it, ‘supporting people to speak for themselves is a basic requirement for such equality’ (Beresford and Croft 1995, 90). To achieve such status, democracy requires concrete and recurring practices that normalizes the deliberative agency of the poor as part of civic culture. The news, by virtue of its regularity and influence, is a critical genre for the realization of this aspiration.

The second reason is an epistemic one. If the goal of the news is to provide information so citizens can make intelligent political decisions, then part of this obligation is to provide a robust account of poor communities’ perspectives. As discussed in the previous section, there is a tendency to portray the poor as a homogenous group of people ‘and somehow detached from mainstream society’ (Lugo-Ocando 2019, 1). The reality could not be farther from these portrayals. Research on village-level deliberations find that the poor have a range of views and priorities when it comes to solving shared problems and it is important to surface these kinds of differences in the public sphere (see Heller and Rao 2015). To work against the essentialist notion of the poor serves an epistemic function by first, allowing poor communities to clarify their preferences by learning about the views of similarly-situated citizens, and second, encouraging broader audiences to think critically about their taken for granted assumptions about poverty and learn to engage in deliberation with different constituencies of poor communities (see Krumer-Nevo and Benjamin 2010).

Illustrative cases

While there are reasons to argue that portraying the poor’s deliberative agency is normatively desirable, the question is whether it is empirically possible. We argue that it is. In this section, we discuss two illustrative cases of how innovations in news media coverage can amplify the poor’s deliberative agency despite the limiting conditions of an imperfect news media.

We present the case of slow journalism in Brazil and citizen journalism in Lebanon. We selected these examples to illuminate how deliberative agency of the poor can be realized from a ‘top-down’ initiative, as in the case of slow journalism with media organizations designing news coverage to amplify the voice to the poor and a ‘grassroots’ initiative, as in the case of citizen journalism with poor communities themselves claiming space in a saturated media environment to assert their discursive presence. Meanwhile, we selected Brazil and Lebanon as empirical cases to illustrate the prospects of deliberative agency in different political and cultural contexts but both notorious for extreme levels of inequality (AbiYaghi, Catusse, and Younes 2017; Nagle 2017). Through these examples, our aim is to identify the conditions, practices, and contingencies that make the performance of deliberative agency possible.

Our illustrative cases are based on secondary data analysis on two news events involving the poor in mining disasters in Brazil and widespread protests in Lebanon. We monitored news reports and social media discussions on these events in both Portuguese and Arabic to construct a timeline of events with a view of tracking how portrayals of the poor’s deliberative agency emerged. In particular, we mapped the conditions that led news media to give the poor voice and visibility in the coverage, identified the actors that facilitated deliberative agency, the inherent and emergent constraints in performing deliberative agency, and the strategies the poor used to claim visibility in the public sphere. We then analysed news coverage using the lens of deliberative agency by identifying (1) the performative aspect of the poor’s claim-making; (2) the political justifications the poor offers in the coverage; and (3) the publicity or the strategies poor communities use to break through the public sphere. We discuss each of the cases on these terms, followed by a reflective discussion on the possibilities and constraints of deliberative agency in unequal societies.

Slow journalism in post-disaster Brazil

Media coverage of disasters tend to focus on the spectacular aspects of a tragedy. In Brazil, coverage of mining disasters usually focuses on the extent of environmental damage and humanitarian impact, which evokes sentiments of pity towards poor communities affected by the disaster. The poor are often portrayed as victims who need our compassion, while claims to injustice and the deeper causes of the disaster are often left out of the discussion. This, however, is not always the case. Media studies scholars have observed the emergence of ‘slow journalism’ in covering situations of extreme vulnerability.

Slow journalism is a ‘subversion of the dominance of speed in our everyday lives’ (Le Masurier 2015, 140). It is distinct from ‘fast’ journalism because it rejects the ‘cult of speed’ that live reporting demands (Neveu 2016, 451). Slowness allows journalists to embed themselves in a community, gain their trust and lessen social distance between reporters and their subjects. It is often associated to long-form formats of news production which sets itself apart from the decontextualized coverage of micro-events, thirty-second news clips, and listicles. This format demands a lot from journalists. Reporters are expected to build a large corpus of data. They have the time to investigate the veracity of claims, listen to more sources, and prepare in-depth content. There is no one formula for a news report to count as slow journalism but it is appreciated for its attempt to ‘structure a new ecology for information production’ (Neveu 2016, 452). Slow journalism promotes empathy, transparency and responsibility between journalists, community leaders and lay people, and, we argue, it also promotes the deliberative agency of the poor.

There are two examples in which news organizations in Brazil have practiced slow journalism in the coverage of a disaster. The first example is Zero Hora’s coverage of the mining disaster in Mariana in November 2015. This disaster unleashed about 40 million cubic meters of iron ore mining sediments and toxic substances, destroying an entire village, killing 19 people and causing huge damage to the ecosystem of the region, including the contamination of one of the largest rivers in the country (see Phillips 2018). As expected, Brazilian news media focused on the suffering caused by the disaster while arguments that express indignation and protest injustice had little coverage (Amaral and Motta 2018). This, however, is not to say that there was no critical news reporting. In Wilson Bueno’s analysis of how Brazil’s four leading newspapers covered the first thirty days of the disaster, he found that journalists contested the mining company’s framing of the disaster as a natural accident. News reports provided evidence on failures in inspection and safety procedures in Samarco, the company responsible for the dam which is administered by world mining giants Vale SA and BHP Billiton, as well as gaps in estate’s legislation and inspection. The limitation of this kind of coverage, however, is news media’s fleeting attention to this issue. ‘Over time, (the press) ignores the real risks inherent in these enterprises, especially when they are at the mercy of corporate greed and the omission of officials’, argues Bueno (Bueno 2017, 39). In this sense, the news coverage of the disaster accomplished two things. First, it reproduced a stereotype of a victim who only suffers and despairs. Second, it demonstrated limited commitment to investigating the consequences of the disaster only to its immediate aftermath instead of committing to a sustained coverage that can draw attention to the incremental failures of the state and the private sector, which, in turn, can inform public deliberations on the issue.

Zero Hora’s Mud Road series presented an alternative coverage to the disaster. Zero Hora is a newspaper based in Southern Brazil. While the first days of Zero Hora’s coverage was mostly conducted from a distance, this evolved to an embedded coverage after public clamour for answers on social media (Barin 2016). Readers of the newspaper started to post comments on Twitter and Facebook, pressing for Zero Hora to change its approach and pay more attention to the disaster in Mariana. Furious about the much greater prominence given to international tragedies, citizens posted content such as:

This Media is a shame. Okay, it is a pity what happened in France … But here the catastrophe that happened to the people of Minas Gerais, you don’t give a damn about in your news

In Mariana there is also fear, pain and thirst. Vale removed the Rio Doce from the map and sent water with kerosene to the population. What did the press report, really?

Ten days after the tragedy, the newspaper published a note acknowledging the public’s clamour. They announced a new phase of coverage and asked citizens for suggestions as to which aspects of the disaster would be important to explore

Dear readers, we have received criticism about our coverage (…) Many are asking if we have forgotten the tragedy in Mariana. (…) A Zero Hora team is arriving tomorrow in Mariana without a date to return.¹

Although it is a newspaper from a different state, Zero Hora is one of the most relevant newspapers in the country and its agenda was transformed at that moment through popular pressure.

In this second phase of coverage, Zero Hora’s reporters lived with people on the scene of the disaster. Through principles of slow journalism, reporters were able to amplify the poor’s deliberative agency. Zero Hora highlighted the political justifications of the poor about the causes and consequences of the disaster. For example, reports about the court’s orders for Samarco to pay damages placed the voices residents in the foreground. The fisherman Augusto Ribierto was quoted:

The mud was contaminating the river very fast. It scared me. I felt a deep sadness. [I was] revolted. I live through that [river], that’s how I support my family. There is nothing to repair it.

This statement demonstrates the fisherman’s deliberative agency. It surfaces the moral judgment Augusto made. He finds the reparation unacceptable because the disaster destroyed his life. His performance was overtly emotional and with it carried a political claim questioning the commensurability of reparations to the impact on Augusto and his family’s life. In another part of the series, student-led action was featured, particularly their visual protest of putting up posters that say ‘We are mourning. Our river is dead. We want our river back’ and ‘it was an avoidable tragedy had the mining company’s vision went beyond profit’. Compared to Augusto, these posters were more confrontational, laying blame on corporate greed and linking affective claims (we are mourning) to accountability claims (we want our river back). This view, however, has not gone uncontested. The report also featured another student, who argued that ‘nobody wanted this to happen’. The student acknowledged the tragedy, and the meaning of this tragedy to people who spent their entire lives on the river, yet subtly, contested the blame-seeking discourse of other students. These portrayals, we argue, is characteristic of slow journalism. By embedding in the field and publishing in long form, journalists can present the different layers of arguments and justifications surrounding the tragedy, as articulated by poor communities. The poor are de-essentialized as a category by mapping the tensions in their views thereby enriching the epistemic dimension of deliberations in the public sphere. It challenges fast journalism’s reliance on dominant political, social and cultural assumptions and instead created space in public life to give voice to many expressions of identity and judgments (Craig 2015).

Zero Hora was not alone using a slow journalism approach to cover the aftermath of a disaster. Less than four years after the disaster in Mariana, a nearby town, Brumadinho, experienced another mining disaster. This time, 272 people died. TV Globo, one of Brazil’s major news channels, sent a team to Brumadinho. The team stayed with the community for three months and then aired a forty-minute news report in Profissão Repórter (Profession Reporter) programme. Profissão Repórter is a weekly news programme that became part of Rede Globo's grid a few years ago. It is shown on Wednesday nights and often has a much higher average audience than other broadcasters. Although it is not the highlight of Rede Globo, it is a programme that stands out for addressing themes that are generally not dealt with in other programmes or other major media. An interesting fact, for example, is that the majority of Profissão Repórter audience is made up of people from lower economic classes.² Profissão Repórter has won awards in Brazil both in the field of journalism and by human rights institutions. Slow journalism often does not appear as a revolution for broadcasters, but through initiatives that may have different levels of contribution to the field. While we recognize that there are limits to what this specific programme is capable of doing, we do see an important potential for empowering subjects and to themes to be treated with more depth, more time and more complexity.

Standing out from this news coverage are two features. First, the performance of indignation and anger associated with moral judgments and strong opinions of victims were central in the coverage. For example, Wilson Caetano, demanded information from the state about his missing son, Luis Paolo. ‘I have the right to his bones, for me to bury him’, he said in exasperation. ‘One person says one thing, another person says another, and in the end, you have no information’ he adds, making a claim about the lack of transparency in post-disaster response. Wilson then walked with the reporters to the scene of the disaster. Reporters asked why Wilson visits the disaster site every day. With an indignant tone, Wilson responded, ‘this is where he lost his life. This is where they killed him’. Wilson, using an impassioned style of speech, assigned accountability to Vale SA, the mining company where his son worked, and argued that not only did Vale fail to protect the life of his son, the company showed no remorse our goodwill to affected families. ‘Nobody from Vale came [to us after the disaster] … They come here and kill our children’, he added. In this coverage, victims of the disaster were portrayed as reasoning subjects who can provide political justifications to their anger to democratic deficits in post-disaster response. In this case, Wilson was protesting the lack of information, poor accountability, and the impunity of the mining company. He was connecting his personal grief to public life by arguing the political basis of his suffering.

The special report also covered the political consequences of the disaster. It drew attention to popular protests and campaigns to pass bills to make mining safer. The programme returned to Mariana and problematized why state representatives failed to begin an inquiry. The Brumadinho disaster is thus placed within a broader context of mining regulation in Brazil. At another point in the programme, visibility is given to MAB, the Dam-Affected Movement. MAB has existed for many years but rarely had the space to speak in the news. Simone Silva, a Mariana citizen, shouts in front of Renova Foundation, a foundation created by Vale SA to facilitate communication between the company and those affected: ‘There are no bad guys here. It’s just a meeting what we want. We want an answer’. This part of the programme is an important one, for it shows the diverse discourses and tactics the poor use to demand accountability. While Wilson is of the view that Vale SA are directly accountable, Simone is more concerned with finding space for dialogue through meetings. As another example of this diversity and complexity of points of view, Amelia Mendez does not blame the company, but instead is concerned with maintaining mining activities to hire residents of the region. She explained the implications of the Mariana disaster to unemployment and laments how ‘the mud swallowed the company he [her husband] worked for’.

These examples, among others, demonstrate how slow journalism has the power to generate an epistemically robust account of a disaster beyond familiar tropes of suffering. Journalists embedding in disaster affected communities places the performative aspect of deliberative agency in the foreground by portraying the passionate expression of justifications for their grievances. It also put forward various political justifications about the disaster’s implications from the perspective of the poor. Slow journalism also affords a longer-term assessment of short-term spectacles. It sustains the presence of the poor in public life for a longer period. In the cases of Mariana and Brumadinho, terrible events with such profound impacts drove media companies out of the normal routine and operate based on deliberative norms of reflection, empathetic understanding, and diversity of views. All these, we argue, enrich the epistemic value of deliberations in the public sphere, while also bestowing recognition to the diverse voices of the poor.

While we emphasise the potential of slow journalism in amplifying the poor’s deliberative agency, we also recognize its limitations. First, we recognize the practical challenges for such project to take off, considering the time and resources needed to cover a single news story. Even in the case of a mining disaster which generated global interest because of the scale of its humanitarian and environmental impact, Zero Hora only sent a team and created a special series of report after public protests For a news story that brought widespread public anxiety, journalists, one could argue, are more open to new approaches and stories to try to build meanings of the tragedy. This opportunity is not available for ‘mundane’ yet equally troubling news stories like economic inequality or urban crime. Slow journalism may serve a deliberative function, but it faces the challenge of prohibitive costs.

Second, we recognize that slow journalism is a genre that demands time and attention which may be contrary to the logics of fast-paced contemporary societies. Media studies scholars, however, suggest that coupled with audiences’ demands for instantaneous news are demands for genres that allow them to process informational complexity (see Craig 2015). The challenge, we argue, is not for all forms of news to embrace the logic and virtues of slow journalism, but for slow journalism’s epistemic contributions to be better incorporated in media and deliberative ecologies espousing different temporalities.

You stink and citizen journalism

On-going civil protest of political corruption in Lebanon was sparked by a garbage crisis in 2015. As the garbage crisis was unfolding, coverage antagonized the poor focusing on the slums where the landfills are located. The poor in the Lebanese political discourse are ‘non-citizens’. The cleanliness of the ruling elite contrasts the ‘dirt’ poor, a discourse which disqualifies the political agency of the poor as they cannot keep themselves and their suburbs clean. These portrayals discredit the poor’s standing as citizens and instead, they are depicted as subjects of disdain and charity from educated elites who know better (see Arsan 2018).

One way to challenge the typical depictions of the poor is for the poor themselves to take over how they are portrayed in the public sphere. Citizen journalism is one way to do this, where ‘ordinary citizens’ command the curation and production of news-making with blogs and social media as journalistic mediums (Abbott 2017). Scholars describe citizen journalism as a ‘deliberative forms of civic education’ where citizens actively make a case for issues that they consider to be relevant in their lives (Nah et al. 2017, 64). Relevance and political purpose are the criteria for citizen journalism’s content. These constitute the democratic potential of citizen journalism in ‘invigorating deliberative discussion’ (Kim and Lowrey 2015, 301). Beyond serving the purpose of providing information, citizen journalism is a method to call out the factors that keep the poor disadvantaged and excluded from political deliberations and, consequently, mobilize movements that can change these conditions (Pain 2017).

The case of Lebanon’s You Stink movement is an example of citizen journalism in action. It is remarkable for it not only gave the poor an avenue to reframe the issue of Lebanon’s trash problem as an issue of political corruption, but it also allowed the poor to perform their deliberative agency. Turning to social media allowed You Stink to contest narratives of poverty and reassigning blame to people in power. The name itself–You Stink–is a performative way of making an accusation that there is something foul with the government and not the poor. You Stink points at the deliberate choice of the slums to become landfills.

The issue began in July 2015 with the closure of the Naameh landfill site which housed waste from two Lebanese governorates: Beirut and Mount Lebanon. The closure caused major problems in garbage collection. With the closure of Naameh, garbage was dumped in all the streets of Beirut engulfing the city and its residents by rivers of trash. In news reports, landfill sites are normalized as places of poverty where audiences are used to seeing areas like Naameh as a ‘poverty-stricken village’ (Moughalian 2016). Uncritically reporting on the Naameh closure in the media did not have room for discussion about the reasons for the garbage crisis in the first place. This kind of coverage was disrupted by the protest of the You Stink movement (Geha 2019). In 2015, protesters staged a march towards government offices, culminating with the crowds throwing garbage bags over the barricades of the government buildings. Through this colourful performance of claim-making the poor expressed their interpretation of the trash problem: what is needed is not to clean the streets but ‘to “clean” the government of sectarian leaders’ (Geha 2019, 84).

A key component of this movement is You Stink’s citizen journalism arm. Participants responded to accusations that the movement is composed of thugs (implying poor people) because they are not as well-dressed as middle-class protesters. On Facebook and Twitter, citizens sarcastically conceded to ‘bring yoga mats’ and ‘wear heels’ to the protests so they prove they are not ‘poor’ in the pejorative stereotypical sense (in Hall 2015). Similar to the performance of dumping garbage in front government offices, citizen journalists produced video reports of the movement renaming dumping sites after ministers in government (see YouStinkLebanon 2016). A parody video of Lebanon’s tourism campaign went viral, where You Stink reappropriated the tourism ministry’s glossy video by alternating images of Lebanon’s pine forests and old towns to tons of garbage piling in the streets.

As mentioned earlier, these performances take the form of parody videos and creative protests that enliven their political claims. This claim is backed by public justifications about the incompetence of Lebanon’s political class and the failures of Lebanon’s consociational democracy (Nagle 2017). Citizen journalism redistributes deliberative agency by interrogating the privilege of ‘educated men living in Beirut’ and instead presents the movement as bearers of ideas for reform (AbiYaghi, Catusse, and Younes 2017, 77). It is also a space for ordinary citizens to reclaim the narrative of poverty in Lebanon in public life. In one tweet, for example, citizens made the association between corruption and poverty.

If they do not kill us by the suffocating landfill smoke, they want to kill us by poverty and debts. Meet us on Sunday to reiterate our demand: no to a life of indignity because our homeland is not a ranch! #YouStink #WeCarryOn.³

Like the case of Brazil, political claims made by the poor are plural and multiple. While most media coverage focused on demands for the government to resign, other poor communities emphasised the impact of the garbage crisis in their everyday lives, including risks on their health. This, we argue, is an important quality in citizen journalism for it pluralises the range of perspectives underpinning a large-scale protest movement. While the You Stink movement has become a broad alliance of civil society organizations, middle classes, and protesters unaffiliated to any political persuasion, the poor were able to secure opportunities to articulate the injustice inflicted upon them as the garbage crisis remains unresolved.

Citizen journalism also had an impact on professional journalism. With the outbreak of more protests in Lebanon almost five years since the first march, mainstream news reports increasingly recognized the role of citizen journalists. In the coverage of the 2019 protests, BBC Arabic (2019) presented a news feature which highlighted multiple forms of citizen journalism that present themselves as ‘alternative media’ which contrast and challenge Lebanese professional journalism that is mostly a front for a political faction. In another news feature on the protests, Arja (2019) accounts for how citizen journalism established a new discourse about poverty where it ignites ‘wanting art, sophistication, and creativity … breaking the fear pillared in sectarian power’.⁴ Arja cites the example of ‘Al-iʿlam Al-badyl’ (alternative media) Facebook page, where, through citizens’ ownership of their own mobile phone devices, they can protect the page and its narrative of protests from being hijacked. Meanwhile, photographs posted on Instagram served to broker the demands of the poor for fair representation to citizens who wish to express solidarity with their cause. For example, citizen journalism page Al-ʿūqūl Al-nyira’ (Enlightened Minds) posted the photo of a banner which, roughly translated, states: ‘We are poor but we have dignity. If you want to help, leave your camera at home’ signed by the Youth of Old Saida.⁵ The subtext of this banner is a demand of the poor not to be photographed receiving aid, for these images that have traditionally shaped their portrayals in the public sphere as helpless citizens relying on the support of others. This page renegotiates the rules of solidarity between the poor and their allies, by providing a reminder about the politics of visual representation.

Thus far, our account of citizen journalism in Lebanon has been celebratory of its capacity to amplify the poor’s deliberative agency. We recognize that this genre also has limits. Its potential for inclusion is limited by broader structural inequalities, such as the digital divide and unequal capacities for citizens to create digital content (Firmstone and Coleman 2015). We also recognize that citizen journalism, despite its portrayal in Lebanon as alternative space for ‘public sphere bloggers ‘[to be] agents of social change’ (Hamdy 2009, 96), is also held captive by logics of virality for their stories to gain relevance. Citizen journalists need to play the game of attention hacking and gaming algorithms to ‘trend’ worldwide. We heed Luke Goode’s warning of equating citizen journalism to democracy or meritocracy in news-making without critically investigating the ‘politics of code’ (Goode 2009, 1303). As far as You Stink is concerned, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the Arabic hashtag that trended in August 22, 2015 took place after months of online and offline activism. Tweets using the hashtag have originated from various locations and different users, suggesting that the activity is a product of organic transnational solidarity and not algorithmic alchemy alone.⁶ Nevertheless, we are supportive of further studies that examine the precise ways in which citizen journalism embraces as well as challenges the politics of code. Related to this issue, we also recognize that citizen journalism is not immune from the pathologies of digital communication. Some studies suggest that citizen journalism tends to focus on the negatives of an issue, using ‘algorithms and other structural features of social media’ that are designed to ‘enrage’ audiences, which, in turn, renders the digital public sphere vulnerable to disinformation and hate speech (Abbott 2017; Wall 2019, 33). The epistemic quality of citizen journalism can also be critiqued, for its lack of editorial controls places questions on the integrity of news produced. This leads some scholars to suggest that there must be intermediaries between citizen and professional journalism to validate and ‘make sense’ of content shared online (see Sienkiewicz 2014). We are aware of these risks for deliberative democracy’s epistemic potential. Citizen journalism may promote inclusiveness and diversity of voices, but this, in some instances, may come at the expense of deliberation’s truth-tracking potential.

Reflections from the illustrative cases

Table 1 presents a summary of the ways in which deliberative agency was manifest in the cases of slow journalism in Brazil and citizen journalism in Lebanon. We offer three key reflections on deliberative agency based on the similarities and differences of these illustrative cases.

1. Conditions of possibility. What makes the performance of deliberative agency possible in an exclusionary public sphere? The public sphere in Brazil and Lebanon are shaped by extreme inequalities as well as a media system with concentrated ownership and a history of government co-optation (Rosas-Moreno 2014; Reporters without Borders 2019). In the case of Brazil, it was public pressure that led the media to portray the poor’s deliberative agency. In Lebanon, it was the strikingly visual performances of claim-making in street protests and digital campaigns that drew the attention of audiences as well as mainstream press through citizen journalism. In both instances, public deliberation was prompted not by ‘context legibility’ or engaging the pre-existing (exclusionary) deliberative structure in the public sphere but ‘context change’ or shifting the terms of engagement in a way that favours the poor (Heller and Rao 2015, 12). Lebanon’s case in particular involved purposeful violation of gentlemanly rules of speech to assert their political claim and set their deliberative agency apart from the ‘educated men of Beirut’ who caused widespread suffering. In this disruptive performance, the poor renegotiated the terms of deliberation by presenting themselves not as problems to be solved but as bearers of ideas to reform Lebanon’s flawed political system.

Table 1. Summary of portrayals of deliberative agency.

Deliberative agency of the poor	Slow journalism Brazil	Citizen journalism Lebanon
Performance	Emotional	Playful
Justification	Calls for accountability due to corporate neglect	Protest due to political elites’ failures
Publicity	Connecting the disaster to mining policy	Connecting the protest to failures of consociational democracy

Public pressure and spectacular performances, however, are not enough for the poor to be seen and heard on their terms. A lesson both examples underscore is the importance of connecting the poor’s political claims to disrupt the dominant discourses and discursive styles in the public sphere. Transmission is the term deliberative theorists use to describe this practice where political claims performed in one site of deliberation – in this case disaster zones and slums – are connected in other sites of deliberation, including privileged sites of discourse (Dryzek 2010; Boswell, Hendriks, and Ercan 2016). You Stink’s alternative media and subsequent citizen journalism platforms connected to legacy media like BBC Arabic to amplify their political claims among mainstream and regional audiences. In Brazil, the poor’s deliberative agency claimed space in the format of longform journalism and investigative documentaries which allowed the poor to make a case to an audience whom they would otherwise not meet in class-divided Brazil. Viewed this way, performing the poor’s deliberative agency requires two conditions for possibility in an unequal public sphere: disruption of the public sphere to be part it, and connection with other deliberative enclaves for their discourses to circulate. It is through the combination of the two that allows the poor to claim space in the public sphere.

• (2)  Conditions of success. Asserting presence in the public sphere, however, is not an indicator of ‘success’ for political inclusion. Deliberative democrats have long recognized that inclusion does only not mean having a seat at the table, or on this case, making an appearance in news media. Molly Scudder proposes the concept of ‘uptake’ as key deliberative ideal, where voices of the poor are ‘actually heard and ultimately considered’ (Scudder 2020, 505; emphasis in the original). In our illustrative cases, there is some level of uptake with the poor’s performance of deliberative agency. In Brazil, the media coverage facilitated a wider public discussion about the underlying reasons for what seemed to be a natural disaster. Meanwhile, in Lebanon, the claims made by the poor such as the effects of landfills in slums on health has been considered and reflected in contributions made by middle-class protestors. In other respect, uptake of this particular claim has been further advocated by international organizations such as Human Rights Watch to advance government action (‘Lebanon: No Quick Fixes to Trash Crisis’).

Scudder reminds us that uptake must not be confused with direct impact. It is possible that the poor’s inputs are duly evaluated but not reflected in the decision emerging from public deliberation. We extend this discussion to say that uptake does not necessarily mean changes in the material conditions of the poor or that being heard in the public sphere should immediately convince decision-makers to heed the demands of the poor – especially when these demands are not homogeneous and sometimes in conflict with each other. This, we argue, is contrary to deliberative ideals of weighing arguments, listening to a range of considerations, and deliberating on the common good. What uptake does in this context is creating capacities for the public sphere to recognize new perspectives and transform the terms of deliberation in a way that is sensitive to rather than dismissive of the poor’s reasons (see Heller and Rao 2015). We observed this in citizen journalism where the voices of the poor have been considered a legitimate source of information by legacy media and wider publics. We observed this in slow journalism where the voices of the poor have been considered worthy of sustained engagement beyond the spectacle of suffering.

• (3)  Conditions for replicability. Slow and citizen journalism, while increasingly becoming popular modes of journalistic practice, are still considered luxuries. Slow journalism demands time, resources, and attention which are not always available in a fast-moving news cycle. Citizen journalism too is a luxury. Despite its grassroots character, documenting political claim-making is demanding for communities whose time and energy also need to be spent to make a living. We recognize that the performances of the poor’s deliberative agency in the wider public sphere is possible, but not all the time. These examples are exceptional cases, leading us to enquire into the conditions for replicability of performances of deliberative agency.

And so, we find it useful to circle back to the lessons of deliberative mini-publics convened to give voice to poor communities in development programmes. In the first part of this article, we referred to the body of evidence demonstrating the poor’s capacity to deliberate under the right conditions. Building the right conditions for exercising deliberative agency is crucial. Performing deliberative agency is habit-forming. For deliberative interventions to work, they must not be one-off attempts but instead are incorporated in the policy cycles of community development. Performing deliberative agency also demands material support, which explains why development agencies invested resources in convening these forums. Resources are spent to develop the poor’s capacity to express their views, as well as develop institutional capacity for local governments to respond to the voices of the poor.

These insights can serve as inspiration for reforms in the media system and the wider public sphere. Instead of waiting for ‘conditions of possibility’ for deliberative agency, these conditions can be created through interventions in crafting a mediated public sphere that is hospitable to the poor’s voices. Some look to journalism grants that focus on poverty reporting, others campaign for fair wages for journalists who themselves come from poverty to serve as connector among discursive enclaves. Other major news outlets look to the affordances of digital technology including short digital films to make poverty reporting more engaging to audiences who otherwise would look the other way. A major part of this, of course, is the political economy of media systems, which makes it challenging to publish ‘stories about the downtrodden because they don’t sit well on the same page with advertisements for diamonds and luxury homes’ (Ehrenreich 2015). Until such structural reforms are underway, we recognize that performances of deliberative agency remain scare and possibly ephemeral. It is this precisely this concern that led us to write this article in the first place, and make a case for the poor’s performance of deliberative agency in a (corporate) media-saturated society.

Conclusion

The cases of Brazil and Lebanon demonstrate that performing deliberative agency in news media is not only normatively desirable but also empirically possible. Claiming space for the poor in post-authoritarian settings where power imbalances are stark limits the scope for possible deliberative action, but as these cases demonstrate, can still operate given the agentic and creative character of poor communities in securing their voice. By making this argument, we hope to have contributed to on-going conversations about deliberative democracy’s contributions to media studies, particularly in providing a normative vision and plan of action for transformative politics.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Accessed from: https://www.facebook.com/gauchazh/posts/10150660269844956.

2 Information accessed from: https://tvefamosos.uol.com.br/colunas/flavio-ricco/2019/04/14/profissao-reporter-encontra-na-classe-c-o-seu-maior-publico.htm.

3 Translated from Arabic to English. Accessed from: https://twitter.com/Ryan_Jurdy/status/667398198181232640

4 Translated from Arabic to English.

5 Translated from Arabic to English. Accessed from: https://www.instagram.com/p/B-9cmKQJY5r/?igshid=1p9an1omeg9ns.

6 Based on trending topic archives accessed from: https://trendogate.com/trend/2341259.