(Expansion) – Synchronized swimming is a practice that emerged in the 19th century and is located between art and sport. It is about all the members of the team executing their choreography in perfect synchrony as if they were one.
But synchronized swimming is also a form of journalism. On some occasion, the former electoral councilor, Alfredo Figueroa, defined it in an interview as: “A set of voices that, without knowing how or why, agree even in commas to say exactly the same thing, forming a propaganda campaign, and at that moment there is no distinction between what is information and what is propaganda of a group of voices ”.
It operates when different opinion-makers (who hardly reveal their sources) receive information, generally true, with very precise data on some matter in order to highlight facts or situations with the aim of highlighting them and exhibiting in some way the actor (s) involved or to achieve some objective such as: trying to influence a public policy or some regulation; draw attention to certain errors or social, economic or political needs; support or revile someone or an organization, etc.
As in sports, in editorial synchronized swimming, the technical style and personal style also appear. For this reason, some differences are achieved in the wording, although some phrases or words that indicate that it is a coordinated action regularly prevail.
For the generality of newspaper and magazine readers, this activity goes unnoticed because they only read a comment about an event or to some person in the newspaper of their choice; but its scope goes beyond the common reader of a single newspaper: the recipient (s) identify it when several media simultaneously publish the same line of argument, a very similar wording and sometimes even without modifications to the original text.
Generally, the final recipients of these publications are people with a certain level of influence or authority, politicians, presidents or representatives of autonomous organizations or civil society, public officials, presidents of companies or business organizations, and even prominent artists and athletes.
Editorial synchronized swimming is something that is seen a lot, for example, in political campaigns. You just have to review different media during the last two or three months to find that synchrony to get your foot in the political adversaries. In this case, it is considered that it functions as a propaganda tool that seeks to reveal candidates in order to weaken them with the power of media opinion or to try to strengthen them in the same way.
Through this instrument, card fraud, illicit enrichment, fraudulent contracts or businesses, altered recordings and any subject that may achieve the political objective of strengthening or weakening are attributed.
The media effect that is achieved is generally magnified through social networks, where literally armies of bots, with identical or similar words, are in charge of reproducing synchronized comments to attack and try to discredit those on the same networks express contrary opinions.
An example: It is presumed that at present there is a synchronized swimming team at the command of the current government (financially supported by the National Palace) that through social networks and internet pages are in charge of discrediting the criticisms made of the government from the media. Each of the members of this team is responsible for issuing the same disqualifications by publishing their comments with great synchrony and uniformity.
I don’t want to think about what would happen if the electoral propaganda were sophisticated to the degree of invading the privacy of the voters. I think of it from an experiment carried out at the University of Minnesota called “Synchronized Advertising”, consisting of synchronizing radio and television with smartphones or tablets to capture the attention of the multi-task user. Whoever watches a commercial on television or listens to it on the radio, at the same time receives additional information about the product on their mobile device.
I hope that the idea does not prosper and much less in our country because I do not want to imagine what the next political campaigns would be like with a synchronized multimedia swimming. If, as we are, the campaigns saturate and annoy us, with that idea they would end up invading our privacy with the permission of the government.
Editor’s note: Mario Maraboto Moreno has a degree in Journalism from UNAM. Associate Researcher at the University of North Carolina. Author of the book “Journalism and Business. How to link companies with journalists”. Consultant in Communication, Public Relations and special situations / crisis since 1991. Write to him at [email protected] and follow him on. The opinions published in this column belong exclusively to the author.
