1. Introduction to the Popular Committee and the Dossiers
Rio de Janeiro's World Cup and Olympics Popular Committee (Comitê Popular da Copa e Olimpíadas) was an informal coalition of activists including academics, social movement members, residents of communities affected by Olympic developments, and NGO representatives. After the Olympics were awarded to Rio in 2009, the Popular Committee formed in part out of existing activist networks that had protested Rio's 2007 Pan-American Games. The Rio network also participated in a broader national coalition of Popular Committees of the World Cup, alongside activists from almost all of Brazil's World Cup host cities.
This national articulation of committees published its first dossier on human rights violations in late 2011, aiming to show the systematic nature of violations across the country as preparations got underway for the World Cup. Given Rio's unique status as a World Cup host and the Olympics host city, Rio's Popular Committee decided to produce a city-specific dossier. The first version was published in 2012 and was then updated in a new edition each year through 2015. Rio's Popular Committee also produced three more thematic dossiers: on the right to housing, the right to sport, and the rights of street vendors. It is important to note that the dossiers did not only denounce violations — they also offered a list of proposals for a more inclusive Olympic project and city.
2. Introduction to Catalytic communities and rioonwatch.org
When the Olympics were awarded to Rio de Janeiro in October 2009, the Rio-based NGO Catalytic Communities (CatComm) was a nine-year-old advocacy organization that had created and strengthened networks among community leaders from favela neighborhoods across the city. Some 1,050 leaders from 250 favelas had exchanged ideas and local solutions through the organization’s activities, from technology training workshops to an online “Community Solutions Database." Shortly after the Olympic announcement, the City announced 119 favelas would be removed. The NGO's director Theresa Williamson reflected:
"All of a sudden the most basic floor on which CatComm was based, which is that favelas have value and that they should be strengthened, all of a sudden the favelas we worked with were being threatened. Existentially."
In 2010 when CatComm organized a “Strategic Use of Social Media” course for favela residents, the team started a simple Wordpress site — RioOnWatch.org — where course participants could practice blogging.
"In May 2010, Catalytic Communities launched Rio Olympics Neighborhood Watch (RioOnWatch), a program to bring visibility to favela community voices in the lead-up to the 2016 Rio Olympics. This news site, RioOnWatch.org, is our primary vehicle for publishing the perspectives of community organizers, residents, and international observers, in light of the fast-paced urban transformations that currently characterize Rio." – RioOnWatch.org homepage
In its “original call to action,” the site identifies a discrepancy between a certain image of the Olympic City — “initial positive press for policies intervening in the city’s favelas [...] and significant work on the part of the city administration to engender a positive image in the face of international public opinion” — and a more sobering reality: “escalating debate and conflict over policies which have proven only to exacerbate Rio’s infamous inequality.” The news site was designed in part to shine light on this mismatch between image and reality. Favelas were the focus, but the period of Olympic preparations and the accompanying government PR campaigns provided the context that created RioOnWatch.
Like the dossiers, RioOnWatch did not just denounce problems but proposed solutions. Favela residents’ ideas and projects to improve their own communities were a constant theme across articles.
6. Five Strategies for engaging the mainstream media
Despite the Popular Committee and CatComm’s concerns about traditional outlets' coverage of the Olympic City, it was clear to both groups that the mainstream media was still a crucial battleground for challenging the official and celebratory narratives. As important as it was to build autonomous spaces where they could employ the practices described in the previous section, mainstream media remained the key to reaching bigger audiences.
Furthermore, both groups observed that Rio's mayor at the time, Eduardo Paes, aspired to higher political offices and was striving to cultivate an image as a transformative leader, both nationally and abroad. The Olympics themselves are always inherently about promoting a certain positive image of the host city. As such, there was a strong sense that negative international media coverage would matter to the mayor and the IOC, and could therefore be used as leverage. Almost everyone I interviewed identified international journalists as a key target audience for RioOnWatch and the dossiers.
Some interviewees suggested international media coverage also played the role of influencing Brazilian media coverage. One Popular Committee activist reflected on the period around 2013 when international media began to voice criticisms of the Games' preparations:
"These materials began to come out in the international press: The Guardian, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, El País. And so, it became unsustainable for the local media not to talk about it. And they began to discuss it too. Often in a distorted form, but at least they began to talk about it. This was particularly clear in relation to evictions."*
The following list of strategies to engage mainstream media is by no means exhaustive, but instead reflects those strategies that emerged from my interviews and document analysis.
Strategy #1: Build media contacts, early
As foreign correspondents and freelance journalists moved to Rio de Janeiro in the years before the Games, both groups worked to build and maintain media contacts. CatComm made sure to let newly arrived journalists know they could reach out to the team for support on reporting on favelas.
"I’d reach out and we’d meet up for coffee. Basically I’d just let them pick my brain about whatever interested them. But I’d also give them perspectives that I thought were important, in terms of what is a favela and why their work is so important in Rio at the moment." — CatComm Executive Director
Through these informal interactions and through press requests from journalists, CatComm developed a mailing list of reporters' emails that it would blast with important story recommendations and resources for reporting on favelas.
The Popular Committee developed its own journalist mailing list, built up in a similar fashion over the years from a combination of contacts who had reached out to the group and contacts that members of the collective already had. This list received press releases about each dossier as it was launched. The Popular Committee’s communications team was fully aware that journalists might not have time to read the long dossiers in full, so they highlighted updated statistics and summarized key issues in the press releases.
It's crucial to emphasize that both groups had built up extensive media contacts long before 2016. They worked over the course of years to support critical coverage in mainstream media and, as described earlier in this page, to solidify their positions as recognized "references" on rights violations and favelas, respectively, in the context of the Olympics.
Strategy #2: Create resources for journalists
Just before the World Cup, CatComm used its mailing list to disseminate a contact list and map of favela community leaders who wanted to tell their stories to international press. It was a way of encouraging mainstream media to invert the trend of overlooking favela perspectives and to produce coverage that challenged stereotypes. Journalist feedback suggested the resources were useful but would have been more helpful several months prior to the start of the sports event. Accordingly, for the Olympics, CatComm compiled a full page on RioOnWatch dedicated to “Olympics Resources for Journalists,” and shared these materials with journalist contacts several months ahead of the Games.
One of the NGOs closely involved with the Popular Committee, Justiça Global, knew that Olympics organizers were blasting accredited journalists with information through mailing lists, press conferences, and even carefully coordinated tours of the city. Assuming many reporters coming for the event would be pressed for time and would seek out this kind of ready-made reporting, Justiça Global produced a Guide for Reporting on Rio for journalists. Published in three languages, the guide offered concise snapshots of information from the dossiers and from across the network of actors critiquing the Olympics.
Strategy #3. Create and capitalize on moments of high media interest
One Popular Committee activist told me the group received spikes in press coverage with each protest and event it organized, so the collective strategized around this notion that it could influence, to an extent, the timeline of media interest. In addition to organizing the main protests immediately before and during the World Cup and Olympics, the Popular Committee received considerable media coverage for the People's Cup (in 2013 and 2014) and for each of its dossier launch events. It also organized countless public debates on themes ranging from the militarization of the city to the right to housing, and co-organized protests around the city in partnership with communities threatened by Olympics developments and other civil society groups. (And as most of the links in this paragraph demonstrate, many Popular Committee events were documented on RioOnWatch.)
At the same time, the activists used certain milestones they knew would be high media visibility occasions. One activist recalled that in 2012 when the Olympic flag arrived in Rio, the Popular Committee knew reporters would be at the airport to attend a city government press conference. Accordingly, activists went to the airport dressed as Olympic swimmers and delivered a press release to those journalists. The press release included critical questions the reporters could ask at the press conference, an example of the Popular Committee encouraging mainstream media actors to use dossier data to see beyond the official narratives. In this case, the protesters attracted coverage from the major Brazilian publication Globo, among others.
Similarly, CatComm timed Olympics-focused articles to dates when the team knew mainstream media interest would be high, such as the “One Year To Go” and “Three Months To Go” dates. In 2012 when Eduardo Paes delivered the Olympic flag from London to Rio, CatComm Director Theresa Williamson and Providência photographer Maurício Hora published an op-ed in The New York Times titled, "In the Name of the Future, Rio is Destroying Its Past." They used the occasion to pivot attention not just from London toward Rio, but toward critical questions about the communities and heritage at stake in Rio's rush to develop and construct in the name of the Olympics.
"The London Olympics concluded Sunday, but the battle over the next games has just begun in Rio, where protests against illegal evictions of some of the city’s poorest residents are spreading. Indeed, the Rio Olympics are poised to increase inequality in a city already famous for it." — Theresa Williamson and Maurício Hora, The New York Times
CatComm also held an “Alternative Press Conference” in October 2015, timed closely with the city government’s major press conference for international journalists. At this alternative event, the CatComm team and Olympics researcher Jules Boykoff recommended hard-hitting questions for journalists to ask the mayor and Olympics organizers at the official press conference; former Vila Autódromo resident Heloisa Helena Costa Berto also shared her eviction story. Later, in the week before the Games began, the NGO organized an “Alternative Olympics Tour," calculating that the days immediately preceding the Opening Ceremony would offer the maximum number of available journalists before their attention was grabbed by the sports. RioOnWatch editors also used this week as a deadline to squeeze in a number of articles that were heavily critical of the Olympics, as well as a series of articles that called on journalists to #StopFavelaStigma.
The Popular Committee shared the assumption that the period immediately before the Games would be the most strategic moment of high media visibility before sports began to dominate everything. One activist recalled:
“We didn’t plan such a big schedule of protests [during the Games] because we knew, based on the experience of the World Cup when there was very violent repression [...] the coverage, even of the international media, was all focused on the Games.”*
Learning from the World Cup, then, the Popular Committee did plan a protest on the day of the Olympics Opening Ceremony (see the video below), but also ran a week of protest events prior to the start date. Similarly, the Popular Committee ran a Facebook campaign for the 100 days prior to the Opening Ceremony in which they posted about one human rights violation per day. One activist stated simply:
“We posted a lot in the pre-Olympic period. We knew it was when we would have more visibility.”*
Thus, perceptions of changing opportunities at different moments led both groups to concentrate their efforts to attract media visibility in the period at the very end of the build-up phase, rather than during the main event itself.
Strategy #4. Provide interviews and support for the press
Members of both groups did interviews with the press and regularly accompanied journalists to visit communities threatened by Olympics preparations. In CatComm's case, given its mission to challenge negative preconceptions about favelas, team members also accompanied journalists on visits to community initiatives involving culture, environmental sustainability, homegrown solutions to issues of sanitation or water, and local organizing.
Some mainstream media coverage had tangible impacts on "the concrete struggle," as one Popular Committee activist described it. There were cases when the mere presence of camera teams delayed demolitions or gave residents an extra dose of confidence to demand full compensation for their homes.
Several interviewees said media interest in their work built in intensity throughout 2016 to the start of the games on August 5. June and July of 2016, in particular, saw several Popular Committee and CatComm participants managing exhausting numbers of press requests.
Some joked that they did so many interviews on a weekly basis that they lost track of who they were talking to and for what publication they were being interviewed.
The unprecedented demand for interviews and support as the Olympics approached reflected the influx of what both groups referred to as "parachute journalists." Unlike the correspondents and freelancers who had moved to Rio some years prior in anticipation of the Games, parachute journalists spent only short chunks of time in the city, or arrived in June or July to prepare for Olympics and Paralympics coverage in August and September. In my interviews, several people suggested the interest in critical reporting was there, but many of these parachute journalists came with set scripts they wanted to report and did not have the time to go beyond those scripts. Still, they were instrumental in raising the quantity of voices debating the impacts of the Olympics on the city, and some produced materials that CatComm and the Popular Committee appreciated immensely.
The videos produced by Johnny Harris for Vox, for example, epitomized the kind of reporting CatComm aimed to support: one analyzed the exclusive Olympic City project that had been built on the displacement of poor residents, and another invited viewers to rethink the common stereotypes of the city's favelas.
Activists also used interviews and other exchanges with journalists as opportunities to voice their concerns about media complicity. Referring to the trend for international outlets to question whether the Rio Olympics would be ready in time, one CatComm staff member explained:
"One thing I commonly told journalists during those years was that not only was this focus on whether Rio could 'pull it off' patronizing and distracting, but it actually gave leverage to the city to instate a state of exception and pound on citizens' rights because they could argue it was necessary 'to pull off the Games' given the international pressure. So the journalists were actually compounding the human rights abuses by reporting like that."
Strategy #5: Pile on the social media
Both groups were highly active on Facebook and Twitter, posting multiple times per day to share their own material, content produced by others in their critical network, relevant news from mainstream media, and Facebook pages for upcoming events.
On Twitter, the CatComm team developed two new Twitter accounts in the years approaching the Olympics. @RioONWire, launched in April 2015, was targeted specifically at international journalists, aiming to support more diverse and stigma-countering stories about favelas. CatComm's website explained:
"Different from our regular @RioOnWatch Twitter feed (for general news, in English and Portuguese, including retweets and conversations), our @RioONWire Twitter feed behaves like a traditional Wire service (think Bloomberg, Reuters or CNN scrolling updates along the bottom of your screen or in Times Square) but focused on favelas and real-time news, in English and with some extra punch: after every NEWS, BREAKING or EVENT item, you’ll find tweets offering BACKGROUND, CONTEXT, CONTACT information, and more, to help you understand and contextualize that original news item."
Like RioOnWatch, @RioONWire's primary objective was to change the narrative about favelas in order to pave the way for more productive public policies. Its focus on stories about favelas and by favela residents ultimately meant that it often directed followers to critical analyses of abandoned Olympic legacy projects and the elite city being constructed in the name of the Olympics.
Created in October 2014, @RioOnWatchLIVE was another handle that CatComm's interns and collaborators used to report directly from events. It was developed after interns tweeted live from the protest in Rio on the final day of the World Cup, documenting how several hundred police blockaded protesters in one plaza and used stun grenades, tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets. The tweets were shared widely by journalists, researchers and activists, alerting the team to the demand for this kind of live social media reporting. Most of @RioOnWatchLIVE's tweets were retweeted by @RioOnWatch, which had a bigger audience built up over the years. The CatComm team typically used the @RioOnWatchLIVE account to report on demolitions, panel discussions organized by groups like the Popular Committee, and protests, including the Protest Against the Genocide of Black Youth held in July 2016 and pictured below.
The Popular Committee's "100 Days Without Rights" (#CemDiasSemDireitos) campaign provided the group with an additional media hook in the immediate build-up to the Olympics, and RioOnWatch was among the outlets that covered the social media campaign. The campaign also gave the group an opportunity to distill the extensive content of the dossiers into short but informative posts, highlighting the wide range of rights violations that had occurred in the Olympic City.