There is a recurring joke, almost obligatory when some kind of curious, striking or bizarre event happens on the other side of the Río de la Plata, which speaks of how lucky we are as Uruguayans to have a beach chair close at hand with views of Argentina. The joke is based on verifiable facts: from a feeling of moral superiority that we do not want to assume so as not to tarnish the image of integral honesty that we carry as a medal, we are witnesses and spectators of a country that is not boring and that has 24/7 entertainment for give. The problem is when that possibility of laughing and being consumers of minor and not very harmful situations becomes something else: in the preferential seat in the box of tragedy.
It is clear: the neighboring country is not patrimony of the tragedy, but the proximity pulls and what happens there hits hard on this side of the world. It hits more, even, than pains of lurid dimensions such as those of Turkey and Syria. In this way, processing and consuming these phenomena becomes a backpack that sticks almost by default in anyone who has a social network at hand and the traces are sometimes difficult to clean. As an example enough the case of Fernando Báez Sosa.
On Monday, when the Argentine court sentenced the eight rugby players responsible for the murder of the 20-year-old in the town of Villa Gesell in January 2020, there were various repercussions, opinion columns and articles that emerged from Uruguay. There were also comments in inner circles. In general, They spoke of the impact and accumulated pain of not having been able to escape consumption, for having been part of the trial almost automatically. For the exploitation of a sociologically perfect case for the good digestion of the masses and mediated to the stratosphere.
“The live broadcast of the trial for the crime of Fernando Báez Sosa broke all the metrics and ratings indices, it is the news with the most clicks and the one that attracts the most audience in the last month. It is a piece of news that thematizes a risk situation and, in this sense, questions audiences just like any news about insecurity: its media approach prevails: ‘it can happen to anyone’” writes, for example, Brenda Focás , Argentina, doctor in social sciences, specialist in audiences and media constructions, in a column in Diario.ar.
“There is no record of a criminal trial broadcast simultaneously on open TV, cable and streaming during a period of activity limited by a judicial fair and which, moreover, coincides with the anniversary of the event that gave rise to it. The coverage of the case and the trial has had characteristics of spectacularization and sensationalism. It is followed by the hearings like a soap opera, which also adds infotainment overtones, beginning with the victim’s lawyer, the hyper-media Fernando Burlando”, he adds later.
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The eight young people convicted of the murder of Báez Sosa
Focás wrote his article when there were still a few days left before the sentence, the turning point in the trial. That day everything catalyzed even more.
From a sociological point of view, it is common for people to get hooked on these ultra-media cases like viewers of another fiction series. In addition, the case of Báez Sosa had all the components and stereotypes indicated to conquer the general public, something that is recurrent in Argentina and that this time permeated Uruguayan shores. Namely: it had a victim of humble and foreign origin, villains who occupied the quintessential stereotype of senseless violence, added to a dispute that inflamed class hatred and, deep down, it was less white / black than what is believed. thought.
“This case has everything,” explains the Argentine journalist Victoria De Masi in one of the latest installments of her newsletter Thank you for coming. It has the perfect villains and the perfect victim. She introduces the question of social class, of hate, of ‘skin color’. It lays out the worker identities: on that and from the twelve hearings that I witnessed, I say that there are more similarities between the families of the victim and the perpetrator, than between the families of both compared to those of the students of the Marianista school, to which Fernando attended thanks to a scholarship. In this case, the defendants and the victim arrived on vacation counting coins. It has violence, a bestial violence: hitting until someone’s head becomes a rattle. And he also has the characteristics of the fortuitous and of bad decisions.”
It was because of these qualities that, without needing to be too attentive to the comings and goings of the hearings, one could know absolutely everything about this case. Today, in events mediated in this way, it is almost a constant to be a part. Even when we don’t want it. Somehow it comes.
According to Felipe Arocena, a sociologist and professor at Udelar’s Faculty of Social Sciences, this affects society in two ways: on the one hand, it generates an unprecedented degree of involvement in the event, and on the other, it activates the morbid motor, one that is directly connected to the idea of pleasure.
“There are permanent public lynchings in situations of violence, condemnations by public opinion replicated over and over again through the different media, something that is much stronger than two decades ago, before the networks. Aftershocks generate a kind of obscenity of the image“, says.
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The media coverage of the trial was one of its characteristics
“In this particular case, and in other similar ones, that connection continues causing the sensation for those who consume the news that they are part of that process, and that the judgment they issue somehow affects the outcome. Because by saying ‘they must be sentenced to life imprisonment’, the person arrogates the right to impart justice in the world, and although it is symbolic that moves many fibers. We feel minimally empowered and with the ability to make the world a fairer place, or to act against an injustice. Today, the means to feel like this are not only greater, but they are constant, permanent, they are present second by second in your pocket, in real time”, adds Arocena.
But what about the morbid? Why do we run after him without stopping to think about the consequences of the rampant consumption that he forces us to do? Basically, because it is a feeling closely linked to the need to feel safe, to find ourselves on the correct/healthy/beneficial side of the line. To some extent, morbidity is an automatic security battery that is put into practice and fed back in a chain of satisfaction.
“When you see a person who is in a difficult situation, by default you have empathy but you also think ‘luckily I’m not that bad’. And that to some extent causes a certain pleasure “says Arocena.
Apart from the morbid attraction and that illusion of collective justice imparted from the networks that Arocena mentions, exposure to this type of news or cases also leaves traces on a psychological level.
in a note from The Observer about the practice of doomscrolling —anglicism that has become popular to mark addiction to negative or tragic news— Lorena Estefanell, master’s degree in psychological therapy and professor at the Catholic University, puts the psychological aftershocks of exposure to this type of news in these terms:
“Each person has a tendency to see the glass as half empty or half full. In the face of catastrophes, some are optimistic, they see the best and a potential for improvement in that situation, while others are negative and despair. That is something that can be modified, and that changes as life progresses. It is linked to biology as well.”
His statement is contextualized at a time in the already extinct pandemic world where the consumption of news that predicted the apocalypse intensified, but to a lesser extent that residual hopelessness also occupied the psyche of several of the people who, as consumers, were linked to the case of Baez Sosa. And those are the moments when the beach chair begins to weigh a little more, where grace is not evident —nor does it exist— and the media and exhibitionist coup hits squarely. “This whole issue left me sick,” was something that people not connected to each other repeated to the writer in recent days, referring to the resolution of the rugby crime. The discomfort makes sense and even foundation: it is the price to pay for a historical consumption practice of the human being that, in the last decades, has been strengthened. And that it is far from losing footing.
