PAQUETE DE OLIVEIRA

(1936 – 2016)

“Physically, you die only once; socially, we can die and be born several times.”It was Paquete de Oliveira himself who stated this, assuming his multifaceted trajectory, that is, his multiple and “diverse paths”.

José Manuel Paquete de Oliveira was born in 1936, in Funchal (Madeira), and died in Lisbon, on June 11, 2016. He was ordained a priest in 1960, after having attended the Funchal Seminary, where he was a teacher and responsible for the area of Education.

He was, at the time, a member of the board of the Clube Desportivo Nacional (the National of Madeira), having even directed the bulletin then published by the club and, in 2010, was part of the centenary commemorative honor committee.

From an early age, he fell in love with Journalism (at the age of 23, already a priest, he was editor-in-chief of Jornal da Madeira, a daily newspaper then linked to the diocese of Funchal) and, later, with Sociology, he graduated in 1973, in Social Sciences (branch of Sociology) at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Pontifical Gregorian University of Rome.

After the revolution of April 25th, already separated from the priesthood, he directed the Diário de Notícias (Madeira) and joined the Planning Board, the government management body of the Archipelago until the creation of new democratic structures.

In 1976, he was invited by Adérito Sedas Nunes to teach the subject of Sociology of Communication at ISCTE – Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa (today, ISCTE – IUL-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa), in the course that would only end be recognized the following year, since, thanks to the repeated opposition of the Estado Novo, “Portuguese sociology”, as Madureira Pinto wrote, only truly began” after April 1974.

Paquete de Oliveira dedicated his life to ISCTE, to the point that, according to José Rebelo, this teaching marked his own identity. With the important curiosity that, in the opinion of Céu Neves, a journalist who was his student, wife and mother of his two children, the practice of journalism associated the practice of scholarship and the practice of investigation.

She remembers, by the way, that, on the first day of classes, «José Manuel identified all the students by name», because, as she would “discover later”, before starting the school year, he carefully read the curriculum of each student, focusing particularly on the photos.

It was also at ISCTE that he received his doctorate (1988), with a thesis that, under the title of Forms of “Hidden Censorship” in the Written Press in Portugal after the 25th of April (1974-1987), continues to constitute an indispensable document for understanding of the complex relationships between the media and society – in question, “invisible censorship”. At that Institute, he also assumed important scientific and management positions, having been part of its Executive Board (1989-2006). Between 1986 and 1989, he directed Sociology, Problems and Practices, a magazine of which he was one of the founders.

Attentive to the evolution and innovation of communication, around a decade later, he created the pioneering master's course in the area of​​Communication, Culture and Information Technologies, where, according to António Firmino da Costa, a researcher and sociologist who was a full professor at ISCTE- IUL, «added the modernity of new technologies to the aspects of society, culture, communication and power». With the important advantage of, in someone's words, having always fought for the opening of the university to the world and always having refused the restriction of «research to the academy».

He was a member of the Consultative Council of the National Commission of UNESCO (1999-2002), he presided, between 2002 and 2006, as director of LUSOCOM, the Lusophone Federation of Communication Sciences founded in 1998, with the aim of promoting the development of science studies and communication policies in the Portuguese-speaking space, and to the General Council of the University of Beira Interior.

With his life especially focused on teaching and research, Paquete de Oliveira never abandoned Journalism, having been a regular presence in newspapers such as Expresso, Diário de Lisboa, Diário de Notícias or Jornal de Notícias. Between 1994 and 1997, he was also a resident commentator on the program “Police Cases”, broadcast by SIC.

As stated by José Jorge Barreiros, who was his friend and academic companion, he has always been “interested in the issues of journalism, communication, information, news”, in other words, the media constituted “a striking feature” “his entire life journey”.

It is also worth highlighting his important intervention in defending the rights of spectators and readers, having been provider for RTP viewers, between 2006 and 2011 (“Voz do Cidadão”), and, later, provider for readers of the newspaper Público, a position he held between December 2013 and the day of his death (June 11, 2016).

Some of those who followed his activity more closely consider that the “careful” and “reflected” way in which he treated the messages received meant that his television program reached an unexpected audience. There are even those who, by the way, consider that he was the provider capable of teaching the country to “think” about Communication.

In 2004, he published, with Gustavo Cardoso and José Jorge Barreiros, Comunicação, Cultura e Tecnologias de Informação (2004), a work that, according to its authors, intended to make a “contribution” and be “a reflection on the impacts and consequences of the Internet on the processes of innovation and social change it triggers”.

For Gustavo Cardoso, professor and researcher at ISCTE-IUL, Paquete de Oliveira managed to create a school capable “of thinking about Communication in a different way”, that is, “a Sociology of Communication with its own perspective”, as it integrates “contributions from Anthropology, Sociology, Management, Economics and History”. What is at stake, in that sociologist’s opinion, is a different look (an “understanding”) on communication – “not just on Journalism, but on communication as a whole”.

In honor of the professor and journalist who “distinguished himself in defending communication sciences, the principles of transparency and neutrality in journalistic work, defending respect for citizens and the rules of democratic pluralism in the media”, in 2018, the ISCTE-IUL, with the support of the PortoBay group, created the “Paquete de Oliveira Prize”, with the aim of annually distinguishing essays on the media in Portugal.