Creating the Social-Critical Telenovela in Brazil: How Television Drama by Left-Wing Writers Came to Dominate the National Agenda Under Military Dictatorship in Brazil

• In Event: Rhetorical Filters and Politics of the State

Abstract

This paper intends to re-examine a case that was crucial in the original debate between cultural imperialism and what was then emerging in the 1980s in cultural industry analysis and cultural studies that contributed to the globalization paradigm. At the time the case of Brazilian television showed that national production was rising, not being diminished by an overwhelming wave of U.S. imports (Nordenstreng and Varis 1974), contradicting somewhat the predictions of both media imperialism and cultural imperialism theories (Straubhaar 1981, 1984). It led to a counter theory of cultural proximity, which posited that the aggregate cultural agency of the Brazilian public’s preference for national production created a space for that production, when industry had the resources to meet it (Straubhaar 1991). We want to bring in some useful perspectives from the new emerging paradigm of critical media industry studies, but also to critique that paradigm somewhat in light of the continuing importance of classic political economy in explaining aspects of this case.
The case in point here is the initial rise to rapid dominance in Brazil of TV Globo, in a complex interaction between Globo’s joint venture partner Time-Life, the Brazilian military government, the managers of TV Globo (who were delegated remarkable authority for that situation, time and place), and the writers, directors, and others they hired. Many of the latter were communists, exactly the people the military had sworn to repress and drive out of political power. So there seems to be an intense contradiction here. What were missing in earlier accounts, including my own (1981, 1984, 1991), were two critical things: First, an appreciation of these internal contradictions and the use of agency by all of the participants that they represented. To better understand this theoretically, aspects of current media industries theory (Havens, et al) are quite useful. Second, however, is an appreciation of the continuing predictive value of the political economy espoused at the time by Herb Schiller, and further developed by Brazilian political economists themselves (Bolano). While current media industry theorists bring a crucial understanding of the agency involved by actors within media industries, they sometimes miss the continuing importance of the overall political economic structures of those industries within their national and global context.

Authors

• Joseph D. Straubhaar, U of Texas - Austin

• Heloisa Pait, UNESP-Faculdade de Filosofia e Letras