[OFF] Television in Brazil. Globo domination

This post is a Off-Topic, bit I think it has connection with the issue of Media manipulation and authoritarianism.

The article below describes the behavior of TV Globo (Brazil), a TV station that rose in Brazil in 1964, year of the dictatorship, and it behaves like a Totalitarian TV, even in a democracy (the dictatorship ended in 1985 in Brazil, but the Globe has been attacking Democracy until today).

Even a liberal publication (The Economist) shows their shock chronicling the social control exercised by this TV Station in Brazil and the danger that it represents for any country (in case of some Country to copy this model of Globo TV for social control). Worth reading this matter for those who don't know the control model of this TV station in Brazil (Globo is one of the largest TV in the world, a big power, despite the loss of increasing power to the internet who Globo fears), which is "affectionately" nicknamed in Brazil, for popular sectors, as 'Goebbels TV' (Rede Goebbels) (a deserved name, in true).
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Globo’s not so little piece of the ratings

Brazil’s biggest media firm is flourishing with an old-fashioned business model
Jun 7th 2014 | RIO DE JANEIRO | From the print edition

WHEN the football World Cup begins on June 12th in Brazil, tens of millions of Brazilians will watch the festivities on TV Globo, the country’s largest broadcast network. But for Globo it will be just another day of vast audiences. No fewer than 91m people, just under half the population, tune in to it each day: the sort of audience that, in the United States, is to be had only once a year, and only for the one network that has won the rights that year to broadcast American football’s Super Bowl championship game.

Globo is surely Brazil’s most powerful company, given its reach into so many homes. Its nearest competitor in free-to-air television, Record, has an audience share of only about 13%. America’s most popular broadcast network, CBS, has a mere 12% share of audience during prime time, and its main competitors have around 8%.

The company started in Rio de Janeiro with a newspaper, O Globo, in 1925, and was built by a visionary and long-lived media titan, Roberto Marinho, who died in 2003 at the age of 98. As it grew in the television age, Globo has arguably done as much as any politician to unite a vast and diverse country, from the Amazonian jungle to the heart of coffee-growing country, from wretched favelas on the urban periphery to the fancy boutiques of downtown Rio and São Paulo. Today it is controlled by Mr Marinho’s three sons and towers over Brazil like Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue. It is the largest media company in Latin America, with revenues that reached 14.6 billion reais ($6.3 billion) in 2013, having climbed impressively over the past decade. As a powerful, family-owned media firm, it looks like a local version of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, without the family drama.

Globo counts pay-TV stations, magazines, radio, film production and newspapers as part of its empire, but most of its profits come from its broadcast network, which airs salacious telenovelas, or soap operas, that are always the talk of Brazil. In richer countries the habit of “appointment viewing” has declined with the spread of digital video recorders, but Brazilians still tune in devoutly for the three telenovelas that run each evening, six days a week.

Globo airs Brazil’s snazziest and freshest shows, yet its business model feels decidedly old-fashioned. Its programmes are filmed on its own vast studio lot, called Projac, nestled among forested mountains on the edge of Rio. Actors and writers are on contract, just as they were in the early days of Hollywood. Workers stitch lavish costumes and build intricate sets on site, like those of “Meu Pedacinho de Chão” (“My Little Patch of Land”), one of the current soaps, a fantastical tale about a small town seen through a child’s eyes (pictured). The telenovela format can be adapted to audience feedback, and plots can be changed on the fly depending on what viewers like.

Globo executives obsess over the real-time audience figures streamed to their offices. “If ratings decline a tenth of a percent, you feel this building shake,” one of them says. For advertisers wanting to get a message to a national audience, it is the obvious choice. Globo knows this, and is estimated to have raised its rates for prime-time spots by nearly 60% since 2010.

Setting the standard

Not everyone is comfortable with Globo’s good fortune. Critics are unsettled by the firm’s share of advertising and audience. It controls everything from Brazilians’ access to news to the market rates for journalists’ salaries. Even entertainment shows can be remarkably influential. “Salve Jorge”, a recent soap set in Turkey, prompted hordes of Brazilians to take holidays there. Its programmes also shape the national culture. This year it aired what it believes was the first gay kiss on a broadcast network.

Elsewhere in Latin America big media companies are in the midst of real-life dramas. Argentina’s Grupo Clarín is being carved up by the government, and Mexico is trying to make Televisa slim down. But Brazil’s government is more docile towards media owners. It helps that the Marinhos tend to adapt to the political climate. Mr Marinho was a staunch supporter of the country’s 1964-85 military dictatorship; today his sons live in a more liberal, democratic Brazil and stay out of the public eye. Last year they ran an apology for their father’s politics in the “errors” section of O Globo.

Brazil does not have a tradition of sequels and prequels, and popular telenovelas are always killed off after a few months to make way for new ones (“Meu Pedacinho” is a rare remake). Likewise, for two decades people have predicted that Globo’s heady success would come to an end as Brazilians look for entertainment elsewhere. So far it has defied them. Sir Martin Sorrell, the boss of WPP, an advertising firm, points out that, as in Japan, traditional media in Brazil are “like a fortress” and continue to hold strong in spite of the incursions of new entertainment sources.

Because Brazil has lagged media trends in rich countries, Globo has been able to watch foreign firms’ mistakes “so we don’t have to make them”, says Roberto Irineu Marinho, the group’s boss. But internet use has taken off in Brazil, and will alter consumers’ viewing habits over time. Today Brazil has more mobile phones than it has people, and penetration of pay-television has slowly crept up to around 28% of households. In April Brazilians spent around 12.5 hours a week on online social networks from their desktop computers, more than double the global average, according to comScore, a research firm. For the first time in Globo’s history it is facing serious competition for advertisers and audience. Increasingly, Brazil’s advertising market will be a contest between the two Gs: Globo and Google.

Globo is still the biggest fish in a big pond, and can keep a hold on Brazilians’ attention, even as they migrate to new platforms. For example, as more households can afford pay-TV packages, Globo may lose viewers from its free-to-air network, but should gain when they tune in to the group’s paid-for channels. It is experimenting with new online offerings, such as letting people subscribe for a monthly fee to view its content online with a time delay.

“We don’t want to jeopardise our advertising revenues by changing people’s habits, but we have to be ready,” says Jorge Nóbrega, a senior Globo executive. Netflix, an American online-video firm, has entered Brazil, but Globo-boosters argue that Brazilians prefer telenovelas to foreign fare. In television, as in football, they are likely to keep rooting for the home team.

From the print edition: Business

Source: The Economist
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21603472-brazils-biggest-media-firm-flourishing-old-fashioned-business-model-globo-domination

Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014

Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014
by Laurence H. Shoup

The Council on Foreign Relations is the most influential foreign-policy think tank in the United States, claiming among its members a high percentage of government officials, media figures, and establishment elite. For decades it kept a low profile even while it shaped policy, advised presidents, and helped shore up U.S. hegemony following the Second World War. In 1977, Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter published the first in-depth study of the CFR, Imperial Brain Trust, an explosive work that traced the activities and influence of the CFR from its origins in the 1920s through the Cold War.

Now, Laurence H. Shoup returns with this long-awaited sequel, which brings the story up to date. Wall Street’s Think Tank follows the CFR from the 1970s through the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union to the present. It explains how members responded to rapid changes in the world scene: globalization, the rise of China, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the launch of a “War on Terror,” among other major developments. Shoup argues that the CFR now operates in an era of “Neoliberal Geopolitics,” a worldwide paradigm that its members helped to establish and that reflects the interests of the U.S. ruling class, but is not without challengers. Wall Street’s Think Tank is an essential guide to understanding the Council on Foreign Relations and the shadow it casts over recent history and current events.

Wall Street’s Think Tank is a very important book, and its information is essential for an understanding of how our politics, and the world’s, has come to its sorry state.

—Joan Roelofs, Counterpunch

Forty years ago, Laurence Shoup and William Minter published their book Imperial Brain Trust, a careful and highly informative analysis of World War II planning for the postwar world by the Council of Foreign Relations and the State Department, plans that were then implemented, establishing much of the framework of postwar history. In this new study, Shoup carries their inquiry forward with a very revealing account of how a small group of planners drawn from sectors of concentrated private and state power, closely linked, along with ‘experts’ whose commitments are congenial to their ends, have set the contours for much of recent history, not least the neoliberal assault that has had a generally destructive impact on populations while serving as an effective instrument of class war. A welcome and very valuable contribution.

—Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Laurence Shoup reveals, as nobody has before, the actual workings of the Council on Foreign Relations. He names the names, explores the connections, and details the penetration of this beast as it shapes and expresses the will of the United States ruling class in the period of its global hegemony. As this approaches its end, we may expect the Council to continue to play a decisive role. In any event, no one can claim to understand U.S. imperialism without reference to Shoup’s masterful work.

—Joel Kovel, author, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?

Lucidly written and deeply informed, this book reveals how the super-rich class organizes itself into a consciously directed, ruling plutocracy. Shoup offers a treasure of insights into a subject that seldom gets the attention it very much needs.

—Michael Parenti, author, The Face of Imperialism and Profit Pathology and Other Indecencies

This book will be a formidable resource for those looking for the ‘American’ fraction of the transnational capitalist class in an era when the hegemony of the U.S. state is being seriously challenged.

—Leslie Sklair, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics

Wall Street’s Think Tank is an invaluable supplement to Laurence Shoup’s earlier book, Imperial Brain Trust, as it chronicles the subsequent history and composition of the Council on Foreign Relations over the last five decades. It thus records how the CFR’s early advocacy of the Vietnam War led to a reversal in 1968 of both Council and U.S. policy, followed by a restructuring of the CFR itself. Did this mean that the CFR avoided the widespread campaign before 2003 to press America into another disastrous war in Iraq? Not at all: The CFR, as Shoup documents, played a leading role in this largely dishonest effort. Underlying both campaigns Shoup shows the on-going presence in the CFR of the international oil majors, as well as of related financial interests, such as the Rockefellers and their spokesmen. Shoup persuasively demonstrates how U.S. foreign policies are still (as in the 1950s) formulated at the CFR before they are adopted in Washington. While it may be more challenged than before by other think tanks, none can begin to match its international outreach. This is a must read for those wishing to understand the dynamics of U.S. hegemony.

—Peter Dale Scott, Professor Emeritus of English, University of California, Berkeley; author, The American Deep State

Praise for Imperial Brain Trust:
The first in-depth analysis of the activities and influence of the most important private institution in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy. Shoup and Minter’s work is based on detailed research, including examination of material hitherto unavailable to the public. This work will stand as a milestone.

—Library Journal

[A] masterpiece of documented analysis of one of the most successful influences on American national policy…. As informed and informative as it is thoughtful and thought-provoking, Wall Street’s Think Tank is an essential and strongly recommended addition to both community and academic library collections.

—Paul T. Vogel, The Midwest Book Review

Laurence H. Shoup received his Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University in 1974. He is the author of several books, including Imperial Brain Trust (with William Minter) and Rulers and Rebels: A People’s History of Early California, 1769-1901, as well as many articles in scholarly and popular publications. He has taught U.S. history at the University of Illinois, San Francisco State University, Sonoma State University, and has been active in the anti-war and social justice movements since the 1960s.

Source: Monthly Review
http://monthlyreview.org/product/wall_streets_think_tank/

The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France. Sandrine Sanos

Aesthetics, Politics, and Abjection: Gendered Fantasies of Race and Nation among 1930s French Far-Right Intellectuals

The intellectual far right in 1930s France sought to reimagine national belonging by challenging what they saw as pervasive moral degeneration and a crisis in a national sense of masculine sexuality. These challenges involved articulating an exclusionary, even violent, antisemitism, and scholars have long debated precisely how to account for the political choices and rhetorical strategies mobilized by far-right writers and journalists from the period. In this lucid and thoughtfully argued book, Sandrine Sanos argues against prevailing historiographical and literary approaches to the work of far-right intellectuals and journalists in 1930s interwar France. Specifically, she challenges scholars who have conceived of interwar far-right politics as thoroughly determined by the “shameful” homosexual longings of its most ardent practitioners. She explains that scholars have unduly privileged biographical readings that view antisemitic political commitments as pathological outcroppings of “deviant” homosexual and homosocial obsessions and desires. For Sanos, antisemitic fantasies of national regeneration in interwar France cannot be tied simply to the “perverted” masculinity of leading far-right figures. Her study focuses instead on the ways in which gendered discourses of sexual perversion became central themes in what she calls the “aesthetics of hate” developed by far-right thinkers.

Drawing on the literary and political writings of such figures as Lucien Rebatet, Robert Brasillach, Thierry Maulnier, Maurice Blanchot, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Sanos convincingly demonstrates that “we must take more seriously the ways in which the tropes of heterosexual deviance, sexual perversion, and abject homosexuality helped mark the bounds of the male citizen and the meaning of public letters in French history” (p. 203). These tropes, she explains, actually constituted the ideological foundations of interwar far-right thought and as such they were explicitly mobilized by intellectuals writing for publications like Je Suis Partout, Combat, and L’Insurgé. The figures Sanos analyzes in The Aesthetics of Hate emerged from early twentieth-century right-wing nationalist and monarchist circles and took inspiration from Charles Maurras, the leading figure in reactionary and antisemitic politics from the turn of the century. One of the book’s goals is to show how these intellectuals formed a loosely knit movement bent on redefining Frenchness (in the face of what they perceived to be social “abjection”) according to a political grammar that united discourses of gender, race, and sexuality (p. 4). Sexuality was a key category for the writers Sanos analyzes, as they called for a renewed French heterosexual masculinity (and, hence, a renewed sense of French citizenship) over and against the “unmanly” bodies of Jews and colonized subjects who were often coded as homosexual. As she puts it, “the appropriate gendered and sexual underpinnings of the social order” had become unmoored after the experience of the First World War and the embrace of modernity, and far-right intellectuals sought to “restore” stable sexual identities as moral foundations for national regeneration (p. 29). Thus the figures Sanos studies were obsessed with well-regulated gender roles, denunciations of sexual “deviance” (which tended to be linked with Jews, communists, and foreigners), and the restoration of a whole masculine self that had been torn asunder by sexual difference.

Central to Sanos’s argument here is the idea that far-right thinkers sought political responses to the tense and fraught social climate of 1930s France in the realm of aesthetics. Art and literature (and aesthetic form as such) provided these figures with potential avenues for regenerating and demarcating anew a corrupt and degraded social body that had been beset from without and from within by democratic and “foreign” (i.e., Jewish) intrusion. This claim explains why she aims to avoid narrowly historicizing the movement she seeks to define; instead, she ties historicizing readings to close consideration of “the narrative and rhetorical strategies [far-right intellectuals] developed in their journalism and in their literary writings” (p. 6).

As she points out in her introduction, the conjuncture of aesthetics and politics that frames her study owes less to what Walter Benjamin referred to as fascism’s aestheticization of politics than it does to Jacques Rancière’s theorization of how the overlapping of aesthetics and politics provokes new “distributions of the sensible;” she rightly highlights how Rancière’s work foregrounds aesthetics as politics and how this emphasis helps to define “the common of a community” (p. 7). This is precisely the problem that haunted far-right thinkers in the interwar period who were obsessed with renewing or recreating a bounded masculine self and, by extension, a bounded national community in response to the excesses of modern life. This theoretical point is an original and timely contribution, given how Rancière’s work has succeeded in drawing the attention of many critics back to the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Yet Sanos only devotes a paragraph of her introduction to this observation, which nonetheless undergirds the theoretical thrust of her project. One cannot help but feel that this underdeveloped discussion of Rancière is a missed opportunity, since its pertinence seems to demand a more sustained and in-depth engagement. Additional fleshing out of this point might reveal more clearly how far-right intellectuals’ turn to aesthetics for political solutions generated new “ways of doing and making,” in Rancière’s terms, that “intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility.”[1] The creation of new forms of visibility in particular seems crucial for Sanos’s study, since the far-right figures and publications she examines sought to make perceptible a pathological Jewishness (embodied by socialist Léon Blum, leader of France’s Popular Front government) that they felt was responsible for the abjection of France’s social body. Since Sanos views her project as a contribution to both the historiography and literary theory of far-right politics in France, drawing out her reading of Rancière a bit further would have been especially revealing.

The book’s chapters engage a variety of themes and figures, offering an intellectual genealogy of the 1930s far-right movement; a contextualization of the “crises” caused by modernity to which far-right journals responded by calling for a renewed sense of virility that would restore order and boundaries to a (masculine) national subject that had been decentered; and a synthetic analysis of how the far-right press polemically and even violently negotiated their fixation with the French nation’s “abjection.” The discourse and thematics of abjection thoroughly permeated the thought and written work of figures like Maulnier and Rebatet, and the figure of the “Jew” served to embody an abject national modernity that had to be transcended via a turn to aesthetics and the “rigorous order” of form (p. 113).

Two of Sanos’s strongest chapters are given over to extended studies of individual writers, Blanchot and Céline, respectively. In the first of these, she historicizes Blanchot’s interwar journalism, viewing his early far-right and antisemitic work as born of a contingent and problematic historical moment and situating her reading of his early career in response to the work of scholars who have retroactively dismissed or minimized the content of his far-right writing. She makes a similar analytic move in the following chapter on Céline, reading his antisemitic pamphlets as continuous with his literary work (especially Voyage au bout de la nuit [1932]) and as a piece of the “cultural discourses of difference and otherness” embraced by “the intellectual and literary far right” (p. 162). In both of these cases, Sanos reads canonical literary figures against the grain, illuminating provocative continuities between their 1930s writing and later literary production and, through careful historical exegesis, laying bare their intellectual and political affinities with the interwar far right more broadly.

Her chapter on Céline deals in part with his racist and hygienicist conception of social contamination, highlighting how colonial interaction with race and blackness in Africa caused his protagonist in the pamphlet, Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937), to grow acutely aware of pervasive Jewish influence on an abject society at home in France. This observation reflects another key element of Sanos’s argument, namely, that far-right figures in interwar France racialized Frenchness within the nation by linking strident denunciations of Jews to colonial ideologies that were enacted abroad in the empire (particularly, in Africa). This is an especially fascinating and provocative point; however, whereas she deals with it at some length in her reading of Céline, at other moments in the book she brings it up only briefly, and it remains unclear precisely how meaningful this turn to questions of empire was for members of the antisemitic French far right. This aspect of her argument is handled most directly in a several-page subsection of chapter 6 (on representations of race in the journal Je Suis Partout) that takes up how the journal approached the problem of colonialism. She points out that Martinican writers René Maran and Paulette Nardal actually produced articles for Je Suis Partout’s colonial affairs page, but she does not go so far as to synthetically historicize the unlikely and paradoxical relationship with far-right intellectuals that these figures must have experienced. Since Sanos refers to this aspect of her argument throughout the book, one expects a fuller and more synthetic treatment of the ways antisemitism was articulated through a racialized colonial grammar than what is actually provided. Such an idea merits extended attention, especially since discourses of race were so central to far-right intellectuals’ collective senses of masculinity and nationality.

The Aesthetics of Hate is nonetheless a rich, well-researched, and well-documented study that succeeds in complicating historical and literary approaches to what Sanos rightly identifies as the far-right ideological confluence of aesthetics and politics in interwar France. She evinces a keen sense of the debates in the field as well as of her work’s place in relation to them, which lends the book and her writing a sense of scholarly self-awareness that makes for engaging reading. Sanos’s analyses of journalistic and literary “fantasies of abjection” avoid the pathologizing logic against which she argues and instead shed convincing light on “a particular aesthetics where young far-right intellectuals reimagined nation, race, and bodies articulated in a gendered and sexual discourse of male identity, citizenship, and civilization” (p. 14).

Note

[1]. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 13.

Sandrine Sanos. The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. xi + 369 pages. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8047-7457-4.

Reviewed by Justin Izzo (Brown University)
Published on H-SAE (June, 2013)
Commissioned by Michael B. Munnik

Source: H-Net
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=38444
https://networks.h-net.org/node/21311/reviews/21626/izzo-sanos-aesthetics-hate-far-right-intellectuals-antisemitism-and

Nuestro ensayo “¿Qué era? ¿Qué es? El Fascismo” EN PDF GRATUITO

¿Qué era? ¿Qué es? El fascismo. Entre el legado de Franco y la modernidad de Le Pen (1975-1997), Destino, Barcelona, 1998, 94 pp. ISBN: 978-84-233-2999-1. Prólogo de Rosa Regás, pp. 11-14.

EN 1998 publicamos nuestro ensayo breve El fascismo, en la colección “¿Qué era? ¿Qué es?”, que entonces dirigía Rosa Regás en editorial Destino. Dado que el libro está descatalogado y hemos recibido peticiones de consulta, hemos decidido fotocopiarlo y escanearlo íntegramente para que sea accesible en PDF de modo gratuito. Para acceder al pdf íntegro del libro clicar aquí: El fascismo-Xavier Casals

Consideramos que pese al tiempo transcurrido ofrece una imagen de interés: una radiografía del universo de la ultraderecha española de la época, en la que se dibujaban entonces intentos de importación del lepenismo, pervivencia del neofranquismo y se apuntaban populismos protestatario emergentes.

En suma, desde nuestra perspectiva ofrece una radiografía asequible del universo de la extrema derecha española antes de que hiciera eclosión la Plataforma per Catalunya [PxC].

Sinopsis

Síntesis divulgativa sobre la evolución del fascismo hasta el momento de publicación del ensayo centrada en el caso de España. La primera parte (“Los herederos del fascismo”) expone cómo se conformó una extrema derecha en el seno del franquismo que constituyó un sector ideológicamente involucionista en las postrimerías del régimen y durante los albores de la Transición, el llamado “búnker”. La segunda (“La crisis del ‘búnker’, 1975-1982) analiza el papel y la trayectoria de Fuerza Nueva, del terrorismo ultraderechista en “los años del plomo” y del fracasado golpe de Estado del 23 de febrero de 1981. La tercera parte (“Entre la tradición y la innovación, 1983-1994)” constata la coexistencia de discursos ultraderechistas nostálgicos del franquismo con otros innovadores e importadores de la cultura política de este espectro entonces exitosa en Europa, siendo su referente principal el Front National francés. La cuarta y última (“Hacia una nueva extrema derecha, 1994…”), efectúa previsiones de futuro sobre la eventual existencia de un “lepenismo español”.

La conclusión final, a la luz de la década transcurrida, resultó acertada. Decíamos ayer (1998):

“En cuanto a la ultraderecha española, ésta todavía parece contar con un largo camino que recorrer antes de configurar una opción política de cierta solidez. Carece de líderes y cuadros políticos, los ejes ideológicos de su discurso actual son tan variados como -en ocasiones- contradictorios. La siglas que se agitan en este espectro son casi desconocidas, muy cambiantes y difícilmente valorables en cuanto a su capacidad de convocatoria. Los ditintos grupos o no concurren a las elecciones o, cuando lo hacen, sus resultados son insignificantes […]. Pero, sobre todo, la extrema derecha se enfrenta a un problema irresuelto: conciliar los valores de la ultraderecha ‘tradicional’ y los de la ‘postindustrial’, aunar el legado de Franco y la modernidad de Le Pen” (p. 89).

Source: Blog de Xavier Casals
https://xaviercasals.wordpress.com/2014/08/31/el-populismo-que-viene-86-asi-era-la-extrema-derecha-espanola-antes-de-anglada-descarguese-el-ensayo-el-fascismo-en-pdf-gratuitamente/

Escaping Reality With Brazil’s Globo TV

NOV. 10, 2015

Vanessa Barbara

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Last year, The Economist published an article about TV Globo, Brazil’s largest broadcast network. It reported that “91 million people, just under half the population, tune in to it each day: The sort of audience that, in the United States, is to be had only once a year, and only for the one network that has won the rights that year to broadcast American football’s Super Bowl championship game.”

That figure might seem exaggerated, but all it takes is a walk around the block for it to look conservative. Everywhere I go there’s a television turned on, usually to Globo, and everybody is staring hypnotically at it.

Not surprisingly, a 2011 study supported by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics found the percentage of households with a television set in 2011 (96.9) was higher than the percentage of those with a refrigerator (95.8), and that 64 percent had more than one television set. Other researchers have found that Brazilians watch four hours and 31 minutes of TV per weekday, and four hours and 14 minutes on weekends; 73 percent watch TV every day and only 4 percent never regularly watch television. (I’m one of the latter.)

Among them, Globo is ubiquitous. Although its audience has been declining for decades, its share is still about 34 percent. Its nearest competitor, Record, has 15 percent.

So what does this all-pervading presence mean? In a country where education lags (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently ranked us 60th among 76 countries in average performance on international student achievement tests), it would imply that one set of values and social perspectives is very widely shared. Furthermore, being Latin America’s biggest media company, Globo can exert considerable influence on our politics.

One example: Two years ago, in a bland apology, Globo confessed to having supported Brazil’s military dictatorship between 1964 and 1985. “In the light of history, however,” it said, “there is no reason to not recognize explicitly today that this support was a mistake, and that other editorial decisions in the period that followed were also wrong.”

With these hazards in mind, and in the name of good journalism, I watched a whole day of Globo programming on a recent Tuesday, to see what I could learn about the values and the ideas it promotes.

The first thing most people watch each morning is the local news, then the national news. From those, one might infer that there is nothing more important in life than the weather and the traffic. The fact that our president, Dilma Rousseff, faces a serious risk of impeachment and that her main political opponent, Eduardo Cunha, the speaker of the lower house of Congress, is being investigated for embezzlement, get less airtime than the details of traffic jams. Those bulletins are updated at least six times a day, with the anchors chatting amicably, like old aunts at teatime, about the heat or the rain.

From the morning talk shows and other programs, I grasped that the secret of life is to be famous, rich, vaguely religious and “do bem” (those who stand on the side of good). Everybody on-air loved everyone else and smiled all the time. Wondrous tales were told of people with disabilities who had the willpower to succeed in their jobs. Specialists and celebrities discussed that and other topics with remarkable superficiality.

I decided to skip the afternoon programs — mostly reruns of soap operas and Hollywood movies — and go straight to the prime-time news.

Ten years ago, a Globo anchorman, William Bonner, compared the average viewer of the news program Jornal Nacional to Homer Simpson — incapable of understanding complex news. From what I saw, this standard still applies. A segment on a water shortage in São Paulo, for example, was highlighted by a reporter, standing at the local zoo, who said ironically: “You can see the worried look of the lion about the water crisis.”

Watching Globo means getting used to platitudes and tired formulas; many news scripts include little puns at the end, or an inanity from a bystander. “Dunga said he likes to smile,” one reporter said about the coach of Brazil’s national soccer team. Often, a few seconds are devoted to disturbing news like a revelation that São Paulo would keep operational data about the state’s water supply secret for 15 years, while full minutes are lavished on items like “the rescue of a drowning man that caused awe and surprise in a little town.”

The rest of the evening was filled with soap operas, from which you could learn that women always wear heavy makeup, huge earrings, polished nails, tight skirts, high heels and straight hair. (On those counts, I guess I’m not a woman.) Female characters are good or bad, but unanimously thin. They fight one another over men. Their ultimate purposes in life are to wear a wedding dress, give birth to a blond-haired baby or appear on television, or all of the above. Normal people have butlers in their homes, where hot male plumbers visit and seduce bored housewives.

Two of the three current soap operas talk about favelas, but with little resemblance to reality. Politically, they tend toward conservatism. “A Regra do Jogo,” for example, has a character who, in one episode, claims to be a human rights lawyer working with Amnesty International in order to smuggle bomb-making materials to imprisoned criminals. The advocacy organization publicly complained about that, accusing Globo of trying to defame human rights workers throughout Brazil.

Despite the high technical level of production, the novelas were painful to watch, with their thick doses of prejudice, melodrama, lame dialogue and clichés.

But they had their effect. At the end of the day, I felt less concerned about the water crisis or the possibility of another military coup — just like the apathetic lion and the empty women of the soap operas.
Correction: November 10, 2015

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described a brief report by Globo television about the status of operational data on São Paulo’s water supply. The report said the data would be kept secret for 15 years, not that it had been kept secret for 25 years.
________________

Vanessa Barbara is a columnist for the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de São Paulo and the editor of the literary website A Hortaliça.

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Source: New York Times (USA)
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/opinion/international/escaping-reality-with-brazils-globo-tv.html?_r=2

In Portuguese:
Deu no New York Times: “Rede Globo, a ‘TV irrealidade’ que ilude o Brasil”

Willis Carto, influential figure of the far right, dies at 89

Willis Carto, influential figure of the far right, dies at 89
By Staff Reports October 31

Willis Carto, who spent decades leading an influential network of far-right organizations, including the Washington-based Liberty Lobby and a California institute dedicated to denying the Holocaust, and whose extremist views resonated with generations of neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists and other fringe elements, died Oct. 26. He was 89.

His death was announced by the American Free Press, a publication he founded. No further details were available. After spending much of his adult life in California, Mr. Carto apparently lived near Jacksonville, Fla., in recent years, according to public records.

Mr. Carto founded the Liberty Lobby in the 1950s, and the organization maintained a presence on Capitol Hill for decades. He had a publishing company, Noontide Press, that distributed extremist literature and launched several publications, including the Washington Observer newsletter and a weekly newspaper, the Spotlight, which had a national circulation of 300,000 in the early 1980s.

In letters and other statements, Mr. Carto voiced admiration for Nazi Germany and recommended that black Americans be deported to Africa. In 1981, the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that monitors anti-Jewish slurs and threats, called Mr. Carto “a professional anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer and the mastermind” of a “propaganda empire.”

The reclusive Mr. Carto “does not speak in public,” a 1971 Washington Post investigation found. “He refuses to be interviewed. He shies away from cameras. He keeps an unlisted telephone number. He shields his residence address in suburban Los Angeles from public scrutiny.”

Yet he controlled or maintained connections with a variety of far-right groups that opposed taxes, gun control, foreign aid and school busing to achieve racial integration. One of his groups supported the minority white rule of defiant segregationist Ian Smith in the African country of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

The Liberty Lobby’s political committee was led by former Texas congressman Bruce Alger, a right-wing zealot who once incited a riot in Dallas against then-Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson.

In 1978, Mr. Carto founded the Institute for Historical Review, which promulgated anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and denounced the Holocaust as a hoax. Mr. Carto reportedly kept busts of Adolf Hitler in his office at the California-based institute.

Through his publications and interconnected organizations, Mr. Carto exerted outsize influence on a variety of political issues and campaigns. He organized Youth for Wallace to support the 1968 presidential bid of Alabama segregationist Gov. George C. Wallace. The group was later renamed the National Youth Alliance, which, under its next leader, William L. Pierce, became the National Alliance, one of the country’s most prominent white separatist groups.

In the 1980s, Mr. Carto helped found the Populist Party, whose 1988 presidential candidate was David Duke, a onetime leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

Mr. Carto was treasurer of the Liberty Lobby, which took in about $1 million a year by 1970, and also controlled the purse strings of other allied organizations. Over the years, employees accused him of financial improprieties and having an imperious style of leadership.

“Several former Liberty Lobby executives say Carto makes all major decisions, delegates little authority and trusts hardly anyone,” The Post noted in 1971. Behind his back, his employees called him “Little Hitler.”

Source: Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/willis-carto-influential-figure-of-the-far-right-dies-at-89/2015/10/31/80eb8aee-7f36-11e5-afce-2afd1d3eb896_story.html

See more:
Willis Carto, Far-Right Figure and Holocaust Denier, Dies at 89 (NY Times)
Willis Carto has been a major figure on the American radical right since the 1950s, when he set up his anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby with offices not far from the White House (SPLC)

Max Wallace. The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich

On a recent flight to St. Louis (no less), while still reading the book under review, I was asked if I would recommend it. My neighbor, a self-professed history-buff, could not help notice the striking cover--Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford next to Auschwitz-Birkenau and a swastika--and the title that linked this "American Axis" to the rise of the Third Reich. What follows is my ambivalent endorsement.

The book was not written for an academic audience to whom it will yield few new insights--in spite of the somewhat sensationalist advertisement of new disclosures and revelations on the two protagonists. The author, Max Wallace, is an investigative journalist and this accounts for both the strength and the weakness of his story. His style is dramatic and captivating, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book. The narrative is organized exclusively around the two central figures with a gallery of secondary characters ranging from alleged Nazi spies and military attachés to slave labor victims in "supporting roles." The story of Ford's and Lindbergh's anti-Semitism and racism, and their deliberate as well as unwitting efforts to assist the Nazis is an important one and should be told to a wider audience. But the account is lacking in interpretative focus and occasionally in historical perspective.

The book weaves together the genesis of Ford's and Lindbergh's racial notions, their professional dealings with Germany and their private admiration for the Third Reich. Wallace uses the existing literature on his two fallen heroes as well as Lindbergh's private papers and the Ford Company archives. Yet his account is not a biographical one. Overall Lindbergh emerges as more of a complex, real-life character from these pages; Wallace's portrait of Anne Morrow Lindbergh is nuanced and at times even moving (p. 247ff.). By contrast Ford's personality remains vague and Wallace's explanation of how and why he acquired his anti-Semitic views is not entirely convincing. In 1920 Ford began serializing articles on the "Jewish Question" based on the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in his newspaper the Dearborn Independent, outlining a worldwide sinister Jewish conspiracy as detailed in the forgery. Subsequently he published the collection as a pamphlet, The International Jew, and effectively distributed it through the Ford Company's national and international network of dealerships. Wallace reviews and rejects as deficient alternative explanations of how Ford--that "hitherto shy, gentle ... and in some respects quite enlightened" man (p. 16)--had come to adopt these malicious lies. The author instead introduces as the real culprit Ernest Gustav Liebold, a Detroit-born German-American, who became both the Dearborn Independent's general manager and Henry Ford's trusted personal secretary. A 1918 "most secret" military intelligence document reported that Liebold is "considered to be a German spy" (p. 25), although the investigation remained inconclusive. Over the next three hundred pages Liebold remains a shadowy figure. Wallace insinuates that Liebold is both responsible for Ford's anti-Semitism and for his company's attempts to prevent and undermine the American war effort in both World War I and World War II.

But Liebold is also shadowy in that Wallace neither develops his character and motivations (or the makeup of his anti-Semitism) nor the specific nature of his ties to Germany from 1918 through 1941. He has contacts with Franz von Papen (pp. 131, 225), Kurt Ludecke (the Nazis' "chief fund raiser" in the 1920s, p. 49ff) and perhaps Heinrich Albert, one of the members of the board of directors of German Ford Werke since the 1930s. By page 318 Liebold has evolved into "probably a Nazi spy" but the evidence remains shaky and confusing, and consists of a few official Nazi (p. 146) or older German contacts, the significance of which Wallace cannot fully illuminate. This never explicitly-made line of argumentation then would read as follows: during World War I an unconfirmed German spy set Henry Ford up to develop anti-Semitic views which, by the time of World War II, would lead the Ford Company to undermine the American military efforts against Nazi Germany. My problem is less with the validity of this interpretation than with the lack of specific and convincing evidence that it was Liebold who was behind all of this activity; too often the argument is based on conjecture (131ff., 144, 318f.). Rather than focusing on how Ford came to be an anti-Semite (as if anti-Semitism were a contagious disease one could only catch through close personal contact), it is the story of the public and political consequences of Ford's anti-Semitism that is really the more interesting one.

No less frustrating is the reversal of the above-outlined argument in chapter 2, "The Fuehrer's Inspiration." Much is made of Ford's portrait in Hitler's office in 1931 (p. 2) and Baldur von Schirach's defense at the Nuremberg trial: "If [Ford] said the Jews were to blame, naturally we believed him" (p. 42). Surely, the Nazis did not have to rely on Ford as a teacher of anti-Semitism? Here, too, the claim of Ford's influence on the Nazis is not contextualized.[1] Wallace instead offers the opinion by another historian emphasizing "the role that Russian émigrés played in laying the ideological groundwork for the Holocaust" (p. 63).[2] Wallace uses this point to explain the significance of the White Russian Boris Brasol who is the most direct link between Ford (via Liebold, of course) and the Nazis and also the conduit for a possible financial donation to the NSDAP. The driving force behind Wallace's account is the existence of links between people who move like chess figures across board. The author establishes far-flung connections between his two protagonists and Germany, but much of the context is missing. Occasionally, the reason for the lack of historical perspective is Wallace's unfamiliarity with important secondary literature on his subject. The reference for his account of American controversy over boycotting the Berlin Olympics in 1936 is a 2001 article on China in the National Review Online (p. 415f.). But the main problem of Wallace's book is not a failure to adhere to academic standards of referencing or source criticism. At issue is a broader concern that historians and journalists share: we tell a story in order to advance an argument, to give meaning to an otherwise confusing and chaotic assemblage of facts and events. It is in this endeavor that Wallace's meandering account falls somewhat short. Instead we learn intermittently some juicy tidbits that do not pertain to the author's immediate subject matter: for example, Kurt Vonnegut once wrote an admiring piece in a student paper on the isolationist "lonely eagle" (p. 275) and George W. Bush's maternal great-grandfather "has been described by a U.S. Justice Department investigator as 'one of Hitler's most powerful financial supporters in the United States'" (p. 349).

Later chapters explore the relationship between the Ford Company (Dearborn) and its German subsidiary Ford Werke during World War II. It is a story of "business as usual": the German profits were "placed in an escrow account for distribution to the American parent company after the war" (p. 329). These profits, Wallace rightly highlights, were in part based on forced labor.[3] Wallace is also correct in challenging the notion--offered as the conclusion of a recent investigation that Dearborn had conducted into the problem of wartime profits from its European, Nazi-dominated subsidiaries--that Ford "had to use labor provided by the German government" (p. 335). The German controlled Ford plants in Europe had, even before the outbreak of the war and with the consent of Dearborn, turned into "an arsenal of Nazism" (pp. 228f., 340).

The story of Lindbergh's misguided views and actions is also advanced through a narrative of secondary figures. Lindbergh--in spite of a father who is portrayed as more racist than ordinary white Americans at the time (p. 83)--acquired his racial views through his close association and friendship with the French scientist Alexis Carrel. The aviator's obsessions with racial purity were subsequently further bent in a direction of admiration for the Nazi project by the American military attaché to Germany, Truman Smith (pp. 104-111, 381). And it is the latter who invited Lindbergh and his wife "in the name of Göring" to visit the Third Reich at the time of the Olympic Games (p. 112ff.) Not surprisingly, Lindbergh was deeply impressed not only by "the organized vitality of Germany" but more importantly by a state that sought to realize his own ideals: "science and technology harnessed for the preservation of a superior race" (p. 118). As a result of the exclusive focus on the aviator, the dramatic and complex story of the Czechoslovak crisis is told with Lindbergh and his exaggerated reports on the German air force playing the decisive role in tilting British policy towards appeasement (pp. 165, 167-171). Wallace's chapter ignores the military, political and diplomatic reality of the British situation in 1938.[4]

Lindbergh, probably even more so than Ford, emerges at times in this book as an unsuspecting dupe of more sinister forces working in the background (p. 208). I am not convinced that this conspiratorial approach to history serves Wallace's endeavor to establish personal responsibility for politically damaging actions. The point to make about the problematic role of the two flawed heroes concerns the impact of their anti-Semitic, racist, pro-Nazi public activities, speeches or publications over the course of more than a decade on American public opinion. The Roosevelt administration, in the meantime, tried to rally the same public around a program of aid to Britain and subsequently in a heavily ideological mobilization characterized Nazism as an assault on civilization. Ford and Lindbergh in turn found this civilization not threatened by the Germans but by the Russians. The fact that both received a Nazi medal, which was evidently well-deserved, and that they refused to return them is telling. Particularly in the last chapter, Wallace tries hard to give the impression of a fair and balanced portrait of the "lonely eagle," defending him against Harold Ickes's public as well as Roosevelt's private accusations of being a "Nazi." This highlights one the book's more problematic aspects: the incongruity between the title and jacket design suggesting a crucial role of this "American Axis" in the rise of the Third Reich and the nuanced conclusion that the author "discovered no smoking gun proving that Lindbergh was motivated by anything but sincere--albeit misguided--motives for this prewar isolationist activities or that he was disloyal to America" (p. 378). Between title and conclusion lies the substance of the book: characterized by the absence of an explicitly stated argument, a detailed, yet narrowly focused narrative suggests that their racist convictions led Ford and Lindbergh to take a benevolent and admiring view of the Third Reich, and partly knowingly, partly unwittingly served Nazi interests.

From the dust jacket we learn that Wallace is a "Holocaust researcher" but he exhibits little scholarly background on the Third Reich itself. (To refer to Adolf Hitler as "another German philosopher" [p. 43] in the same sentence with Hegel is not helpful to his overall point.) He cites some relevant secondary literature on specific aspects of World War II, for example Nazi Fifth Column activities in the United States, anti-Semitism in the U.S. army, and forced labor in the German Ford Werke, but he does not use it to establish the urgently needed interpretive context for the events detailed in this book. Most sorely missing is a proper analysis of American anti-Semitism as a prerequisite for understanding how Americans confronted the Third Reich. Wallace, even though citing studies by Leonard Dinnerstein and Myron Scholnick, neither defines the nature of American anti-Semitism nor does he seem to understand the effect it had on the American public perception of and official responses to the Third Reich--a story told by Deborah Lipstadt, Richard Breitman, David Wyman and others. Its relevance lay in the role which even the mildest forms of social prejudice and, in particular, the Roosevelt administration's concern over these prejudices played in devising responses to Nazi Germany. Within the context of Wallace's narrower focus, it would have been helpful at least to clarify the difference between Ford's hatred fantasizing about a Jewish political-economic conspiracy and Lindbergh's obsession with racial purity. But for Wallace anti-Semitism is a monolithic, timeless, unchanging phenomenon.

Max Wallace has written a passionate, though sprawling, narrative that serves an important educational purpose: rather than continuing to admire these two deeply flawed individuals we should appreciate both the political impact of their racial beliefs and the nature of their misguided attraction to Nazi Germany. But his book is not yet a conclusive assessment of the historical role these two public figures played in German-American relations in the 1930s and 40s.

Notes

[1]. For an important primary source on Hitler's pre-1933 views of the United States, its automotive industry and his admiration for an immigration policy that produced "racially first-rate Americans" see Gerhard L. Weinberg, Hitler's Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler (New York: Enigma Books, 2003), pp. 107, 109, 111-118. For the development of "Fordism" during the Third Reich cf. Philipp Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich: Ideologie, Propaganda und Volksmeinung, 1933-1945 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997).

[2]. The dissertation proposal on which this assertion is based, incidentally, turns into a dissertation only a few footnotes later, p. 408, n. 101, 106.

[3]. The essence of Wallace's argument with more historical context can also be found in Bernd Greiner, Die Morgenthau Legende. Zur Geschichte eines umstrittenen Plans (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995), pp. 112f., 115f.; and Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings, Antia Kugler and Nicholas Levis, Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors and Forced Labor in Germany during the Second World War (New York: Berghahn, 2000).

[4]. Gerhard L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany: Starting World War II, 1937-1939 (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1994), pp. 313-464.

*Max Wallace. The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003. ix + 465 pp. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-312-29022-1.

Reviewed by Michaela Hoenicke Moore (Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Published on H-German (May, 2004)

Source: H-Net
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9274