[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

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.
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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”