Escaping Reality With Brazils Globo TV - The New York Times

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INTERNATIONAL OPINION

CONTRIBUTING OP-ED WRITER

Vanessa Barbara NOV. 10, 2015

SO PAULO, Brazil Last year, The Economist published an article about TV

Globo, Brazils 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 footballs 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 theres 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. (Im 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

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and social perspectives is very widely shared. Furthermore, being Latin Americas
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 Brazils 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 So 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.

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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 Brazils national
soccer team. Often, a few seconds are devoted to disturbing news like a revelation
that So Paulo would keep operational data about the states 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 Im 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 clichs.
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 So Paulos
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 So Paulo
and the editor of the literary website A Hortalia.

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