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Rede Globo

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Encompassing half of the land and population of South America, Brazil is an economic and cultural powerhouse, set apart from its neighbors by language, custom, and a vibrant mixture of African, European, indigenous, and, more recently, Asian bloodlines. Divided by broad stretches of wilderness and immense belts of poverty, eclectic in religion, regional dialect, and race, Brazil is united by only two things: soccer and television. The country consumes and produces the latter commodity in staggering quantities: It is a nation of 35 million television sets and 100 million viewers watching an average of seven hours a day, a country where illiteracy is widespread and twice as many people own televisions than own telephones. TV, understandably, is a powerful, centralizing institution that delivers the national voice of Brazil. And the influence of Brazilian television doesn't stop at the nation's border: 130 nations consume Brazilian programming, making Xuxa - the lip-synching queen of Saturday television - a star around the world. Hundreds of millions of Chinese watch Brazilian shows (dubbed into three dialects), Nicaraguans are obsessed, Scandinavians are hooked, and even Lech Walesa and Fidel Castro are fans. t all began with the humble soap opera. Like most things nefarious in Latin America, the rise of the Brazilian soap, or novela, can be traced to Fidel Castro. In the 1930s, Cuba developed an industry in writing, performing, and exporting radio novelas. Soaps were such a lucrative industry that when Castro's army stormed Havana on January 1, 1959, many writers fled. The first "Brazilian" soaps were written in Argentina by Cuban exiles. Today, Brazilian soaps are virtually synonymous with Rede Globo. The media giant produces 4,420 hours of original programming a year - including news, novelas, sports, music, and children's shows - more than any other network or studio anywhere, the company claims. Globo's primetime soaps run six nights a week, routinely garnering a 75 percent audience share, and the network's 105 stations earn 2.1 billion Brazilian real (US$1.9 billion) annually. Measured by audience, Globo is the fourth-largest network in the world after ABC, CBS, and NBC. Rede Globo's parent company, Globopar, employs some 23,000 people in businesses ranging from O Globo, the nation's largest daily newspaper, to books, magazines, real estate, construction, insurance, and banking. But no Globopar business reflects the scale and influence of the company more than its soaps: Malhaçao, Love Is in the Air, The Untamed, and Zazá. These series are produced at a new BrR324 million (US$300 million) facility set in the lush grasslands outside of Rio. A self-contained 1.3-million-square-meter complex, the Global Production Center could sit out a nuclear war quietly churning out episodes of Love is in the Air for the survivors. The soap factory resembles nothing so much as the villain's lair in Thunderball. The walled-off complex is staffed by 2,500 employees, most of them wearing various uniforms in Globo Blue, the company's official color. Globo is vertically integrated, which is another way of saying the company likes to have its own toys: The production center has a 5,000-kilowatt power plant, a helipad, an explosives bunker, a bus system, and machine and model shops. Globo employees buy Globo magazines at the Globo newsstand, and eat Globo food in the Globo restaurant (with low-fat selections for actors). To make Globo soaps appealing to everyone in this diverse country, Globo actors are even coached to eliminate regionalisms from their accents - they call it "Globotalk". Every evening over 50 million Brazilians tune in to what many critics call the greatest threat to the country's fledgling democracy. All eyes are glued to TV Globo, a monolithic television network that some believe is capable of turning fiction into reality. Given its penetration into 99 percent of Brazil's continent-sized territory and its 70 percent audience share in a country of 150 million (where a quarter of the population is illiterate and millions more are semi- literate), the assertion has a strong foundation. But statistics fail to illustrate the reach of Globo's tentacles into the Brazilian psyche. Consider, instead, a pair of shootings--one real, one fictional--which coincidentally occurred during the same period in late 1988. While people throughout the rest of the world called for a prompt and thorough investigation of the assassination of Amazon labor leader Chico Mendes, Brazilians were sidelined by a version of "Who shot J.R.?"--as a villainous character in a Globo soap opera fell victim to an unknown gunslinger. In Brazil, the fictional murder overshadowed the real one. Another dramatic example shows how quickly and directly Globo can affect the Brazilian market. When the star of the top- ranking novela, as Brazil's evening soap operas are called, observed off-handedly, "I don't like the color purple," sales for purple clothing suddenly plummeted. Responding to complaints from boutiques, scriptwriters were forced to have the character change her mind in a subsequent episode. TV Globo's power is immense. It is the world's fourth largest commercial television network, ranking behind only the three U.S. giants. The network raked in record advertising sales domestically in 1989, reportedly between $500 million and $600 million. It has 78 stations throughout Brazil. Company officials say that Globo has 8,000 employees. And in 1985 The Christian Science Monitor reported that its activities generated some 35,000 jobs. The network's programs are shown in 112 countries, including the United States (on Spanish language stations) and China. Unsatisfied with its virtual monopoly over Brazil's audience, Globo has taken steps to exert more direct control over its competition. In February 1990, it reached an agreement with TV Gazeta in Sao Paulo, giving control over the rights to a wide range of films and mini-series to the smaller Gazeta. Officials with the second-ranking national network, the Brazilian Television System (SBT), say that Globo's move was designed to counter SBTs efforts to boost it's ratings in Sao Paulo, South America's largest city. Similarly, in 1989, according to Luiz Fernando Santoro, professor of communications at the University of Sao Paulo, Globo bought up the broadcasting rights to Brazilian soccer matches "so that nobody else would get them" and promptly resold them to another network, TV Bandeirantes. Additionally, Globo has made repeated efforts to purchase a chunk of the Manchete Network, the country's third largest. Launched by the Time-Life Group in the early 1960s, Globo was nurtured under the protective wing of the 1964-1985 military dictatorship, and kowtowed to the regime enough to earn the nickname "the Ministry of Information." The network remains a steadfastly conservative force in Brazilian politics, having played a leading role in efforts to stem the tide of the country's redemocratization process. Defeated in its attempt to prolong the dictatorship, the network eventually embraced democracy, only to enlist in the well-orchestrated and successful campaign in support of rightwing populist Fernando Collor de Mello's successful 1989 presidential candidacy. The network's news department has been involved in a series of well-documented attempts to distort facts. On the eve of the 1989 presidential runoff, for example, Globo presented an edited version of the final candidates' debate, which even a top Globo executive admitted highlighted the worst moments of the event for Collor's opponent, leftist Luis Inacio "Lula" da Silva of the Workers Party (PT). Lula charged: "They were playing their last hand when we had no time to react." The power behind the camera Globo is controlled by one 85-year-old man, Roberto Marinho, whom many consider to be the most powerful person in Brazil. Globo's sole owner, he keeps a tight rein on his news department. The British news magazine The Economist once called him a "one-man conglomerate." Besides the television network, Marinho runs the daily newspaper O Globo, the country's largest privately-owned radio network, a record company and a publishing firm, as well as companies in such diverse areas as telecommunications, electronics, real estate, agriculture, insurance and banking. Overall, his empire includes more than three dozen companies operating worldwide, from Europe to Suriname to Cuba. Many of Marinho's business initiatives have required official acquiescence or assistance, and over the years he has developed a symbiotic relationship with successive governments. Beginning with the military regime and continuing through the first civilian government under Jose Sarney, Marinho helped choose a slew of ministers, particularly in the areas of communications and education (the minister of education determines funding for the educational projects of the Roberto Marinho Foundation), according to researchers and Globo insiders. While such influence is difficult to document, Marinho himself recounted the role he played in choosing one of Sarney's economic ministers in a May 1990 interview with the daily O Estado de Sao Paulo. Other examples of Marinho's coziness with top ranking officials are better-known. When veteran politician Antonio Carlos Magalhaes assumed leadership of the Ministry of Communications under Sarney, Marinho promptly transferred the lucrative Globo affiliation contract to the television station the minister owned in his home state of Bahia. O Globo from his father a month after it had opened. Later, he used that newspaper to declare his initial support for the 1964 military coup. Already on an ideological wavelength similar to the dictatorship, Marinho's plans to create a media empire dovetailed nicely with the military regime's plans for "national integration." The Globo television network began in 1961, as documented in Daniel Herz's book The Secret History of the Globo Network. That was when Marinho and Time-Life negotiated a contract which many claim violated Brazilian constitutional regulations regarding ownership and investment in the media by foreigners. Signed in 1962 and carried out as of 1964, the contract created a joint venture, with direct investment by the U.S. multinational. (Herz says Time-Life invested more than $6 million between 1962 and 1966; in interviews with the Brazilian press, Marinho has admitted to receiving $4 million, which he claims was later repaid.) Time-Life also provided technical assistance, training and personnel in the areas of television technology, engineering, administration and commercial activities. Among the personnel was Joe Wallach, who left KOGO-TV in California and, without speaking a word of Portuguese, became Globo's executive director. The U.S. connection went a step further, according to Santoro, who recounts how the nascent enterprise was given an additional boost by Time-Life's lobbying of Brazilian advertising agencies, almost all of which were branches of U.S. multinationals. Aided from abroad by Time-Life and at home by a military regime anxious to invest in telecommunications, Globo soon overtook what had been the dominant network since the birth of Brazilian television in 1950, TV Tupi. Already buying up stations across the country, Globo was the first to take advantage of satellite broadcasting made possible by the government in 1968. Globo's distinctiveness and popularity stem from its own programming style, known as the Global Standard, which the Brazilian public has adopted as its own and which outpaces the competition's technical capabilities. Today, the network produces an astonishing 80 percent of its programming. Aided by its own extensive market research and public-preference polls, the network has proficiently blended high-quality technical production, comparable to U.S. standards, with a style and content that appeals to Brazilians--"full of frills, attention- getters and presentation," as Santoro puts it. Despite the criticism of Globo's hegemony, however, most Brazilians are comfortable with Globo. Study results included in a network promotional packet reveal that 55 percent of those interviewed consider Globo the television network "most connected to the community." It is a video version of McDonald's. The power of the camera The flagships of Globo's programming are its novelas, part soap opera, part mini-series. Two separate novelas are sandwiched around the 8 p.m. network news (guaranteeing, incidentally, the latter's audience), each running six nights a week for three or four months. They are fast-paced, but lack most of the melodrama of American soaps and the violence of many U.S. evening programs. Instead, they provide high doses of romance and intrigue. Globo's novela operations have been compared to those of the Hollywood studios, particularly MGM, in the 1940s. To outpace the competition, Globo signs up many of Brazil's leading actors and actresses--maintaining a reserve of top talent. Ironically, many of those same stars filmed spots for Lula's presidential campaign. Regardless of their personal preferences, those actors and actresses present Globo's version of reality in the novelas. Researcher Maria Helena Weber, of Rio Grande do Sul state, analyzed three novelas which appeared during the presidential campaign in 1988-89. All three, she concludes, worked to buttress Collor's campaign. Salvador da Patria (Savior of the Country), which ran as the presidential campaign shifted into gear in mid-1989, tells the story of a mentally deficient character who becomes mayor. At first controlled by powerful political forces, he later expresses independent positions. It teaches, according to Weber, that "politicians don't need to have a political background, they don't need to be intelligent, they don't need to have a history." She says this orientation favored Collor, the former supporter of the dictatorship trying to hide his background and run against the system. Weber maintains that the novelas set the ideological stage for Brazil's depoliticization, precisely as the country drew close to its first direct presidential elections in 30 years. he Portuguese word novela, a shortening of the earlier term telenovela, reflects the literary roots of the genre. A hundred years ago, it was common for novelists to write their books in instalments in literary publications. Typically they would write and send in one chapter a week. That is how Dickens wrote most of his novels. In Brazil, but for some reason not in the US, this tradition continued with the advent of radio. Novelists began writing for radio rather than periodicals. Chapters were presented on the air by professional actors, and these works became known as radionovelas. Once television was introduced in Brazil, many of the same actors and writers went on to produce telenovelas. So there is an unbroken continuity of literary tradition in Brazil, starting with the great literary novelists and continuing on in the great soap opera writers of today (as well as in the modern Brazilian novelists). Today the word novela in Brazil nearly always refers to a soap opera. Besides the literary background, Brazilian soap operas have a lot going for them. One of their great advantages over American soap operas is that they are not endless. They run for between six months to a year and begin with an ending already in mind. Generally, the better the ratings, the longer a story is allowed to run, but I don't think they ever run as long as a year. One interesting characteristic of Brazilian soaps is that they each have a soundtrack. Popular music is incorporated into each episode, and each soap opera has its own collection of songs that are exclusive to it and not played by the other soaps. Each soap has two CDs that you can buy. One contains the Brazilian hits (versão nacional), and the other is comprised of American music (versão internacional). I'm fairly certain that Brazil makes the greatest soap operas in the world, this is a text click HERE to go somewhere link. Last but not least this

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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.aindamelhor.com/weblog/weblog.php?p=2 Amérida Eu tava olhando essas manchetes de um portal da Internet (só olhando mesmo, pra ficar "atualizado"), e uma delas dizia: "Déborah Secco sonha com Hollywood". Ô coisa meiga! Meu sonho também é que você vá pra Hollywood. E sem a passagem de volta, por favor! Vou te falar, esses atormentados e atricidas da Globo... Se ego fosse dinheiro, seriam todos bilionários! Neguinho viaja na maionese, no paté, no requeijão... E a Globo tá dinamitando a propaganda da nova novela, Amérida. E precisa? Tem gente que prefere perder a mãe do que o último capítulo da novela. E ainda vai assistir a reprise no Sábado. Eu não entendo mais nada! Pô, a pessoa já viu o final, pra que vai assistir a mesma porcaria de novo??? Mas o povão é assim mesmo, não desgruda a nádega flácida do sofá nem se o prédio estiver em chamas. Primeiro capítulo, último, reprise... pouco importa. É vício mesmo! E nem se importa se a estória é sempre a mesma: um triângulo amoroso, a mocinha, o vilão, um personagem engraçadinho, um gay, uma gostosona... E todo mundo é rico em novela. Até os "pobres"! Ou alguém já viu um personagem na miséria, desempregado, despejado, numa fila do INSS?! Claro que não! Isso já é a realidade do povo. Ele quer seus 60 minutos de fantasia. Quer fugir dos seus problemas e de sua vida de merda. O pobrema é quando essa fantasia se torna a única válvula de escape do cidadão. Aí fica complicado. Trocar a sua própria vida pelos romances de uma novela é deprimente. Parece que a pessoa deixa de viver para ficar assistindo a vida (fictícia) de outros na telinha de uma televisão. Porra, sei lá, vai transar, vai beber, vai brigar com a vizinha, vai ler alguma coisa, vai evacuar, vai contar quantos palitos tem numa caixa de fósforos... Qualquer merda é melhor que novela. E mal acaba uma novela, o povo já engata na outra. Nem dá tempo de respirar. Por mim, se uma novela acabasse em Janeiro, a outra só poderia começar em Dezembro. Isso é para que as pessoas pudessem se recobrar das "fortes emoções" (é sempre essa frase nas chamadas, né?) do último capítulo. E mais: muitos dizem que a televisão é uma "caixa de bosta". Se for assim, a novela é um "extrato concentrado de merda"! E, já imagino, que deve ter alguém achando que eu sou um tremendo chato e que fico me metendo na preferência das pessoas. Tá bom, sou chato sim e graças a Deus! E tenho todo direito de odiar novelas! E, para quem gosta: não percam, hoje, após o Jornal Nacional, as fortes emoções de Amérida. Amérida, a novela onde o boi não é o único chifrudo. Brasileiros sonhando em conquistar a Amérida... e acabando na Abosta. xxxxxxxxxxxx

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