The Brazilian Media: A Quincentennial Survey

Abstract

Included in Portugal's half of the world by the Tordesillas Treaty of 1494, although supposedly only discovered in 1500, Brazil was initially just a revictualling stop on the long maritime route to its empire in the East. Only with the loss of that empire, and the discovery of gold in Minas Gerais, did the colony become important. But Portuguese despotism stifled intellectual development ; the printing press only arrived with the government in exile, fleeing Napoleon, in 1808. Journalism flourished with the ending of censorship in 1820 and political independence in 1822, although book publishing had to await more settled times in the 1840s, only to decline in the face of foreign competition at the end of the century. Then, in the Depression of the 1930s, lack of foreign exchange revitalised the domestic book trade, while the dictator, Getulio Vargas, discovered the political utility of broadcasting. Modern industrialised Brazil dates from the accession of Vargas' protege Kubitschek in 1956, whose expansion of education transformed the demand for reading material. The first steps toward a national cinema date from the 1940s, but only become significant in the Kubitschek era with the Cinema novo. Victor Civita's magazine empire, notable for the news magazine Veja (with the world's fourth largest circulation) dates from this period. Brazilian television arrived in the 1950s, but Rede Globo, now the world's largest commercial network outside of North America, resulted from an alliance of entrepreneur Roberto Marinho with the military regime of 1964-1985. Brazil's economic history since then has been one of successive attempts to battle with runaway inflation. Measures by President Collor to this end in the early 1990s included the termination of government subsidies to culture, including the book trade and the film industry. The Real Plan of mid 1994 seems to have established a stable currency at last. With the plan's author now President-Elect, there is hope that this time the inflation battle may indeed have been won, and with it the media, along with the rest of the economy, will be entering a new era of stability and prosperity.