Brazilian TV Research Articles

Between Political Strife and National Science: COVID-19 Vaccines on the Main Brazilian TV newscast

ABSTRACT Brazil ranks second worldwide in COVID-19 deaths. In this country, television is the most popular means of mass communication, and 95.5% of Brazilian homes have a TV set. During the coronavirus pandemic, Brazilians considered TV news the most reliable source of information about COVID-19. In this context, we examined the coverage of vaccines, between 2020 and 2021, on the main Brazilian TV newscast – Jornal Nacional. We identified 1,173 reports on vaccination in the digital collection of this news show, which we analyzed based on six dimensions that systematize the following: general characteristics of the news, approach to vaccination, framing the news, general handling of the topic, actors and geographic location of the study and/or the immunization campaign on the agenda. The reports evinced a mostly positive attitude towards vaccines, emphasizing the political strategies and public policies adopted in COVID-19 vaccine development. National science gained prominence in the coverage. The most common news sources were institutions and/or representatives of the executive branch, and scientists were the voices most present in the reports. Just over half of the reports discussed the topic using visual aids, but only a few explained scientific concepts pertaining to the vaccine.

Coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war on Brazilian TV news: The case of Jornal Nacional

This article presents the main findings of a content analysis of the coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war in the Brazilian TV news program, Jornal Nacional, undertaken as part of an international study of coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war on television news in nine countries. Jornal Nacional was selected as the first news program to be broadcast nationwide in Brazil, which is still the country's market leader for private TV. The content analysis included a 10-day sample of 66 news items from the invasion of Ukraine by Russia on 24 February 2022 and the following seven weeks, classified according to thematic categories. The results showed a coverage characterized by a panoramic view of the conflict and the presence of a diversity of angles and points of view. Most of the news focused on the civilian situation, sanctions applied to Russia by the United States and the European Union, and daily news about the battlefield.

“Tem uma hora que você tem que puxar o gatilho!”: discurso de ódio, apologia e incitação ao crime na TV no pós-eleições 2022

This article analyzes evidence of hate speech, incitement and apology for crime in television news programs in three critical moments of Brazilian democracy. The objective is to investigate the role played by Brazilian TV in the propagation and normalization of hate speech and incitement to criminal practices against the democratic rule of law. To investigate its roots, we examine media-driven penal populism and the conceptual contours of hate speech. Six episodes of the programs "Os Pingo nos Is" and "Alerta Nacional" were analyzed in conjunction with Critical Discourse Studies.

Críticas ao lugar de fala mantém interdição às narrativas de mulheres negras

In this article, I resume the concept of ‘standpoint,’ a notion mainly defended by black feminisms in Brazil, against the persistent denial by the hegemonic media of rejecting structural racism in their news productions. In this context, the criticisms, mostly limited to identity arguments or reverse silencing, disregard the historical absence of racial content in the narratives published in mainstream media, thus nullifying a racial ‘standpoint.’ As an example, I note the low number of black columnists that exercise their standpoint in print and digital media and thus interfere in public opinion. I offer a critical analysis of how the discourses of black and anti-racist feminisms are ‘cancelled’ creating a negotiation threshold that does not exceed the greater presence of black journalists, mainly on Brazilian TV, which is a novelty despite barriers.

Mundo China: The media partnership reframing China's image in Brazil

This paper explores China's increasing media engagement with Latin American partners. It examines the case of Mundo China (MC), a China-news segment broadcast by the Brazilian news channel BandNews TV and co-produced in partnership with CCTV. By conducting content analysis, we assess how China is presented, contrast the framing of China before and since the partnership agreement, and compare the televised image of China between BandNews TV and other news channels in Brazil. The findings show that MC has assisted in diversifying and balancing the ratio of positive frames in relation to the overall China-related reporting across the broadcasters sampled.

Beyond media imperialism: The challenges of theorizing global TV flows

This article reviews the intellectual journey that led me to study the development of television in Brazil. It discusses how I came to study how media were developing in countries of the global South as part of a Ph.D. in International Relations. It led me to get particularly interested in Brazil, particularly when I discovered that the US State Department was willing to train me in Portuguese and send me there for three years. It discusses the great intellectual support I received for my research on Brazilian television, TV Globo and cultural dependency, from Prof. José Marques de Melo and others at ECA/USP, in which others like Carlos Eduardo Lins da Silva and Ana Maria Fadul were beginning to look at some of the same issues. It goes on to discuss how interesting and helpful the INTERCOM and ALAIC network of researchers was in learning about the great upswell in Brazilian and Latin American research that was taking place.

MPEG-5 LCEVC for 3.0 Next Generation Digital TV in Brazil

TV 3.0 is the next generation digital broadcasting system developed in Brazil by the SBTVD Forum. The ambition of TV 3.0 is significantly higher than that of previous generations as it targets the delivery of IP based signals for applications, such as 8K, HDR, virtual and augmented reality, video enhancement and scalability. To deliver such services, more advanced and flexible compression technologies are required. MPEG-5 Part 2 Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding (LCEVC) is a new video coding standard which works in combination with a separate video standard (e.g., H.264/AVC [H.264/AVC], H.265/HEVC [H.265/HEVC], H.266/VVC [H.266/VVC], AV1 [AV1]) to enhance the quality of a video. In the typical scenario, the enhanced quality is provided in terms of a higher resolution video obtained by adding details coded through an enhancement layer to a lower resolution version of the same video coded through a base layer. The LCEVC format also provides the ability to signal the bit-depth of the base layer independently from that of the enhancement layer and allowing up to 14-bit depth HDR. MPEG-5 LCEVC has been selected by the SBTVD committee as part of the TV 3.0 in December 2021. In this paper we describe the proposal submitted for LCEVC in response to the SBTVD Call for Proposals (CfP) for TV 3.0.

COVID-19 News bias and selective exposure in Brazilian TV news during the COVID-19 pandemic

Este artigo investiga a ocorrência da exposição seletiva no Brasil, tendo em vista a frequência com que os brasileiros disseram buscar informações sobre a pandemia de COVID-19 no Jornal Nacional e no Jornal da Record. Utiliza dados de uma análise de conteúdo da cobertura desses veículos acerca do assunto em 2020 e os dados de uma pesquisa de opinião pública nacional. As análises realizadas mostram que o partidarismo e a religião foram importantes preditores do consumo de notícias desses veículos. Evangélicos e adeptos do “partido do Bolsonaro” eram telespectadores mais assíduos do Jornal da Record; católicos, partidários de outras legendas e apartidários consumiam mais o Jornal Nacional. Esses resultados indicam que os brasileiros consomem notícias em consonância com suas convicções políticas e que alguns grupos podem estar recebendo menos informação sobre a COVID-19.

Remembering Brazil @Mexico1970: Social Media & Collective Memory Making in Times of COVID-19

In March 2020 – following the rapid increase of COVID-19 (Coronavirus) cases in the country – several Brazilian sports leagues momentarily ceased to slow the virus spread among the population. Despite the record number of deaths caused by the disease, most of these leagues re-started by mid-July. Brazilian TV channels offered football match reruns as an alternative to fill weekly schedule gaps. Therefore, within a somewhat dystopian context of political chaos, deep economic recession and unparalleled public health crisis, the most-watched sports channel in the country, SporTV, decided to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Brazil’s third FIFA World Cup title at the 1970 men’s tournament by rerunning the six matches played by the successful national football team (aka Seleção), from April 14 to the 19 and on June 21. Focusing on Twitter, this article demonstrates how the moment provided content for social media narratives about the country’s assumed ‘glorious’ past, its fractured contemporary state and uncertain futures. In doing so, we offer insights into the complexities of memory craft within sport histories and nation-making practices.

Pride and Prejudice in Brazil’s Popular Culture: A Photonovel and a Soap Opera

Soap operas are an integral part of Brazilian popular culture and the daily lives of Brazil’s people. In 2018, the biggest TV channel in the country, Globo, broadcast a six-month-long soap opera called ‘Pride and Passion’, centered on the story of the Benedito family and their five unmarried daughters, who live in the small village of ‘Vale do Café’ (‘Coffee Valley’) around the 1910s, surrounded by the rural aristocracy and its coffee plantations. The obvious inspiration is Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and its choice is an indication of Austen’s growing popularity outside English-speaking countries. This adaptation, which incorporates characters from her other novels as well, is the quintessential amalgamation of cultures and media, combining a canonical author of the English language with a Brazilian TV genre commonly seen as ‘lowbrow’. It was not, however, Austen’s first incursion in Brazil’s popular culture. During the 1960s and 1970s, photonovels were an extremely popular genre there, usually translated into Portuguese from Italian productions, as was the case of the 1965 Pride and Prejudice photonovel, sold as a literary supplement to a widely circulated women’s magazine. This essay analyses both cases of different, although connected, adaptations of Austen, arguing that Austen’s presence in Brazil was always mediated by the expectations and appropriation of new media, while showing that the dialogue with popular culture can only enhance our understanding of the ‘global Austen’ phenomenon and her appeal across time and cultures.

Versatile Video Coding for 3.0 Next Generation Digital TV in Brazil

In the past few decades, the video broadcast ecosystem has gone through major changes; Originally transmitted using analog signals, it has been more and more transitioned toward digital, leveraging compression technologies and transport protocols, principally developed by MPEG. Along this way, the introduction of new video formats was achieved with standardization of new compression technologies for their better bandwidth preservation. Notably, SD with MPEG-2, HD with H.264, 4K/UHD with HEVC. In Brazil, the successive generations of digital broadcasting systems were developed by the SBTVD Forum, from TV-1.0 to TV-3.0 nowadays. The ambition of TV-3.0 is significantly higher than that of previous generations as it targets the delivery of IPbased signals for applications, such as 8K, HDR, virtual and augmented reality. To deliver such services, compressed video signals shall fit into a limited bandwidth, requiring even more advanced compression technologies. The Versatile Video Coding standard (H.266/VVC), has been finalized by the JVET committee in 2021 and is a relevant candidate to address the TV3.0 requirements. VVC is versatile by nature thanks to its dedicated tools for efficient compression of various formats, from 8K to 360°, and provides around 50% of bitrate saving compared to its predecessor HEVC. This paper presents the VVC-based compression system that has been proposed to the SBTVD call for proposals for TV-3.0. A technical description of VVC and an evaluation of its coding performance is provided. In addition, an end-to-end live transmission chain is demonstrated, supporting 4K real-time encoding and decoding with a low glass-to-glass latency.

On counterfactuality: a multimodal approach to (apparent) contradictions between positive statements and gestures of negation

Relying on discussions about recurrent gestures and gestures of negation, in this paper, we aim to demonstrate how the apparent contradiction between negative gestural utterances co-occurring with positive spoken utterances can be explained with the concepts of counterfactuality and epistemic stances, developed in the Mental Spaces Theory framework. To illustrate how gestures of negation can be analyzed as a case of multiple blends and be metaphorically interpreted, we chose three examples of co-occurrences of a positive verbal and negative gestural utterance. Specifically for the discussion proposed here, we selected three videos from the Brazilian TV show “What the hell is this story, Porchat?” (“Que história é essa, Porchat?”). To analyze the data we used the Linguistic Annotation System for Gestures (LASG) and focused on gestural forms and functions, as well as their semantic relation with the speech. The results showed that in all three videos gestures perform a metacommunicative function. Thus, they can be categorized as pragmatic and discursive gestures, realizing specific performative or operational functions. The sweeping away gestures found in two occurrences work on the discursive level to emphasize implicit counterfactuality of the verbal utterance. The throwing away gesture, found in one occurrence, works on the pragmatic level, also to dismiss the positive possibility created by the verbal utterance. In both cases the gesture operates to prevent any possibility of creating an alternative positive mental space, also demonstrating the implicit counterfactuality of the positive verbal utterances.

Is Netflix a threat to the cable TV industry? Evidence from Brazil

In recent years, the Brazilian cable TV industry has experienced a sharp downturn. In parallel, the over-the-top platform Netflix gained popularity and Brazil has become one of its biggest markets. The objective of this paper is to investigate the competitive effects of Netflix's entry on the incumbent cable TV industry. We explore the regional variability of Netflix's popularity (measured by Google Trends) and combined this information with official data of the cable TV market. Using a two-way fixed effects estimator with state-month observations (covering the period of 2012–2019), we showed that the increase in one standard deviation in Netflix popularity is associated with a 3.62% reduction in the density of cable TV subscribers and with a 19.69% reduction in the number of small firms that operate cable TV.

Use of persuasive strategies in food advertising on television and on social media in Brazil

We analyzed the use of persuasive advertising strategies by 18 food brands on TV and Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube in Brazil in April 2018. Advertising strategies were investigated from three groups: power of advertising strategies (n = 10) (e.g., use of licensed character, celebrities, awards, etc), use of the prize offering (n = 9) (e.g., pay 2 take 3 or more, gifts or collectable, limited edition, etc), and use of brand benefit claims (n = 8) (e.g., messages that exalt sensory-based characteristics such as flavor, taste, aroma and recommend how to use/consume the product, etc). Almost 90% of the brands were ultra-processed foods producers and they carried 52 ads on TV and 194 posts on social media platforms. A higher frequency of the strategy ‘cartoon/company owned character’ was found on TV ads (19.2%; p < 0.0001) in comparison to social media platforms (0% on the three platforms) while the presence of ‘famous sportsperson/team’ prevailed on YouTube (41.4%) in comparison to TV (19.2%), Facebook (10.9%) and Instagram (9.1%), p < 0.0001. On YouTube ads, the claims ‘sensory-based characteristics’ (86.2%), ‘suggested use’ (51.7%), and ‘emotive claims’ (31.0%) were more commonly seen in comparison to the other media, while the claims about ‘new brand developments’ (23.1%), ‘price’ (9.6%) and ‘suggesting to children and the whole family to use the advertised product’ (21.1%) prevailed on TV. Ultra-processed food brands are the main food companies that advertise on Brazilian TV and social media and the message transmitted by these brands varies in each media according to the advertising strategies that are used.

Brazilian soap opera and American TV series: narrativity according Barthes

Abstract: This paper aims to compare two audiovisual tv products: a Brazilian soap operates “Avenida Brasil” (Brazil Avenue, 2012) and an American TV series Grey´s Anatomy (2005). The theoretical and methodological approach are structural narratology studies and French Semiotics, based on narratology studies influenced by Propp, Greimas and Barthes. The main goal is to analyze and compare the narrative structure of the first episodes of both TV productions by means the cardinal and catalyzer functions according to Roland Barthes narratives point of view.Keywords: brazilian soap opera, tv series, structural narratology, semiotics

#Desmonetizasikera: o net-ativismo na campanha de desmonetização contra o discurso de ódio na televisão

This paper approaches the phenomenon of net-activism in the struggle against information disorder from the Sleeping Giants Brasil movement on Twitter. To this end, it is based on a literature review about the contemporary debate on the subject, in which hate speech emerges as one of its axes, and the inscription of net-activism as a form of resistance in the midst of this scenario. Then, it proposes a case study on the #DesmonetizaSikera campaign, which publicly called on companies to break their advertising contracts with the police journalism television program Alerta Nacional. This is hosted by Sikêra Júnior, known for using his space in the programming of the Brazilian broadcaster Rede TV! to spread hate speech against the LGBTQIA+ community. The analyzes showed an awareness of a considerable number of companies over one hundred days of online actions. They also revealed that the net-activist experience opens up possibilities for thinking about the collective, politics and activism outside their traditional spaces, through digital social networks.

Representations about science and scientist in Pokemon and Lilo &amp; Stitch

Este trabalho tem por objetivo compreender as representações imaginárias sobre ciência e cientista que atravessam dois desenhos infantis estrangeiros que circulam na TV brasileira: Pokemon e Lilo &amp; Stitch. Para isso, apoiamo-nos no aparato teórico-metodológico da Análise de Discurso de linha francesa e brasileira, mobilizando noções como texto, discurso, imaginário e formação discursiva. Partimos do pressuposto de que os desenhos animados, longe de serem objetos inocentes e transparentes, trazem em seu bojo regiões de interpretação a partir das quais irrompem diferentes discursividades, reforçando muitas vezes sentidos cristalizados sobre relações sociais, ciência e cientista.

Nutritional quality of foods and non-alcoholic beverages advertised on Brazilian free-to-air television: a cross-sectional study

BackgroundEvidence shows that foods marketed on television are often low-nutrient-dense foods associated with poor nutritional diet quality, obesity and non-communicable diseases. However, little research has been undertaken in Brazil around this issue. This study assessed the nutritional profile of foods and non-alcoholic beverages advertised on Brazilian television by applying the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and the World Health Organization (WHO/Europe) nutrient profiling models.MethodsCross-sectional study based on the International Network for Food and Obesity/non-communicable diseases Research, Monitoring and Action Support (INFORMAS) protocol. A total of 432 h on the three major Brazilian free-to-air TV channels was recorded from April 1st to 30th 2018. Recordings were done for eight non-consecutive and randomly selected days from 6 am to 12 am (midnight). All food-related ads were coded using a systematic approach and classified according to the PAHO and the WHO/Europe nutrient profile models as “eligible”/“not eligible” for marketing restrictions. Absolute and relative frequencies were used to describe absolute numbers and proportions of food and beverage advertisements. The nutritional profile of foods was compared by day, time of the day and types of TV program. For each advertisement, the parent company of promoted food products, supermarkets and restaurants was identified.ResultsA total of 1610 food and beverage ads were broadcast, representing 18.1% of the total ads shown on selected channels. Over 80.0% of all foods and beverages advertised on Brazilian TV channels did not meet the PAHO and the WHO/Europe nutritional quality standards and were considered eligible for marketing restrictions. The proportion of unhealthy food ads was significantly higher on weekends, in the afternoon, and during soap operas programming. Altogether, 10 transnational and local food and beverage companies, two large international fast food chains and two of Brazil’s largest supermarket retailers accounted for almost 90% of all unhealthy food ads shown.ConclusionsThe findings of the present study indicate a high exposure of the Brazilian population to unhealthy food marketing and an inefficient enforcement of existing regulations. Further research to monitor population exposure to unhealthy food marketing and understand the policy inertia that is preventing policy progress, is highly recommended.

The commendable man: an anthropological experience of self-slimming based on health TV journalism

This article presents the results of an ethnographic research about food, a theme that has gained prominence in Brazilian TV. The author of this work followed feeding tips from the Bem Estar program, Rede Globo; slimmed 25 kg in four months, and noted the sensations he had and the reactions of others. The study considers that Brazilian TV propagates the idea of lean body as "normal" and as a model to be followed. The work uses observant participation. It is an ethnographic research technique in which the researcher not only observes the phenomenon, but also participates in it (in this case, noting changes in the body itself). The manuscript uses an interdisciplinary technique to associate themes from Anthropology to Social Communication. He concludes that the television message in favor of thinness transforms the one who slims into a commendable man.

Mediatized tourist experience: a Brazilian TV newscast conception

This article has as objective the comprehension of the tourist’s experience perspective adopted by Jornal Hoje (JH)­ – Rede Globo on their sketch To de Folga (TDF). The conception adopted in this work considers the touristic activities have become an important driver of human dislocations nowadays. And, within this scenery, we analyze one of the top Brazilian TV news programs that maintains an exclusive space dedicated to travels since 2008. The investigation involved a sample involving 44 news pieces and from information gathered through the means of participant’s observations and content analysis. In addition, the pairing technique was used. A prevalence of a marketing oriented conception was found – not in the promotional sense, of selling the touristic destination with its attractiveness, experiences and services but of captivating whoever is watching the TV news program first.