Citizens everywhere are turning to multiple news sources to inform their daily decisions. In Brazil, an emerging global power and democracy, those sources include the ever-popular telenovelas and, on a rising basis, newspapers. News and Novela in Brazilian Media: Fact, Fiction, and National Identity examines how news issues help frame telenovela plots, comparing key issues across Brazilian media to highlight differing levels of progression associated with press freedom. Scrutiny of concurrent print news stories, print news photos, and telenovela scenes indicate that when a hit telenovela is compared to news, the novela becomes a more progressive storyteller. At least, race, class, gender, and religious news issues seem more progressive: An Afro-Brazilian wins a local election; a favela or shantytown is idealized; a less popular African religion is heralded while Protestantism is marginalized and Catholicism continues as the right religion; and women achieving power leads to a more egalitarian society. In a diversifying media environment, where lines between fact and fiction are increasingly blurred, Brazilian alternative news studies are critical measures of Brazil’s state of media opening that inform national identity formation.

This concise book provides an accessible overview of the history of the telenovela in Latin America within a pan-Latino context, including the way the genre crosses borders between Latin America and the United States. Telenovelas, a distinct variety of soap operas originating in Latin America, take up key issues of race, class, sexual identity and violence, interweaving stories with melodramatic romance and quests for identity. June Carolyn Erlick examines the social implications of telenovela themes in the context of the evolution of television as an integral part of the modernization of Latin American countries.

The Brazilian television industry is one of the most productive and commercially successful in the world. At the forefront of this industry is TV Globo and its production of standardized telenovelas, which millions of Brazilians and viewers from over 130 countries watch nightly. Eli Lee Carter examines the field of television production by focusing on the work of one of Brazil's greatest living directors, Luiz Fernando Carvalho. Through an emphasis on Carvalho's thirty-plus year career working for TV Globo, his unique mode of production, and his development of a singular aesthetic as a reaction to the dominant telenovela genre, Carter sheds new light on Brazilian television's history, its current state, and where it is going—as new legislation and technology push it increasingly toward a post-network era.

Branding Brazil examines a panorama of contemporary cultural productions including film, television, photography, and alternative media to explore the transformation of citizenship in Brazil from 2003 to 2014. A utopian impulse drove the reproduction of Brazilian cultural identity for local and global consumption; cultural production sought social and economic profits, especially greater inclusion of previously marginalized people and places. Marsh asserts that three communicative strategies from branding–promising progress, cultivating buy-in, and resolving contradictions–are the most salient and recurrent practices of nation branding during this historic period. More recent political crises can be understood partly in terms of backlash against marked social and political changes introduced during the branding period. Branding Brazil takes a multi-faceted approach, weaving media studies with politics and cinema studies to reveal that more than a marketing term or project emanating from the state, branding was a cultural phenomenon.

Elevates global entertainment to an area of worthy media study that was previously reserved for global news and takes a worldwide approach, encompassing Nigeria, Egypt, Brazil, and India - in addition to the more high-profile, heavily researched areas of Europe and East Asia.

A new generation of Afro-Brazilian media producers have emerged to challenge a mainstream that frequently excludes them. Reighan Gillam delves into the dynamic alternative media landscape developed by Afro-Brazilians in the twenty-first century. With works that confront racism and focus on Black characters, these artists and the visual media they create identify, challenge, or break with entrenched racist practices, ideologies, and structures. Gillam looks at a cross-section of media to show the ways Afro-Brazilians assert control over various means of representation in order to present a complex Black humanity. These images--so at odds with the mainstream--contribute to an anti-racist visual politics fighting to change how Brazilian media depicts Black people while highlighting the importance of media in the movement for Black inclusion. An eye-opening union of analysis and fieldwork, Visualizing Black Lives examines the alternative and activist Black media and the people creating it in today's Brazil.

This study examines how news issues help frame telenovela plots and compares how the print media and telenovelas frame several key social and political issues. Secondary systematic sampling of the Brazilian leading daily newspaper O Jornal do Brasil and newsmagazine Veja/Veja-Rio from January 2007 to April 2008 generated 313 news stories along with 292 photos for analysis. A five-composite week sample of TV Globo's 8 p.m. hit telenovela Duas Caras resulted in 31 episodes--including its premiere and finale--or a total of 1,051 scenes to explore. Applying framing theory (Reese, 2003) through a reciprocal and dynamic comparative narrative analysis (Berger, 2005; Berger, 1997) to this body of materials suggests the telenovela, compared to news, is a more progressive storyteller with regard to race, class and gender news issues. Salient latent news frames The Government is the family and Brazilian democracy is more social than racial emerge from this study's news portion. These are compared with the emergent salient latent novela frames Family first, family forever and It's not the position that rules, but the influence. For the first time in TV Globo's history, an Afro-Brazilian is an 8 p.m. telenovela hero. In addition, Duas Caras highlights his successful municipal election campaign, right around the time municipal election campaigns in Brazil were gearing up and while U.S. citizens were considering then electing their first Afro-American president. Duas Caras also sanitizes favelas, or Brazilians shantytowns, contrasting the fictive locale of Portelinha against marginalized portrayals of favelas and their residents in the news. In a diversifying media environment where lines between fact and fiction are increasingly less apparent, Brazilian (alternative) news studies, such as social marketing themes in telenovelas, are critical measures of the state of media opening in Brazil (Porto, 2007). They also reveal from which source(s) Brazilians receive their news information, raising the question, Do telenovelas help frame news issues?