Television – Open channels

So that television neither elects nor defeats any presidential candidate

Folha de São Paulo. Mais! São Paulo, Sunday, December 18, 2005

IVANA BENTES
SPECIAL TO FOLHA

I hope in 2006 it becomes increasingly evident that Brazilian television is a State concession, and not the contrary, that the State and society are the hostages of television. As public concession, the TV networks in 2006, besides using their concession to earn money or as an electoral machine, could quadruple their public, social, cultural, experimental and educational role and go beyond just looking at the market, profit and political blackmail.

Because TV is too important and influential to remain just in the hands of a few executives and marketers, a slave to the popularity ratings, I hope in 2006 the TV industry’s black box is pried open to the ethics councils, to independent production, regional production, and that broadcast television carries Brazilian movies, video art and short features.

I hope Brazil does not miss this historic opportunity, with the implementation of digital TV, to democratize the most powerful communications medium in the country. Depending on what is decided now, at the start of 2006 it will be possible to drastically increase the number of new channels to new actors, social movements, NGOs, poor communities, to open TV up to Brazilian cinema, art collectives, universities, etc., or on the other hand, to allow the TV industry to stay in the hands of the same small coterie.

Interactive democracy
Implementing high-definition television (HDTV) in 2006 only to transmit the World Cup from Germany and make millions in ad revenue is only defended by the big broadcasters and Communications Minister Hélio Costa. No more lines of definition are necessary on the screen just to watch a soccer match, and interactivity only to click to buy products on the screen has nothing to do with participative democracy!

I hope the General Mass Communication Law is revised and that television, cinema, video, Internet and all audiovisual production can finally be regulated by just one entity, Ancinav (National Cinema and Audiovisual Agency), an agency that was aborted after intense lobbying and pressure from the big TV networks.

I hope that in 2006, all Brazilian TV viewers, associations, groups and organizations have the right to respond on TV – to occupy the time necessary, on over-the-air or cable TV – any time their citizenship rights are injured.

Esthetics
Esthetically, I hope that the groups experimenting with new forms grow and appear, that intelligent interactivity and new formats, such as the reality and game shows, are not limited only to their commercial forms, that investments are made in documentaries that produce new knowledge, that investigate reality, rather than just telling us what we already know with "faits-divers" and sensationalist images.

I hope that TV discovers television according to Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, The Kitchen (a center for video, music, performance, dance, film and literature in New York), discovers the experimental documentary and a new iconography to express a Brazil that is not the old national-popular one imbued with nationalism cast in stone and neopopulism, but instead brings new images and forces that are transnational, that dwell within us and that TV has not yet managed to reflect.

I hope the images of shantytowns on the TV news do not just serve to stir up fear, prejudice and calls for repression and other exceptional measures, that TV goes beyond images and reports that legitimize the daily murder of our urban poor by the police and produce a new conservatism that calls for removal of the shantytowns and expulsion of the poor from our field of vision.

In 2006, I hope that television does not carry out electioneering on its entertainment shows, talk shows and news programs, and that it neither elects nor defeats any presidential candidate. It that asking for too much?

Ivana Bentes is a professor at the School of Communication of Rio de Janeiro Federal University

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