Abstract, The Financing of TV Brasil: Limitation of Resources or Political Choice?

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The Financing of TV Brasil: Limitation of Resources or Political Choice?
by Sales Augusto dos Santos and Ivonete da Silva Lopes

The federal funds allocated to Brazilian public television are insufficient for its adequate maintenance and could be increased. Instead of advertising on public television, which was the flagship of the Brazilian public communication system, the Lula and Rousseff administrations turned to private broadcasting systems in the hope of co-opting them. In addition to robbing public television of critical funding, this proved a political mistake when TV Globo became one of their harshest critics.

Abstract, Changing the Channel: Class Conflict, Everyday State Formation, and Television in Venezuela

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Changing the Channel: Class Conflict, Everyday State Formation, and Television in Venezuela
 by Naomi Schiller

The formation of new state television outlets in Venezuela during the Chávez era was a process of dismantling and remaking hierarchies among social classes and between the fields of state and community media production. An analysis of the involvement of community media producers in creating a new state television outlet in Caracas and the collaboration between community and state producers in the first decade of the twenty-first century suggests that the influx of community media producers into state media projects and vice versa was mutually transformative. Such an analysis brings to the fore what vertical topographies of power obscure: the conflict and cooperation between different social sectors that were central to the making of both official and unofficial media projects aligned with the Chávez-led Bolivarian Revolution. In these joint efforts we see the state as an unfolding process of negotiation and struggle.

Abstract, Communications Policies and the Production of Audiovisual Content in Argentina

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Communications Policies and the Production of Audiovisual Content in Argentina
By Carla Rodríguez Miranda and Ornela Carboni

The introduction of digital terrestrial television and the passage of the Audiovisual Communications Services Act in Argentina in 2009 led to a series of competitions to stimulate the production of new content and help dismantle the prevailing center-periphery logic in Argentine television. An examination from the perspective of the political economy of communications of these efforts in 2011–2013 indicates that they were small steps in the right direction. Further progress will require a stable source of funding, a stronger role for public televisión, and new strategies for capturing viewers.

Abstract, Constructing Memory through Television in Argentina by Claudia Feld

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Constructing Memory through Television in Argentina 
by Claudia Feld

Television represents Argentina’s recent past through three specific links with social memory: as an “entrepreneur of memory,” shaping public agendas, as a vehicle of intergenerational transmission of past events, and as a creator of meaning through images, sounds, and words, a “stage for memory.” An analysis in terms of the links between television and the memories constructed around the forced disappearance of persons during the 1976–1983 military dictatorship reveals the complex way in which the obstacles when narrating an extreme experience are combined with the attempt to sell a product and entertain the spectator.

Abstract, Constructing Memory through Television in Argentina by Claudia Feld

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Constructing Memory through Television in Argentina 
by Claudia Feld

Television represents Argentina’s recent past through three specific links with social memory: as an “entrepreneur of memory,” shaping public agendas, as a vehicle of intergenerational transmission of past events, and as a creator of meaning through images, sounds, and words, a “stage for memory.” An analysis in terms of the links between television and the memories constructed around the forced disappearance of persons during the 1976–1983 military dictatorship reveals the complex way in which the obstacles when narrating an extreme experience are combined with the attempt to sell a product and entertain the spectator.