thirteen - Media and policy analysis in Brazil: the process of policy production, reception and analysis through the media

Summary

Introduction

In the specific political context of contemporary democratic States, policies are produced as the result of actions and interactions among highly differentiated, specialised and largely autonomous institutions, such as governments and parliaments, and their technical agencies.

The implementation and success of most of that policy output – practically all of it and in practically all cases – depends on its being favourably received and treated by journalists and the mass media, those individual and collective actors who, in an open and democratic society, occupy the strategic position of mediators of information in the so-called public domain.

This chapter intends to provide a (synthetic, but comprehensive) overview of the specific communicational variables that enter into and impact the process of policies’ being publicly received and analysed by the media, in its many forms and properties, in contemporary Brazil. For that purpose a brief account is given of the ill-fated proposals advanced in Brazil at the beginning of the first Lula government (2003-2007) to set up a National Council of Journalism and an Agency for Brazilian Cinema and Audiovisual Production.

Processes like these are certainly not restricted to Brazil, so the theoretical framework underlying the analysis is intended to have a wider heuristic validity.

Nonetheless, even brief study of a specific case of policies’ being received problematically in the contemporary Brazilian context will – it is believed – illustrate the theory's potential, as well as serving as a stimulus and starting parameter for comparative studies in other contexts.

Conjunctural dynamics, policy formulation, implementation and analyses, and the media

A typical policy production process usually brings to mind a certain agenda of problems or interests, a specific cycle in which institutional responses are prepared for such an agenda, and a particular configuration of actors and/or sectors inside and outside the main deliberative political bodies, interested in giving these policies a, once again specific, direction and shape. In this first approximation to the subject approach it makes little difference how such political projects originate: whether ‘demanded’ by important or influential sectors or ‘discovered’ or ‘appropriated’ more or less opportunely (or opportunistically) by some ‘professional’ politician. What most often does matter is that, once the project's actual existence is given (or ‘verbalised’ or ‘manifested’), it enters onto the political agenda as a salient fact, appropriate ‘gravitationally’ to draw the attention of the leading actors (or players) and/or those most directly interested in the matter (or issue).