Roberto Marinho
Roberto Marinho (3 December 1904 to 6 August 2003) was a Brazilian journalist and businessman who built Grupo Globo into the dominant media organisation in Brazil and one of the largest in the world. He controlled the newspaper O Globo, Rádio Globo and, from 1965, TV Globo, whose reach and influence over Brazilian public life during the second half of the twentieth century had few parallels in any democracy.
His career is inseparable from the political history of Brazil in the same period, and assessments of it remain sharply divided between those who regard him as the builder of a modern national broadcasting industry and those who regard his organisation as having sustained a military dictatorship and subsequently shaped elections in its own interest.
Early life
Marinho was born in Rio de Janeiro on 3 December 1904. His father, Irineu Marinho, was a journalist who founded O Globo in July 1925 and died three weeks later, leaving the newspaper to a family with no experience of running it.
Roberto Marinho was twenty. He worked in a subordinate role for some years while others directed the paper, and took control in 1931, at twenty-six.
Career
O Globo and radio
O Globo was the third of Rio de Janeiro's afternoon newspapers when Marinho took charge and became, over the following decades, among the most influential in the country. He founded Rádio Globo in 1944, extending the operation into broadcasting at a point when radio was the mass medium in a country with high illiteracy and vast distances.
TV Globo
TV Globo began transmitting on 26 April 1965. Its establishment involved a financing and technical assistance agreement with the American company Time-Life, which provided capital and expertise in exchange for a share of profits.
The arrangement became a constitutional controversy. The Brazilian constitution prohibited foreign ownership of broadcasters, and a parliamentary inquiry in 1966 and 1967 concluded that the agreement breached it. The relationship was terminated and Time-Life's interest bought out, but the episode gave Globo an initial advantage in capital and technique that competitors did not have, and it has remained a subject of argument ever since.
The Globo standard
What Globo built through the late 1960s and 1970s was a standard of television production considerably higher than anything else in Latin America, described within the company as the padrão Globo de qualidade.
Its central product was the telenovela, the serialised drama broadcast nightly over several months. Globo's productions were made to cinematic standards, addressed contemporary Brazilian subjects including class, race, corruption and social change, and were watched by audiences that at their peak represented a majority of all Brazilians with a television. They also became a substantial export, sold to more than a hundred countries and establishing the Brazilian telenovela as a distinct international form.
Jornal Nacional, the evening news programme launched on 1 September 1969, was the first national news broadcast transmitted live across Brazil and became the principal source of information for the country. Its position was so dominant that its editorial judgements were, in practice, the national news agenda.
Globo's technical and commercial success was assisted by the military government's investment in a national microwave and satellite transmission network, built for reasons of national integration and security, which gave a national broadcaster reach across a country of continental size at a point when no commercial operator could have funded it.
Relations with the dictatorship
Brazil was governed by a military regime from 1964 to 1985. Globo's relationship with it is the central charge against Marinho and he never substantially disputed the facts, though he disputed their interpretation.
The organisation supported the coup of 1964, operated within the censorship regime without public objection, and its news coverage through the 1970s presented an account of the country consistent with the government's. Marinho stated publicly on more than one occasion that he had supported the regime because he believed the alternative was worse, and described the position as patriotic rather than opportunistic.
Two episodes are cited most often.
The Diretas Já campaign of 1983 and 1984 demanded direct presidential elections. Mass demonstrations drew hundreds of thousands and in some cases more than a million people. Globo initially gave the movement minimal coverage, and its early reporting of a rally in São Paulo described it as a celebration of the city's anniversary rather than as a political demonstration. Coverage changed as the campaign's momentum became undeniable.
The 1989 presidential election, the first direct one in twenty-nine years, was contested in its final round between Fernando Collor de Mello and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Globo's edited summary of the final televised debate, broadcast on Jornal Nacional, was widely held to have favoured Collor, who won. A Globo journalist involved subsequently acknowledged the editing had not been balanced, and the network itself later conceded publicly, in an editorial published in 2013, that its support for the 1964 coup had been a mistake.
Beyond Citizen Kane
The British documentary Beyond Citizen Kane, made by Simon Hartog and broadcast by Channel 4 in 1993, examined Globo's political influence and its relationship with the dictatorship. It was never broadcast in Brazil, and attempts to screen it were obstructed, which gave it a considerable underground circulation and a status in Brazilian political argument out of proportion to its content.
Other interests
Marinho's holdings extended beyond media into publishing, recording and other businesses. He was involved in cultural patronage, in the restoration of historic buildings in Rio de Janeiro and in the Roberto Marinho Foundation, established in 1977, which has worked in education and in cultural heritage and which developed the Telecurso distance education programme, used by very large numbers of Brazilians to complete secondary schooling.
Death and succession
Marinho died on 6 August 2003 in Rio de Janeiro at the age of ninety-eight, having remained active in the business into his nineties. He was given a state funeral.
Control passed to his three sons, Roberto Irineu, João Roberto and José Roberto Marinho, who have run the group jointly since, a succession arrangement that has proved more durable than most.
Assessment
Marinho built one of the largest media organisations in the world from a newspaper he inherited by accident at twenty, and the industrial achievement is not seriously disputed. The production standards Globo established, the telenovela as an exported cultural form, and the creation of a genuinely national broadcast audience in a country of Brazil's size and diversity are substantial and lasting.
The political record is the difficulty, and it is not resolved by noting that Globo has itself acknowledged parts of it. A broadcaster with Globo's share of the national audience exercises a degree of influence that no democratic theory accommodates comfortably, and Marinho exercised it deliberately: he supported a military government against an elected one, operated within its censorship, minimised a mass democratic movement, and presided over an election broadcast that participants later conceded was unbalanced.
The defence offered on his behalf is that the alternative in 1964 was a communist government, that every Brazilian media organisation of the period accommodated the regime to some degree, and that Globo's technical and cultural achievements were real and would not have existed otherwise. The counter-observation is that the accommodation was more thorough at Globo than elsewhere and that the organisation benefited materially from it, through the transmission infrastructure the state built and through the licences it granted.
What is beyond argument is the scale of the influence. For roughly three decades, what most Brazilians knew about their own country came through organisations Roberto Marinho controlled, and the consequences of that concentration are still being argued about in Brazil.