TVs Educativas catarinenses: relações entre política, mercado e sociedade civil

Abstract

This dissertation is about the current model of communication policy in Brazil, especially with regard to educational television. These public concessions are distributed to nongovernmental organizations by Federal Government. It demonstrates the complex relationship among the third sector, civil society, the State, the marketplace, and policymakers or public authorities. It also shows how the relationship of many elements are reflected in educational television programming. We focus our research on the state of Santa Catarina where we analyze the process of the expansion of Educational Television stations through new concessions. We hypothesize that non-governmental organizations and Educational TV programming do not act democratically, rather they were created by private interest groups. Based on interviews with eight of the nine subsidaries in Santa Catarina and extensive analyses of documents and literature, we find that most of the public educational stations were created by the Federal Government for entities with no community ties but were formed by political, religious, and marketplace associations.