Decoding television censorship during the last Brazilian military regime: The censor as negotiator and censorship as a semi-open interpretative process

This essay focuses on television censorship during the last military regime in Brazil (19641985) by
examining the performance of television censors employed by the Public Entertainment Censor
Department (Divisa˜o de Censura e Diverso˜es Pu´ blicas, DCDP). It challenges common perceptions
about small-screen censorship during this period, pointing to the need to analyse the boundaries
and the spaces of autonomy in each television genre. It focuses on the multiple tensions and
struggles between the written procedures and codes, the censors’ subjective interpretation of
television texts and the negotiation process of the broadcast contents between censors and
television producers. The recent opening of the Censor Division Archives (DCDP) and the deluge of
biographies, autobiographies and testimonials of key television figures during the authoritarian
regime, have opened up new perspectives to examine Brazilian TV history and the place television
censors had within it. Annotated and censored scripts of telenovelas and comedy series,
correspondence exchanged between the executives of Globo Television Network, the hegemonic
TV station in Brazil at the time, and the regime’s authorities, printed press reports, as well as
audiovisual content that is now available to researchers, constitute some of the sources analysed
in this article.