Do they count the words?


BRAZILIANS love television. Nearly all households own a set, more than do a refrigerator. Over two-thirds of the population watch it every day. In the eyes of the state, that makes television too potent a tool to let politicians—or broadcasterswield it as they please.

On August 4th the evening news on Brazil’s dominant TV Globo network began showing daily reports from the presidential campaign trail—but only according to an elaborate schedule. In the name of fairness and compliance with rigid rules dating to 1997, it affords President Dilma Rousseff and her two main rivals one minute each of daily campaign coverage.


To ensure a level playing field, the law also bars candidates from buying TV ads with their own cash. Instead, the exchequer pays all free-to-air channels 80% of market rates to run commercials produced by parties and their hopefuls

Most will be broadcast from August 19th until polling day on October 5th, three times a week in two 25-minute blocks. These ads, together with similar ones for local and congressional races, will cost taxpayers an estimated 840m reais ($368m).

This “freetelevision time will be split between presidential candidates using a complicated formula which is largely based on the size of electoral alliances. The going rate for one minute in each block of airtime is a cabinet portfolio. In June Ms Rousseff replaced her transport minister after a junior partner threatened to pull out of her coalition and to hand its 60 seconds to Aécio Neves, her principal challenger. She now has nearly 12 minutes, more than twice Mr Neves’s tally.

One voter in four relies on commercials for information about candidates. Studies have shown a correlation between the amount of television time they receive and success in local and congressional polls. Little wonder that TV production costs eat up the biggest chunk of Mr Neves’s war chest, according to Otávio Cabral, his media co-ordinator.

Yet the last time commercials swayed a presidential race was in 1989, when the telegenic Fernando Collor beguiled voters with slick tricks such as new-fangled computer graphics, notes David Fleischer of the University of Brasília. Since then, he says, commercials have at best sustained candidates’ trajectories rather than changed them.

That may be enough for Mr Neves. He currently trails Ms Rousseff by 16 percentage points in the first round. But that is down from 23 points in April. And recent polls for the first time showed him neck-and-neck with the president in a run-off.