Abstract
Brazilian ethnic media in the United States is used as a case study to demonstrate how three newspapers communicated information about the 2018 Brazilian election and to analyze how they performed not only ethnic media functions but public diplomacy functions as well. Diaspora media stimulated political activity abroad, pluralistic views, ethnic pride, activism, connection to the homeland, a sense of community, and the maintenance of a Brazilian identity in the host country.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Assimilation theory has been criticized and rejected by scholars for being untestable, as it does not specify when changes occur (Lyman, 1968) and because of its ideological overtones. Glazer and Moynihan (1970) rejected the idea of assimilation as unreal. They suggested that “historical experiences, cultures, skills, and times of arrival” (p. 14) developed unique economic, political, and cultural patterns for each immigrant group.
- 3.
According to a Migration Policy Institute report, three states in the United States contained the largest population of Brazilian immigrants in 2017: Florida, Massachusetts, and California. Because no ethnic newspaper was found in the state of California, I selected a Brazilian newspaper in the fourth most populous state, New Jersey. In fact, if one analyzes the Brazilian population by metropolitan area, the Los Angeles—Long Beach—Anaheim Metro area comes in fourth, while metro areas in MA, FL, and NJ come first.
- 4.
See Brazilian Voice: https://brazilianvoice.com; Brazilian Times: https://www.braziliantimes.com/; and Brasileiros & Brasilieras: https://journalbb.com.
- 5.
The other type of information control process is feedback, which refers to the role of the media in reporting with the aim of drawing attention to a potential problem in the system (Viswanath & Arora, 2000).
- 6.
Brasileiros & Brasileiras had very few stories, and since it is published monthly, it was difficult to establish an overarching theme for it when analyzing the 2018 election. Therefore, it was excluded from the thematic analysis.
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Fernandes, J. (2021). Brazilian Ethnic Media in the United States: An Analysis of Their Social Control and Pluralistic Functions in an Electoral Context. In: Bravo, V., De Moya, M. (eds) Latin American Diasporas in Public Diplomacy. Palgrave Macmillan Series in Global Public Diplomacy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74564-6_12
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