The Effect of Regulations on Telenovelas

     As we saw in class, regulation can have a huge effect on all aspects of production of a telenovela and even content in other forms of communication. We explored the case of Venezuela, where producers were forced to look over every aspect of the telenovela with a microscope or face consequences such being shut down by the government or even exiled from the country. In this situation, telenovelas ceased to be the reflection of society that they had come to be and instead had to be produced without many cultural aspects. I think it's especially important to learn about the extreme cases of regulation and censorship so we can identify potential censorship issues in our own country.

     In many of my classes at UGA, we've learned about various laws surrounding television and media content. However, each time we learned about these laws it was easy to see why they had been put into place. The main reason for the majority of them was to protect the consumer from false or misleading content. For example, the FTC thought that consumers were having difficulty distinguishing between paid content and the actual thoughts of social media influencers, so they mandated that every post have a hashtag that clearly demonstrated the post was an advertisement. On our television, graphic or untrue content typically has a warning before the episode. In these cases, we can clearly see that the essence of this media content was not significantly altered to change the overall message. The producers were still able to create graphic content without fear that the government would shut down their network. But we must ask ourselves where the line is between protecting consumers and censoring content. When does a law significantly change the message of the content? I think that this is very much a grey area and that it's difficult to determine censorship until it's in an extreme form.

     In our country, many television networks are utilizing their content to take stances against political and social issues. They accomplish this through a variety of ways, such as creating a character that reminds viewers of a certain political figure or they might even have a character say something right out. For example, the reboot of Charmed mentions that the apocalypse was brought out by our current president and his tweets. As viewers, we all know that this is a nod to Donald Trump. The same thing is happening with various telenovelas as well. In class, we discussed Al Otro Lado de Muro and how it deals with themes such as immigration in the United States. Throughout the episodes, various references are made to Trump and his attitude towards immigrants. In my opinion, its healthy for a society to explore certain real-world issues in their content. It provides a space for discourse about issues and an area for viewers to escape from reality. I think that the censorship of these ideas could be detrimental to society. It could inhibit the acceptance of new ideas or lifestyles.

     When we learn of new laws regulating media content, we should take a moment to consider the reason behind the passing of this law. Was it passed to protect the consumer, or was it passed to further a governmental agenda to limit the expression of ideas?