RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – This is anything but a novelty. It’s not super-technological, nor is it one of the “trending topics.” But radio, the country’s oldest electronic medium, is in the sights of Brazil’s presidential candidates.
In February alone, the four top-ranked candidates in the polls (Bolsonaro, Moro, Lula da Silva, and Ciro) gave some 30 interviews on radios across the country.
Stations such as Rede Nordeste de Rádio, Progresso FM from Juazeiro do Norte (CE), Rádio Verdes Mares from Fortaleza, Rádio Capital from Cuiabá, Rádio Clube from Pernambuco and Rádio Difusora from Mossoró (RN) celebrated talking to the presidential candidates – and let them speak in peace.
“For the station and also for the local listeners, it’s a great event when a candidate for the presidency of the Republic comes to his town to talk to the local listener,” says Murilo Cesar Soares, professor of sociology at the Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp).
“The voter thinks, ‘Wow, he was here,’ or ‘this candidate spoke on the radio here in the region.’ And they end up feeling honored,” the professor says. Generating those kinds of feelings, he believes, is very important for an election campaign.
PANDEMIC EFFECT
Although radio doesn’t have the appeal of new media like streaming and social media, it has grown in number and scope, which has caught the attention of campaign strategists.
Before the pandemic, in 2019, the total number of radios in Brazil was 9,000 stations, according to the Ministry of Communications. Today, there are 10,176 – a 13% increase.
Audience ratings have also increased. Between the last quarter of 2020 and the same period in 2021, radio saw a three percentage point increase in total listeners, according to audience measurement data from Kantar Ibope Media. Each listener spends about 4h14min a day listening to their favorite stations.
As more and more people – at least in major cities – work from home, the radio audience that used to sit in their cars during commute times have shifted to their homes.
Traditionally, radio has been seen as a listener’s companion. And in rural areas, its strength lies in its regionality: the local radio station is the one that reports on what’s happening in the community.
“In many places, there is neither a printed newspaper nor a website for the town news. But there is the radio station,” says Fernando Barros, an advertiser from Bahia and founder of the Propeg agency. Barros has worked with candidates in more than 30 elections and says he has lost only six of them.
To get an idea of radio’s density, Brazil has 5,570 cities. Of the 10,176 stations on national territory, 4,746 are community radios, which are low-power, low-frequency (FM) radios (25 watts) whose range is limited by Brazilian law to a radius of one kilometer around the transmitting antenna. Another 4,129 are FM and 1,115 AM stations, plus shortwave and tropical waves.
According to Kantar Ibope Media, it reaches the entire national territory and is frequently heard by 81% of the population. Coverage that the Internet still does not have. 25% of the national population does not have Internet access, according to the National Continuous Household Sample Survey – Information and Communication Technology (Pnad Contínua TIC) 2018, published last year.
FREE STAGE FOR CANDIDATES
It is not only because they are a versatile medium that presidential hopefuls pay attention to the radio. “The candidate does not always have the best means to say what he wants. And that happens with the small stations,” Barros says.
So it would be a critical mistake to neglect these media outlets in a national campaign. It’s no coincidence that President Jair Bolsonaro has been giving daily interviews to radio stations in inland communities since mid-2021.
“And the content of one station is often reproduced by another,” recalls Átila Francucci, a publicist who has also run political campaigns.
In his opinion, radio has another appeal: it is inherently one of the most opinionated media. There’s not a lot of fact-checking. “The local announcer always gives his opinion. And when the candidate goes on the radio and gives an interview, he takes advantage of that bias to speak freely.
In print media, in newspapers, and in traditional media, that’s usually not the case. The rule is to verify sources and information. “If the candidate wants to tell a story on the radio, he tells it,” Francucci says.
“It becomes a social event,” summarizes political scientist and professor Marco Antonio Carvalho Teixeira of the Center for the Study of Public Administration and Government of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (CEAPG-FGV).
In many cases, the speaker does not put the candidate up against the wall. At most, he answers calls from listeners who call the radio station.
“It’s a real playground for politicians. They say what they want,” summarizes Fernando Barros of the Propeg agency.
With information from CNN Brasil