Abstract
Cidade Alerta, meaning "City on alert", initiates the weekday prime-time on Rede Record, the third biggest television channel in Brazil. The programme contains various types of reports; turn outs with the police and rescue parties, consumer oriented reports, fantastic or exotic events, transmissions of pleads for help, etc. The way these reports are presented to the audience also varies, from being quite sober, or typical news reports, to agitated, live-looking, and sensationalistic reports. The programme itself tries to create an as much "live" style as possible, by the way it is organised and how it presents the different reports.
In this programme I see both negative and positive tendencies. The negative potential is the obvious tendency towards sensationalism, and the positive potential is in the reports where the programme serves as a service organ for the audience. In my thesis, I have tried to map both the negative and the positive tendencies, and in doing so, also tried to show some of the ethical implications that lie in a format containing aspects of tabloid-style news broadcasts, vox-pop talk shows, infotainment magazines, transnational sattelite television news, and reality-based programmes.