Mauro Porto

Mauro Porto is a scholar of political communication whose research examines the relationship between media, politics, and democracy, with a focus on Brazil. His work explores the role of communication processes and institutions in the exercise of power, especially in relation to how hegemonic ideas and identities are both reinforced and challenged by the media.

In his PhD dissertation, which was published as a book in Brazil (Televisão e política no Brasil: A Rede Globo e as interpretações da audiencia, E-Papers, 2007), Porto analyzed how interpretive frames provided by TV Globo, Brazil’s dominant media organization, contributed to shape the understandings that active and socially located audiences developed about the world of politics. His second book (Media Power and Democratization in Brazil: TV Globo and the Dilemmas of Political Accountability, Routledge, 2012) examined the links between processes of media transformation and political accountability in the first two decades following Brazil’s transition to democracy, from 1985 to 2006.

Between 2011 and 2013, Porto became the first Program Officer for Media Rights and Access at the Ford Foundation office in Rio de Janeiro. In that capacity, he coordinated a portfolio of grants supporting civil society organizations, social movements, and academic institutions working at the front lines of the struggle for freedom of expression and media reform in Brazil.

Porto’s more recent work draws on the fields of critical whiteness studies, Marxist and Weberian class analyses, and critical race and gender theories to analyze the role of the media in the conservative revolt that took place in Brazil between 2013 and 2018. This area of research resulted in his third book (Mirrors of Whiteness: Media, Middle-Class Resentment, and the Rise of the Far Right in Brazil, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023), which analyzes how media representations fostered a status panic in the white middle class, which in turn played a key role in the rise of the far right.

Porto’s current projects focus on two main areas: a) the analysis of the role of political resentment in the rise and expansion of far-right politics in the Americas; and b) the examination of the central role of paid domestic work in the structuring and reproduction of gender, racial, and class inequalities in Brazil.

Selected Publications

• “Toxic resentment and far right politics: A critical theory from a Brazilian perspective,” Latin American Research Review, published online, 2026: 1–16.
• Mirrors of Whiteness: Media, Middle-Class Resentment, and the Rise of the Far Right in Brazil. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023.
• With Fabio Vaconcellos: “Televised presidential debates in Brazil.” In Julio Juárez-Gámiz, Christina Holtz-Bacha, and Alan Schroeder (eds.), Routledge International Handbook on Electoral Debates. New York: Routledge, 2020, pp. 103–113.
• Media Power and Democratization in Brazil: TV Globo and the Dilemmas of Political Accountability. New York: Routledge, 2012.