There are 455,000 foreigners living in the country. The largest group (116.000) comes from Brazil, which means they have no linguistic barriers to accessing the national media. The same is true of other communities coming from former Portuguese colonies (Cape Verde, Angola, and Guinea). But, in recent years, the percentage of immigrants from Eastern European countries has grown rapidly (there are presently 52,000 Ukrainians, 32,000 Rumanians and 21,000 Moldavians, for example).
There are a few newspapers written in foreign languages (in some cases, bi-lingual). But they are not relevant in the media landscape (circulation figures can be counted at most in the hundreds). They usually have been created by the foreigner communities’ associations – and there are more than 100 of these associations in Portugal, according to the “High Commissioner for Immigration and Intercultural Dialogue”.
There are sometimes some complaints made by those communities regarding the way immigrants are mistreated by the mainstream media. A study funded by ERC and conducted by a group of scholars concluded that the visibility of immigrants in the main media was, in the period 2003-2008, usually associated with “crime” and “social transgression” (Férin 2009, p. 124). And the news reporting on those issues tends to give a voice to security forces (police) and institutional sources, rather than to immigrants’ associations or common people from these communities of foreigners (ibidem).
As regards television, a very small percentage of programmes are specifically devoted to ethnic or cultural minorities: during 2009, less than 1 % of the general content of SIC and TVI was devoted to them, while this percentage grew up to 3.4 % in the public channels (RTP 1 and RTP2), although most of it concentrated in RTP2 (ERC 2009).
As for the disabled, public television usually broadcasts some of its leading programmes with sign language or with subtitles in Portuguese. Presently, some TV popular contests, series and soap-operas are regularly subtitled. A technically advanced system (Tecnovoz) has been in use since 2007, allowing RTP1 to automatically deliver – with a delay of some seconds – subtitles in Portuguese for programmes being broadcasted live. As for sign language, four daily news programmes and three weekly programmes are presented simultaneously in this way.
The Regulatory Entity for the Media (ERC), following a prescription inscribed in the Television Law in 2007, finally established (in October 2009) a set of obligations for the main TV operators – both public and private – regarding more attention to people with disabilities: a three-year plan, to be fulfilled until 31 December 2012, will greatly increase the number of programmes with subtitles and with gesture language.
The enormous increase of the Internet, and particularly the strong development of weblogs, brought new possibilities for various minorities (political, religious, sexual, cultural…) to have their own information flows.
