BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. We're devoting this part of the show to awareness, which nearly everyone wants to raise about something. The direct approach is to write up the chosen issue in a press release and hope the media respond. But that's a chancy proposition at best, so other avenues are explored. Take soap operas. They engage the hearts and minds of millions. In the mid-1960s, Miguel Sabido was just a Mexican TV scriptwriter, grinding out cliffhangers for the hugely popular primetime soaps, called telenovelas. But suddenly, a progressive Peruvian telenovela, "Simple Maria," became a national craze, pulling more viewers than even the last game of the World Cup. "Simple Maria" defied stereotype by taking control of her own destiny, and in her storyline, Sabido saw a chance to instruct and inspire millions. Thus, the Sabido method was born. Since the 1970s, Sabido's recipe has been exported around the globe, and several organizations have become torchbearers. Hanna Rosin wrote about Sabido for The New Yorker, and she joins us now. Welcome to the show.

HANNA ROSIN: Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what is the Sabido method, and how is it different from the standard method of creating a telenovela?

HANNA ROSIN: Well, women in Latin America are at a certain level in the standard telenovela. There's no idea that they should break out of the societal mode. Usually it's a woman; it's visited upon her all sort of tragedies and amnesia and infidelity. And then she just kind of drifts back into that cycle again, into sort of another doomed marriage, and, you know, looks for her redemption in romance. A Sabido telenovela completely subverts that formula. While not losing the central romance and titillation of a telenovela, it tries to have one of the characters, at least, break out of those traditional social roles, and it's the character who people are supposed to identify with. So it's a character of lower class who looks like everyone and isn't sort of a blonde bombshell or something like that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: How well have these stories translated from country to country? I mean, you wrote about Sabido's efforts in India, Burma, Nepal. What worked and what didn't?

HANNA ROSIN: Well, that's a lesson that's come hard to them, and it's been a slow trial-and-error process of trying to get a local voice but not a local voice that's completely reflecting all the local values. So, actually, they have to do a lot of specific training country to country, which a group, Population Communications International, which I wrote about, that's one of the things they do is do trainings for screenwriters and radio producers.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Tell me about Population Communications International.

HANNA ROSIN: PCI, as it calls itself, was started to work on population control around the world, and then telenovelas became its specialty. And it gets its funding from all sorts of places, sometimes from the U.S. government, sometimes from the U.N. and sometimes from small organizations locally.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I think the thing that struck me the most is the demonstrable impact of Sabido's telenovelas on people's behavior all around the world. And I guess one of the clearest examples involved a radio telenovela in Tanzania.

HANNA ROSIN: Yes. Tanzania was one of the most interesting studies they did, because they cut off a certain area of the country from radio transmission for two years and measured the difference in how many people, for example, used family planning or took AIDS drugs in the section of the country that did not have the program and the sections that did.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So how big was the difference from region to region?

HANNA ROSIN: There were bigger differences in attitude, so there were sort of 60 percent differences in attitudes in terms of acceptability of HIV testing and acceptability of certain ideas about children and what children represented. And then, in terms of actual behavior, it was on the order of sort of 25 to 30 percent in terms of whether people actually requested certain drugs, requested tests, or requested certain forms of birth control.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And did it ever run into conflict with the local church or the local government?

HANNA ROSIN: Yes, all the time, and in Mexico, it still does. And Sabido talks and writes about how he had to handle the church's position very delicately and got the church to agree to have a priest appear at the end of every one of his programs. These telenovelas do not aim to be radical, because they have to work with governments, because a lot of local television is government controlled, they stay within the rules, but that doesn't mean they don't upset people in Latin America. They're very controversial wherever the church is powerful. Even in South Africa, they had a very hard time. In China, putting on a show about AIDS took a lot of effort and work and negotiation with the local health agencies.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And they don't only have to work with the governments, they also have to work [LAUGHS] with audiences who are going to get turned off by stuff that seems too didactic or educational.

HANNA ROSIN: Yes. At the training that I attended in Mexico, that was a big part of the lesson, because these are not scriptwriters by nature. You know, a lot of these people are social workers and NGO people, and they went over with them the basics of storytelling in dramatic stories.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Your piece opens with them working out the plot of what happens to a young rape victim. You know, should she develop V.D.? Should she be abused by the hospital staff? Should she kill herself? And then finally somebody came in and said, oh, God, she's suffered enough.

HANNA ROSIN: Well, that was an amazing moment for me, because that's when I realized the program was working, because here you have these social workers who, in any other context, they would be trying to help her and feeling sorry for her, and here they were coming up with fresh and better torments. And in the end, this woman had to come in and kind of calm them down – [OVERTALK]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]

HANNA ROSIN: - and say, hey, listen, the Sabido point is that the person who behaves well, she does use the help of social workers, she doesn't kind of hide out in shame, she has to be rewarded for that good behavior.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, we think of soap operas as daytime programming here, but in Latin America and many places around the world, it's in prime time. They have a lot of male viewers. Are there any concessions made to the male viewer to keep them tuned in?

HANNA ROSIN: Yes, hugely. This was one thing that they realized kind of late in the process, 'cause it started, as I said, as a sort of women's rights, population control. They realized that in many of the countries they were working, that was a completely pointless way to go about it, because, in fact, the men made all the decisions. And in the case of Nepal, which I wrote about, it was the men and the mother-in-laws. To pitch a show to women was completely pointless, because they had no power in that particular rural society to decide if they were going to go to the doctor or if the family was going to save money or how much they were going to work. And so they completely rewrote shows in certain countries. And I've seen a few, like in Indonesia and Nepal, where they are completely aimed towards men, so it's like an action show in the beginning. The message comes across at the end, but the show is structured as a show aimed at men.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You mention in your piece that the next step for Population Communications International is possibly a collaboration with U.S. Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen Hughes, our "hearts and minds czar." So what do you know about this collaboration?

HANNA ROSIN: This collaboration is driven by a man named Sonny Fox. He invited Karen Hughes to be the keynote speaker at the last PCI conference, and she had to cancel at the last minute. But he does kind of send scripts and is dialoging, if that's a word, with various people in the State Department and American government to use these telenovelas to get at our central international problem right now.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: It's hard to imagine an Arab-language soap opera which casts America in a positive light these days, but maybe that's just a failure of my imagination.

HANNA ROSIN: Here's my scenario for the perfect Arab telenovela. It would have to be Arab-produced, so you'd have a doctor who was an Arab but born and educated in America, and he is sent over for some reason – let's say, a scholarship – to an Arab country, maybe Jordan. And he comes with all his arrogant American ways, and he thinks he's going to a backward place, and he's really condescending. And then one day, as he's sitting working in his office, he's introduced to his new nurse. And the nurse comes in, and you just sort of see her from the back, and she's fairly covered up. And it turns out to be the daughter of a famous imam, a famous but somewhat progressive imam who lets his daughter work. And then the doctor looks up, and she's absolutely beautiful, and you just pan onto her sort of beautiful, deep eyes, and you see the doctor just kind of freeze, and you know at that moment that he's going to fall in love with her. And then together they teach each other about each's cultural ways.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Hanna, I think you've got a winner. [LAUGHTER]

HANNA ROSIN: Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Hanna Rosin is a contributing writer to The New Yorker.