Cuestiones de América
Fighting for the Microphone
Alternatives to The Globalization of
Media
Colin Brayton *
At a panel held yesterday on “Media, Culture, and
Counter-Hegemony”, events in Venezuela took center stage as a representative of
Media Watch denounced the complicity of transnational broadcasting interests in
the coup of April 11. Topics discussed included resistance to the privatization
of spectrum and the importance of building a media movement.
An international forum on new directions in the
''democratization of media'' found a cause celébre in the questionable role of
multinational broadcasters in the ongoing crisis in Venezuela, and found
consensus in the idea that a democratic society without democratization of
access to mass communications is a contradiction in terms and practical
impossibility.
Blanca Eeckut of MediaWatch Venezuela received intense
applause from an audience of several hundred attendees as she blasted
Venezuelan news outlets for their complicity in the temporary ouster of
President Hugo Chavez in April 2001. She characterized the repression of
freedom of information by the coalition of liberal elites that seized power as
a ''media dictatorship'' and described systematic efforts to censor and distort
information about the activities and attitudes of the pro-Chavez sector of
Venezuelan society.
A inquiry into the ethics of the media during the
Venezuela constitutional crisis was announced for Monday in Porto Alegre, to be
chaired by 1980 Nobel Peace Prize winner Aldolfo Perez Estivel.
Eeckut went on to defend the expanded rights of
expression written into the nation's ''Bolivarian'' constitution,
explaining what she believes their implications are for the regulation of media
ownership and the enforcement of social accountability. Free speech rights in
the Venezuelan constitution are based on the broad definition of ''freedom of
expression'' in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which
asserts, not only a right to ''freedom of opinion and expression'' but
also a right ''to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through
any media and regardless of frontiers.'' Asserting that ''broadcast
spectrum is the patrimony of the people,'' she argued in favor of legal
measures that would bar owners of broadcast media from control over content,
requiring them to open the airwaves to members of civil society.
Steve Rendall of the American media watchdog group
Fairness and Accuracy in Report described the events in Venezuela as
''Orwellian doublespeak.''
''The media there was essentially telling the people,
''Democracy is Tyranny,'' '' he said. ''When I visited Venezuela in
May and July of last year,'' he said, ''the frustration of the people was
literally written on the walls ''the only medium left to them.'' It's a
dramatic example, he said, of an unprecedented situation in which for the first
time, most of the stories children hear are told by corporations, FAIR is a
small grass-roots organization ''Rendall cited a staff of six journalists''
that has achieved a relatively high profile in the mainstream media in the
United States. Its success is founded primarily in the prestige and
professional networking abilities of its members, many of whom had established
careers as journalists prior to the founding of the project in 1986.
Although FAIR has managed to crash, for example, what
Rendall calls the ''rumba line of militarists'' in current American reporting
on the Iraq crisis, Rendall admits that the situation has only worsened since
FAIR was founded, saying that a genuine media movement is required to combat
''decades of corporate colonization of the airwaves.''
''In some sense the battle for the airwaves is the most important struggle,''
Rendall said. ''In the U.S., we lack the progressive legislation of Venezuelan
and Brazilian law, and our FCC is subject to changes in the political wind.''
''We must leave here thinking about the airwaves and
rights of access to media in the same way that we think about air, water, and
the rainforest,'' Rendall said. What people don't realize, and what the
Venezuela case demonstrates, is that without access to media, we can do nothing
about these other pressing social issues, Rendall said.
Daniel Herz of the Brazilian National Forum for the
Democratization of Communication (FNDC), a nationwide network of regional
committees of journalists, broadcasters, and performers, reported that, partly
thanks to the efforts of his organization at the constitutional convention of
1988, national broadcast media are barred from accepting foreign capital under
the Brazilian constitution.
FNDC's current concern is with broadening the role of
the Secretariat of Broadcast Services (SSR), an organ of the Ministry of
Communications analogous to the American FCC, making it more transparent and
participatory. FNDC advocates the transfer of regulatory authority over
Internet communications to the SSR as the precursor to a major reform of the
telecommunications market through an Electronic Social Communications Act to be
submitted to the Brazilian federal legislature. Legislation containing the
measures advocated by the FNDC has been stalled in the legislature for 11
years, he reported.
FNDC's has four major strategic objectives: public
control of media content through processes of consensus; legal reform of the
broadcast market; education of the media consumer; and creation of an inclusive
national culture in and through the mass media.
In the question period, Blanca Eeckut was questioned
closely about whether the measures she proposes do not themselves verge on
censorship and threaten the independence of the press. In response, she
reiterated her analysis of the undue influence of media cartels, which is
having a drastically polarizing effect on the nation's political culture and
contributing to the exportation of capital. In the wake of the open class
warfare ongoing in Venezuela, the nation needs a media that conveys the
message, ''We are the same people and have the same interests,'' she says.
Links:
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
National Forum for Democratization
of Communication [Brazil]
* III Ciranda Internacional
da Informação Independente, 26/01/2003. Colin Brayton E—mail: eyeball@terra.com.br
Cuestiones
de América Nº 13, Febrero - Marzo de 2003
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