Global Media
"It's Time to Create a Fifth Power"

By Kalinga Seneviratne

"Media for a long time was the resource of the citizenry, known as the fourth power, the power to oppose decisions of the government that would have harmful effects on people. The fourth power no longer has this power," says Ignacio Ramonet, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique and communications professor at the University of Paris

The media were long seen as serving as a watchdog over the government to protect citizens from the abuse of power. Thus the media were known as the fourth power or the fourth estate, after the executive, legislature and the judiciary.

Ramonet pointed out that with globalisation of the economic forces, transnational companies have become more powerful than governments - and they have also taken over the media.

These international media conglomerates - companies like Time Warner (which owns CNN), Disney and AOL - have a vested interest in promoting globalisation because they themselves are the process, he said.

Now, rather than protecting the people, the "fourth power is now exploiting and oppressing them" for commercial gain, he said. "How can we tackle this when the protector of the people has transformed into its enemy?"

What is currently happening in Venezuela is a good case study in which a peoples' president is being opposed by the media.

"Free elections wiped out the opposition, now the media has become the opposition power, it is leading the campaign against (President Hugo) Chávez," said Ramonet. "It has become an ideological power which is trying to contain the power of the people."

Sally Burch, executive director of the Ecuador-based Latin American information agency ALAI, agrees that the global media is at the "cutting edge" of globalisation, beyond any control by governments or institutions.

"There's a progressive disassociation of peoples' participation in the communications process," she said. "Without communications there cannot be democracy."

Susanna George, executive director of the Philippines-based ISIS women's information network, won enthusiastic cheers from the 10,000-strong audience at Gigantinho for the "Media and Globalisation" conference when she asserted that, today, the media are utilised to subjugate the minds and the hearts of the people when guns are too crude and blatant.

One example, she said is MTV Asia colonising the minds of the region's youth by presenting its own music but labelling it "world music".

"The global media is to global capitalism what (Christian) missionaries were to (European) colonialism," George pointed out.

We are not in the society of services but in super-industry society where the contents of culture are being manufactured, they are commodities for capitalist industrial exploitation, says Brazilian journalist and professor of journalistic ethics, Eugenio Bucci, who has just named to head the government radio network.

All of the speakers in the conference urged the social movements at the WSF to pressure governments to legislate for participatory communication models such as community radio.

ALAI's Burch pointed out that it is the power of the alternative media that saved the Chávez presidency in Venezuela during last year's coup attempt.

"We need to bring our own networks to global level and avoid starting from scratch," she said. The new alternative media initiatives represent "a new movement of resistance. It is vital for a vigorous social movement."

"We need to develop an ecology of information. We have to clean it up. We have to demand that they (global media) have a basic responsibility to tell the truth," said Le Monde Diplomatique editor Ramonet, announcing the Monday launch of the international watchdog – Media Watch Global.

"We are collectively creating a new weapon for this century," he said, "a fifth power which will oppose the super power of the global media."