COMMUNICATION: Global Media Watch to Monitor Ethics in the Press

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil, Jan 28 2003 (IPS) - Global Media Watch will promote the creation of national committees to monitor violations of journalistic ethics in different countries, the organisation announced Tuesday at the end of the third annual World Social Forum (WSF).

The national committees to be sponsored by the media watchdog, created last year by the international news agency Inter Press Service (IPS) and the French daily Le Monde Diplomatique, will provide an instrument designed to protect reporters and the public from ”manipulation,” said Roberto Savio, president emeritus of IPS and a member of the WSF international board.

The organisation’s aim is to report and document violations of ethics, the people’s right to pluralistic information, and the free exercise of journalism.

According to Savio, reporting is basically subject to two kinds of pressure: that of the market, which confronts economic interests with ethics; and politics, when owners of media outlets put them at the service of power struggles.

One clear instance of manipulation was seen in the Italian city of Florence in November, on the occasion of the European Social Forum, said Savio, who was named secretary-general of Global Media Watch.

A leading Italian newspaper called on local residents to boycott the social forum by closing stores, hospitals and other services, and warned that the city would be overrun by ”vandals” who would destroy one of the centres of European culture, said Savio.

But the European Social Forum march, which drew one million people to protest a United States-led war on Iraq, demonstrated that the local population ”saw through the newspaper’s lies” and joined the peace demonstration in great numbers, he said.

Nevertheless, the newspaper reported that everything it had predicted actually came to pass, Savio added.

Global Media Watch, which will be based in France, will be presided over by the director of Le Monde Diplomatique, Ignacio Ramonet. The organisation’s vice-presidents will be IPS Director-General Mario Lubetkin, and journalist Joaquim Palhares, with the Brazilian news agency Carta Maior.

According to the organisation’s statutes and charter of principles, the national committees will be made up of three members: representatives of the press and of the public, and a member of the academic community who will contribute methodology and scientific foundations for assessing the ethical conduct of the media.

National media watch committees have already been set up in Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela, and another is in the process of being created in Brazil, said Palhares.

During the WSF, which ended Tuesday in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, an international tribunal also began to ”try” cases of ”extreme manipulation” of the media, such as what is occurring in Venezuela, said Italian film-maker Gabriele Nunzio, who produced a film on Venezuelan history.

The tribunal, set up by Venezuelan organisations, and international personalities like Argentine Nobel Peace laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, consisted of a four-member ”jury,” including Pakistani writer Tariq Ali and Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein, the author of the book ‘No Logo’.

Around a dozen journalists and activists testified before the jury and an audience of roughly 300 people, describing the monopolistic control that the opposition movement seeking the ouster of President Hugo Chávez exercises over the press.

They also pointed to the alleged complicity between the owners of Venezuela’s private media outlets and the business and military leaders who led the failed coup in April that removed Chávez from power for two days. In addition, they complained about the lack of professionalism among reporters in Venezuela.

Savio underlined that Global Media Watch differed from the international tribunal in that its aim is not to ”condemn the media,” but to alert citizens of possible attempts at manipulation.

Moreover, it is not oriented by political criteria like the tribunal, but by a rigorous analysis of the news, which covers economic, social and cultural, and not only political, aspects, he observed.

The participation of academic researchers and the strict application of scientific rules and methodology are aimed at preventing Global Media Watch from becoming an instrument of political campaigns, Savio explained.

The objective ”is not to practice censorship,” but to offer tools that allow news consumers and reporters to reach their own conclusions on attempts at manipulation, concealment of information, distortion of events, fabrications and propaganda. The sanctions will be ethical, Savio added.

In a project of this kind, credibility is key, which means scientific and professional standards are ”indispensable,” he underscored.

Problems in communication and information were the focus of heated debates during the six-day WSF, which opened last Thursday.

In a seminar organised Monday by IPS and Le Monde Diplomatique, Ramonet said that the press no longer constitutes the so-called fourth power, as a critical force in defence of citizens against the three powers of the state.

In Ramonet’s view, that role has lost importance, partly due to the media’s ties to large private economic interests, in the current context of globalisation and the growing role of transnational corporations.

That space must now be occupied, he said, by the ”fifth power” – organised civil society.

For his part, Savio recalled an attempt in the 1970s by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to promote debate and change in the global information and communications system.

The initiative, known as the ”new world order in information and communication”, was ridiculed by the major media outlets, and the United States withdrew its contributions to UNESCO, he noted.