By IPS Correspondents
QUITO, Jul 26 2004 (IPS)

The media are the first power in Brazil, because they define the agenda for the government, said Brazilian theologian and writer Frei Betto Monday, the first day of debates at the I Social Forum of the Americas.

Betto said he has seen that phenomenon up close as an adviser to President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva’s Zero Hunger programme.

Participating as an adviser within the leftist Workers’ Party (PT) government, the Dominican friar said he realised that sometimes the administration perceives that ”something is wrong,” but that action is often delayed until the issue appears in the press.

”Once the question stops going unnoticed by the media, there is an immediate reaction, and the necessary solutions are found,” said Betto. ”That is where you see the real power of the media. That’s why I say they are not the fourth power (or estate) as people have always said, but the first.”

Betto, who writes columns for several newspapers in Brazil, was speaking at a seminar on the democratisation of information Monday in the hemispheric Social Forum that opened Sunday and runs through Friday.

”For the big media, information is a capital aimed at selling products and creating habits of consumption, while for the alternative media the objective is to create values and generate a critical vision of reality,” said Betto, a leading exponent of liberation theology, the ”preferential option for the poor”, an alternative current within the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America.

”A well-known screenwriter recently told me that one day while he was working on the script for a new series, a station executive came up and told him that he had to add in a dog, even though that made no sense in the setting where the plot developed,” he said.

The demand that a dog be included in the storyline arose from the fact that the station had signed a contract with a dog food company, as the programme’s biggest sponsor.

”The screenwriter argued that there was no dog in the script. But he ended up putting it in, and in many episodes, the dog appeared eating food in a dish carrying the brand name” of the dog food, he said.

Something similar occurred in the case of another screenwriter. In the programme, one of the characters, a worker, commuted to her job every day on a crowded bus.

But the transportation company which covered that route in real life decided to become one of the TV series’ sponsors, and demanded that the character be seen riding a bus with a maximum of six people standing at any one time, because showing over-crowded buses hurt the company’s image.

Betto complained that the power of advertising had not only invaded the media, but political parties as well.

”Today in Brazil there is no political sector, from the extreme left to the extreme right, that does not take marketing into account. In the past, the most important people, for the parties, were the ideologues, the thinkers; today the most important people are marketing experts,” he said.

In his view, that has led to the ”de-ideologisation” of political and social activity, because platforms and principles are no longer important to convince people.

The democratisation of the media is one of the central questions to be discussed in this week’s conferences, panels and seminars organised by the alternative media.

”Communication is a war” and ”the alternative media can no longer remain artisanal” if they want to win it, said Betto.

”The challenge is for the media that defend the interests of marginalised social sectors to be less artisanal, less improvised, and more scientific,” he said.

Readers and listeners must not be underestimated, and the media that have social objectives must be very creative, José Ignacio López Vigil, author of the book ‘A Guy Named Jesus’ and an activist who has been involved in community radio for more than three decades, told IPS.

Vigil, who heads the project ‘Passionate Radialysts’, which produces micro-radio programmes on social, political and cultural topics, said it is essential for ”alternative” media products to be of high quality.

Rosa Rodríguez, the director of Tintají – a fortnightly alternative publication in Quito – who is organising Thursday’s conference on ‘Other Media Are Possible’, agreed with that view, and argued that it makes no sense to complain about the role of the major media outlets if alternative journalism is not serious and well-developed.

”Other media are certainly possible: other media committed to the changes needed by our countries, and to the sectors seeking to bring about those changes, but without ceasing to be critical and self-critical; other media that besides defending their commitments do not underestimate people with mediocre journalistic and communicational products,” said Rodríguez.

Betto said the alternative press cannot ignore the major media.

”We cannot tell people don’t read the big media. We have to work to create a critical way of thinking, and allow people to make their own analyses,” said Betto.

Although ”there is an information and news war,” we cannot foment ”a war between media outlets,” said the theologian.

According to Rodríguez, the ”other media” must demand that the state equitably distribute the advertising space it hires, which she said should be determined by law.

”It is essential that the alternative, independent media, or whatever you want to call them, join forces. In Ecuador we are working on the creation of an Ecuadorian Association of the Other Media,” said Rodríguez.

Dozens of radio stations, newspapers, news agencies, Internet portals and video producers from around the country have already taken part in meetings to set up the new association, she said.

”The diversity of the ‘other media’ means a heterodox, diverse association is required,” said Rodríguez.

Since ”the large media have their own associations that defend them and are a factor of power, the ‘other media’ must create a strong institution of our own: a mixture of a social organisation, network and business association that would also be a factor of power in relations with the state,” she said.

In the ‘Other Media Are Possible’ conference, several successful experiences will be shared by independent media outlets in Latin America, and the foundations of the future association will be explained.

Some 5,000 activists – the organisers were hoping for 10,000 – from a number of countries, but mainly from Ecuador, Colombia and Peru, are attending the more than 300 activities scheduled at the Americas Social Forum, which forms part of the World Social Forum (WSF), an annual gathering of activists organised as a sort of counterpoint to the World Economic Forum (WEF), a yearly meeting of the planet’s political and economic elite in Switzerland.

The motto of the WSF, which met in India earlier this year and will return to its roots in Brazil in 2005, is ”another world is possible.”

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