By Daniela Estrada
SANTIAGO, Dec 1 2005 (IPS)

Civil society must lead the democratisation of the media, an issue that was barely touched on at the recent World Summit on the Information Society, said participants at an international meeting in the Chilean capital.

“Nobody in Latin America is discussing the democratisation of the media,” Italian-Argentine journalist said Roberto Savio, the founder of the Inter Press Service (IPS) international news agency, durng the three-day seminar on Democracy in the Media: From the MacBride Report to the Summit on the Information Society”.

“Nobody is taking up the subject, none of the governments, neither on the left or the right. Politicians tend to see the media as an information system through which they can talk at the people,” he told IPS.

The Wednesday through Friday seminar is organised by the Institute for Communication and Image (ICEI) of the University of Chile, which has under its aegis the School of Journalism and the Chilean Association of Schools of Journalism and Social Communication, and sponsored by the French Embassy and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

The director of ICEI, Faride Zerán, underscored the importance of the report written 25 years ago by a special United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) commission presided over by an Irishman, Sean MacBride. She said there was an ethical imperative to re-examine the contents of the 1980 report because its call for a New World Information and Communication Order remains highly relevant in today’s globalised world.

“Roughly one billion people on this planet, the equivalent of one-fifth of the world’s population, have access to the Internet, while a large proportion of the rest have never even made a telephone call,” Zerán stated.

Savio, who was the principal media adviser to the MacBride Commission, recalled that the 1980 report particularly emphasised the concentration of the media in the hands of a few, the gap in technological development between the industrialised North and the developing South, the imbalance and distortion of the flow of news and information, and the erosion of cultural identity that goes hand-in-hand with a monopoly on information.

The commission called for a communications policy for Third World countries, the creation of more news media outlets, the rejection of censorship, and a reduction in the degree of concentration and monopoly of the press.

This last point, according to Savio, triggered a campaign against the New World Order proposals, led by then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) and then U.S. president Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), “to the point that the United States, Britain and Singapore withdrew from Unesco.”

The United States withdrew from Unesco in 1984 and re-joined in 2003. Singapore and Britain left the organisation in 1985; the latter re-joined in 1997.

Nearly “three decades went by without any discussion of the issue, until the World Summit on the Information Society, held in Geneva and Tunis,” Savio said. In his view, the language at the Summit was very similar to that of the MacBride Report, with regard to its view of the media as an essential tool which must be accessible to all in order to build a more just world.

However, the Summit on the Information Society (the second phase of which was held in Tunis in November) did not deal with “the dangers of over-concentration of press ownership, the question of non-commercial media, and the issue of access to technological services,” nor did it discuss any practical mechanism for reducing the digital gap, he said.

According to the president of the Chilean association of journalists, Alejandro Guillier, also taking part in the seminar, technology opens up multiple new options, but well-educated, determined people are needed to develop alternative media projects.

Guillier told IPS that it was also important to change the way in which democratisation of the media had traditionally been perceived.

“It used to be thought that media democratisation was a process that would largely be carried out by international bodies, politicians and governments, but experience has shown that the expected results have not come from that quarter. Today, civil society is seen as fertile ground for those options to be put into practice,” he stated.

The speakers agreed on the fact that changes must be initiated from within civil society, so that they may eventually find political expression.

The Internet explosion is contributing to the creation of a more active citizenry, which will definitely have an impact in the world of politics, said Savio.

The challenge for the new generations of journalists is to use the advantages of new technology and develop their capacity to comprehend the new cultural realities, thus becoming persons who can facilitate more horizontal – rather than vertical – ways of doing things, said Guillier.

Other speakers at the seminar include Argentine journalist and writer Mempo Giardinelli, French journalist and former diplomat Pierre Kalfon, University of Paris 3 – La Sorbonne professor Divina Frau-Meigs, and sociologist and political scientist Valeria Betancourt, a specialist in information technology and communication at the Association for Progressive Communications (APC).

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