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MEDIA: A New Glasnost for Linking Citizens and Power in Globalised Era

Sabina Zaccaro

VENICE, Italy, Jun 24 2006 (IPS) - Glasnost – meaning “openness”, from the Russian words for “public” and “voice” – may be a throwback to the 1980s, but it fits the challenge of communication the today’s globalised world.

Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the former Soviet Union and the 1990 Nobel Peace laureate, is well aware of how his policy gave rise to both hope and fear, and how it continues to ring true for media, power and civil society today.

The issue was on the table of a two-day international seminar, organised by the World Political Forum – the global intellectual group founded by Gorbachev to monitor the key processes of globalisation – in cooperation with the Italian province of Venice. Global experts, journalists and media professionals discussed the crucial role of the media, which stand “between citizens and power”.

In that “between” position, are the media a link or an obstacle for civil society and the political arena?

“At the very critical stage of ‘perestroika’ (restructuring of the Soviet economy), the negative feelings and strong attacks from the press were always up in the agenda of every single cabinet: they are pressing us, they are chasing us! Everybody was so worried about that”, Gorbachev told IPS.

“Journalists vehemently kept asking us to uncover the whole worse side of the regime right away”, he continued. “But in the vision of perestroika, people could not repudiate their history at once and all the things their fathers and grandfathers believed in and had fought for in favour of the many.”

Glasnost, a mantra of Gorbachev’s perestroika, was intended to educate people about social and political responsibility, he said. “Civil society needed to be brought by the hand to understand this transitional phase gradually. But media just rushed out and carried on their own way, thus making a big mistake,” said the former Soviet president.

This was a clear demonstration of how the media, civil society and power interrelations can shift the course of history. Looking at more recent times, U.S. President George W. Bush’s push to invade Iraq is a very telling case. The debate now is about the acquiescence of the U.S. media, and how it failed to challenge the Bush administration’s justifications for the war – such as weapons of mass destruction, which have yet to be found, more than three years after the U.S.-led invasion.

History is affected both by what media say and what they don’t say.

“Something is not working in today’s relationship between citizens and the media, and between citizens and power, if citizens become so suspicious towards both counterparts and do not fully trust anymore what they say,” said Ignacio Ramonet, editor-in-chief of Le Monde Diplomatique.

This loss of public confidence in the media comes from information insecurity, which is a paradox in the age of a hyper-communicating society, and an internal contradiction in mature democracies, agreed seminar participants. How can the media-citizens-power dynamic be reshaped?

“It’s a troubled question. Freedom of speech and information is a kind of dogma, but people believe that freedom is an excuse worthy of organising a democracy, and in their view is not respected either by media, or by power,” Ramonet concluded.

Today’s biggest and strongest media players grew through a progressive process of mergers and consolidations, and they come under fire for putting profitability and shareholders expectations ahead of civic responsibility. Big media are themselves part of the economic globalisation system, and are seen as supporting the status quo.

Meanwhile, media observers have started to look at the 64 million rapidly proliferating bloggers – an estimated 17 percent of young people in the United States maintain their own web logs, or blogs, updating their Internet sites regularly with their own content – as a challenger to the media giants and as the grassroots behind the “information guerrilla”.

Every second a new “journalist” is born through a blog, this change of paradigm. Neverthless, this new flow of information has its own implications that highlight traditional media’s virtues.

“The force of the blogging community is in the numbers,” Bernard Guetta, editorialist for the French L’Express, told IPS. “Being impressively copious, they can have the strongest impact on public opinion, as happened last year in France when citizens were called to the polls to accept or reject the European Union constitution,” Guetta said. In that case, the EU constitution was rejected, at least in part the result of the massive clamour on the web.

“But there are cases of ‘extremely false’ information running through the web. And that’s by reason of the total absence of filters,” Guetta continued. “I’m talking about journalists’ self-filters or those awakened by the editor, for example. Well, it is true that within the traditional press, filters often don’t work at all, but at least they exist,” he said.

According to John Lloyd, editorialist for the Financial Times, there are options that could help traditional media to revamp. “Like saving reporting, as a first draft of history. And refraining from merely disdaining politicians while making citizens informed of the specific constraints politicians have to cope with in their sometimes sincere effort to serve civil society.”