[WSIS CS-Plenary] Challenges for community radio in the 21st century

[AHM Bazlur Rahman]

Challenges for community radio in the 21st century
By: Arne Hintz

http://media.mcgill.ca/en/AMARC10_challenges

In a keynote speech to the AMARC10 congress in La Plata, Frank LaRue, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, dicussed a set of key challenges to freedom of expression which apply, particularly, to community media.

Censorship laws in many countries (including the North and West), he said, penalize freedom of expression. In this context he also rejected the criminalization of the unauthorized use of radio frequencies (or, 'pirate radio'). Secondly, physical violence against journalists is persistent around the globe, particularly violence against non-professionals from community radios, blogs and other grassroots media. Thirdly, he said that media concentration and the links between media power and political power (in countries such as Guatemala, Italy and elsewhere) reduces media pluralism. LaRue rejected limits to transmission power for community radio which assign these media a role as 'second-class media' and 'poor people's radio'. Finally, he pointed to increasing surveillance by state and private sectors.

His points were mirrored by Sergio Fernández Novoa, President of the World Council of News Agencies, who - despite representing mainstream media - offered a strong critique of the established communication system. He charged that freedom of the press is often mistaken as freedom of the enterprise, which contradicts the freedom of the majority of people to communicate and to speak out their truth. He said that pluralism and diversity does not exist in Latin America because of media ownership concentration, and he called for true democratization of the media and access to media, including frequencies as well as funding for community media. 

In a further keynote speech on Thursday, Manuel Chaparro reminded participants of the persistent social and economic problems that characterize the overall environment of community radio. Despite the recent "quantum leap in community radio recognition" through new laws in Argentina and elsewhere, the challenge remains how to democratize communication and how to deal with the striking contradictions that people are facing everywhere around the globe. He pointed out environmental destruction, wars for resources, the culture of waste, ethnocentricity, and the predominant concept of development which is oriented towards economic criteria, based on exploitation, and continues to divide rich and poor. He demanded to re-think notions of development fundamentally.

The challenge for community media remains, not least, in marginalization and fragmentation. Recent gains in the recognition of community media in national and international policy mean that, in the words of Oumar Seck Ndiaye from Senegal, "radios are now finding the place that they ought to have at the beginning". However, as Mario Lubetkin from Inter Press Service pointed out, the majority of alternative and community media worldwide mostly work in isolation, and he suggested that their social and political impact would increase significantly if they worked together and expanded as well as strengthened existing collaborations.

Wilna Quarmyne from Ghana concluded: "We cannot afford to remain 'alternative'. We represent the majority of the world population but we remain on the fringe." She criticized that community radio are too often "clones" of the public service and commercial media models, and she asked: "How can we develop a model that truly builds on the social capital of our communities?" 

------------------------------------------




Bazlu
_______________________
AHM. Bazlur Rahman-S21BR
Chief Executive Officer
Bangladesh NGOs Network for Radio and Communication (BNNRC)
[NGO in Special Consultative Status with the UN Economic and Social Council]
& 
Head, Community Radio Academy 
 
House: 13/1, Road: 2, Shaymoli, Dhaka-1207 
Post Box: 5095, Dhaka 1205 Bangladesh
 
Phone: 88-02-9130750, 88-02-9138501
Cell: 01711881647 Fax: 88-02-9138501-105
E-mail: ceo at bnnrc.net www.bnnrc.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman-new.greennet.org.uk/pipermail/plenary/attachments/20101127/f1c6e131/attachment.htm>