Viewer's Declaration of Independence

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

•That all persons are endowed with the right to live in a cultural environment that is respectful of their humanity and supportive of their potential.

•That all children are endowed with the right to grow up in a cultural environment that fosters responsibility, trust, and community rather than force, fear, and violence.

•That when the cultural environment becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter it.

Such is the necessity that constrains us. Let the world hear the long train of injuries and usurpations that compel us to reclaim our rights and take an active role in the shaping of our common cultural environment.

Humans live and learn by stories. Scotch patriot Andrew Fletcher once said, 'If one were permitted to make all the ballads, one need not care who should make the laws of a nation.' Today our 'ballads' - the myths and stories of our culture - are no longer hand-crafted, home-made, community-inspired. They are no longer told by families, schools of churches. They are the products of a complex mass production and marketing process. Our children are born into a cultural environment provided by a small group of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell but a great deal to sell.

This radical transformation of our cultural environment has changed the way we employ creative talent, raise our children, and manage our affairs. Communication channels proliferate but technologies converge and media merge. Consolidation of ownership denies entry to newcomers, drives independents out of the mainstream, and reduces diversity of content. Media blend into a seamless homogenised cultural environment that constrains life's choices as much as the degradation of the physical environment limits life's chances.

This change did not come about spontaneously or after thoughtful deliberation. It was imposed on an uninformed public. It is enshrined in legislation rushed through Congress without any opportunity for public scrutiny or debate about its consequences and world-wide fallout. The airways, a global commons, have been given away to media empires responsible to no one but their stockholders.

In exchange for that give-away, we are told, we get 'free' entertainment and news. But in truth, we pay dearly for both, and we pay both as consumers and as citizens. The price of soap we buy includes a surcharge for the commercials that bring us the 'soap opera'. We pay when we wash, not when we watch. And we pay even if we do not watch. We have no choice but to pay that levy in the price of every advertised product or service we buy, and to pay for the way of life it promotes, whether we like it or not. This is taxation without representation.

Adding insult to injury is the second give-away: advertising expenditures of some fifty billion dollars a year are a tax-deductible business expense. Money diverted from the public treasury pays for an invisible, unelected, unaccountable, private Ministry of Culture making public policy behind closed doors. All others, those who own no media, are excluded from meaningful participation in mainstream cultural decision-making.

The human consequences are far-reaching. They include cults of media violence that desensitize, terrorize, brutalize and paralyze; promotion of unhealthy practices that pollute, drug, hurt, poison, and kill thousands every day; portrayals that dehumanize, stereotype, marginalize and stigmatize women, racial and ethnic groups, gays and lesbians, ageing, disabled and psychologically labelled persons and others outside the mainstream.

These distortions of the democratic process divert attention from the basic needs and aspirations of people. They conceal the drift toward ecological suicide; the silent crumbling of our vital infrastructure; the cruel neglect of children, poor people, and other vulnerable populations; invasions of privacy at home and in the workplace; the growing inequalities of wealth and opportunity; the profits made from throwing millions of people on the scrapheap of the unemployed, the commercialization of the classroom, and the downgrading of education and the arts.

Global marketing formulas, imposed on media workers and foisted on the children of the world, colonize, monopolize and homogenize cultures everywhere. Technocratic fantasies mask social realities and further widen the gaps between the information rich and the information poor.

Repeated protests and petitions have been ignored or dismissed as 'censorship' by the media magnates - who alone have the power to suppress and censor. There is no historical precedent, constitutional protection or legislative blueprint to counter the rush toward total control and the repressive direction the 'culture wars' are taking us.

We, therefore, declare our independence from a system that has drifted out of democratic reach. We offer the liberating alternative: an independent citizen voice in cultural policy-making, working for the creation of a free, diverse and responsible cultural environment for us and our children.

This Declaration originated at the Founding Convention of the Cultural Environment Movement in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, in March 1996. It is published in Media Development as a draft for comments and suggestions. Send to: CEM, P.O. Box 31847, Philadelphia, PA 19104, or fax to (1) 215 387 1560, or post an Internet message to bmosley@libertynet.org, or call (1) 215 387 8034.