Key Issues in Global Communications

Jan Servaes

Two issues of journals and one book have recently revisited the issue of communication for development. The following article reviews them and concludes that all is not lost.

‘Communication has been a key element in the West's project of developing the Third World. In the one-and-a-half decades after Lerner's influential 1958 study of communication and development in the Middle East, communication researchers assumed that the introduction of media and certain types of

Colleen Roach

Tall and thin, P. Sainath looks like he is blessed with a rock-solid constitution. No doubt this comes in handy for travelling in what he once called the ‘eyeball popping’ heat of rural India, at times astride an elephant - the only way of reaching some of the villages he covers. Sainath (as he prefers to be called) is also a bit of an ascetic. He never touches alcohol, since he doesn't want to have his judgement clouded ‘even for a moment.’ Sobriety, along with a wicked sense of humour and an absolute commitment to his country's poor, have no doubt helped make Sainath what he is today: one of India's leading journalists.

Convocados por WACC-AL y en cooperación con ACCE, nos reunimos en Quito, Ecuador, entre los días 25 hasta el 29 de enero de 1999, en el marco del seminario ‘Iglesias, medios y estrategias de evangelización’, para reflexionar sobre nuestras prácticas de comunicación y estrategias de evangelización. Participamos comunicadores y comunicadoras, sacerdotes y pastores, investigadores y líderes de iglesias de los países latinoamericanos y centroamericanos de Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Perú, Bolivia, Brasil, Argentina, Chile y Ecuador. Dafne Sabanes y Carlos Valle, presidenta de la WACC-AL y Secretario General de WACC, respectivamente, nos acompañaron dinamizando nuestras reflexiones durante el encuentro.

Este seminario nos hizo sentir una vez más hermanos y hermanas que son de un mismo sentir, que sirven a un mismo Señor y que luchan por una misma causa.

Karol Jakubowicz

In the last issue of Media Development (1/1999) the author argued the case for the ongoing viability of public service broadcasting (PSB) in the face of changing economic and socio-political circumstances. The following article continues the debate by focusing on problems and some potential solutions.

It is probable that public service broadcasting will face serious problems in the Information Society. In fact, since the early 1990s, the situation has changed enough for at least one author to speak of a world-wide crisis in public broadcasting (Suich, 1997). He identifies the following aspects of this crisis:

How does a country recover from the devastating impact of forty years of civil war? What measures need to be taken to reassert and protect human rights and human dignity? On 24 April 1998, in the year of the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the long awaited report of the project Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (REMHI) was published in Guatemala. It documented and brought to public attention the human rights abuses of thirty-six years of political repression, focusing on the decade of the 1980s and on rural areas with indigenous populations. The testimonies of those who survived witnessed on behalf of those who did not. Of the publication of Guatemala: Nunca más (‘Guatemala: Never again’), Monsignor Próspero Penados del Barrio, Archbishop of Guatemala, wrote: ‘Whoever was directly or indirectly responsible for the suffering must read and interpret these findings as a forthright and categorical rejection by the people of Guatemala of the culture of violence.’ The following is a translation of Part 4 of the report, ‘The victims of the conflict’.

Marjan de Bruin

People concerned about the portrayal of gender through the mass media - the absence or marginalisation of female images and the simplifying and stereotyping of gender relations - have been involved in developing a set of guidelines, a policy that may be of use in improving media portrayal. The assumption is that policy is an important condition for such an improvement; that it could be ‘an effective guide to programme development, acquisition and scheduling’ (Canadian Association of Broadcasters). The following article examines the current situation in the Caribbean.

Jimena Felipe Beltrão

A relatively unknown part of the world for many people is the huge Amazon basin, itself set in the vast country now called Brazil. The following article explores the current media situation of the region, with particular emphasis on environmental concerns and the potential for democratic reform.

Shalini Venturelli

The terms of development have been radically configured in the past decade. A transformation in the structure of global communications has more to do with this, according to the author of the following article, than globalization as such, since the latter is in reality itself a product of the expansion, speed, power, integration, and institutionalization of new information networks.

Seán Ó Siochrú

Maybe all that that should worry NGOs about telecommunication is whether they can get a phone or Internet connection and at what cost. Indeed, these local questions are ultimately what telecommunication is all about, the ability to turn these tools to useful ends. But political decisions that determine whether these needs will be met are anything but local. The telecommunication sector is going through tumultuous change in all regions of the world. NGOs and civil society as a whole will not get the kind of communications they need, at affordable prices, simply by lobbying their local suppliers.

Instead, NGOs must engage with a number of key strategic policy issues, nationally and internationally, where decisions are taken affecting the communications environment for decades to come.

Armand Mattelart

‘Freedom exists only where intelligence and courage succeed in cutting into inevitability’ (from the correspondence between Roger Caillois and Victoria Ocampo, Paris-Buenos Aires, 1956).

It requires some courage, as the century draws to a close, to conceive of alternatives to the existing order and to persevere in raising the question of the democratisation of communication in all its ramifications. Many factors militate against such reflection as the following article reveals.