African
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Biennial Congress
Cape Town
November 1996
The People's Communication Charter
An International Covenant of Standards
A Critical Appraisal
By
Keyan G Tomaselli
Centre for Cultural and Media Studies
E-mail: tomasell@mtb.und.ac.za
and
Arnold Shepperson
Centre for Cultural and media Studies
University of Natal
Durban 4041
South Africa
E-mail: Sheppers@mtb.und.ac.za
Fax: + 27-31-260-1519
November 1996
Acknowledgements
The senior author thanks the Natal University Research Fund for a grant to participate in the Founding Convention of the Cultural Environment Movement (CEM), and to CEM for an accommodation grant. He is also a member of the CEM Board of Directors.
The originators of The People's Communication Charter are the Centre for Communication and Human Rights (The Netherlands), the Third World Network (Malaysia), the AMARC World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (Peru/Canada), and the Cultural Environment Movement (USA).
The Founding Convention of the Cultural Environment Movement (CEM), meeting in St. Louis on March 17, 1996, ratified the Charter and referred it to a committee for refinement. The final version attached reflects the comments, interests and concerns of CEM and the other Signatories. It has also been informed by the international agreements listed below and the statements and publication noted in the Bibliography.
Media - the belly of the Beast
Some speakers at the CEM launch identified the 'enemy' - the transnational media corporations - as 'the beast'. They correctly point put that this beast is global, owned by rapacious American shareholders, ex-Australians and proxy Japanese. The beast may indeed have multiple passports, but the issuing authority is 'Hollywood' - and its shield is the US State Department. Governments act on behalf of national interests, in the context of the global function of capital. The corporate headquarters of transnational media businesses are found mostly in the USA. The US operates like a feudal lord, providing sanctuary to insatiable corporations whose eager plundering of he world's resources would not be so easily tolerated in other First World countries. Shareholders in the US are the world's most fickle - and amongst its most greedy. Self-aggrandising avarice has become institutionalised in both state and corporate policy.
Robert McChesney (1996:15) notes of cultural studies, once a field of inquiry geared to democratic outcomes, that the field has been coopted by the academic 'market' itself in the form of uncritical apostles of the postmodernist turn in cultural studies. Markets, he adds,
... do not respect community or traditions, only profit and personal gain. Markets encourage some of the worst traits of humanity and discourage some of our best traits, including selflessness and compassion ... In fact, markets are destroying families and communities faster than beef production is laying waste the Amazon rainforest.
The essence of McChesney's argument is that so-called 'post-modern cultural studies practitioners are the new capitalist ideologues, trying to persuade the oppressed that they are not oppressed because they might engage in subversive 'readings' of TV and other media. This explanation ignores class dynamics and therefore must contribute to the opacity of capitalism.
The post-modern counter-argument contests the notion that the market is authoritarian. Scholars of this position argue that the market is in fact a site where the 'masses' can contest with the bosses on economic matters; it is a fight without a predetermined outcome, it is "an expansive popular system" (McRobbie in Grossberg 1995). The short time it took for socialists and communists in post-apartheid South Africa to embourgeoisify themselves indeed attests to the power of the market to coopt those previously prepared to die for their beliefs. Class analysis has been forgotten in the scramble towards conspicuous consumption.
The passing of the US Telecommunication Act in February 1996 imposes market criteria alone on the US media environment. All previous restrictions on mergers and cross-ownership, public participation and representation, have been annulled. The business scramble will ultimately annihilate US public media currently outside of the market, thus commercialising and debasing democracy itself. As an early version of the Viewer's Declaration of Independence put it:
Channels proliferate and new technologies pervade home and office while mergers and bottom-line pressures shrink creative alternatives, reduce diversity of content, and concentrate control in a few hands. Media blend into an integrated communication structure that transcends boundaries and constrains life's choices as the degradation of the physical environment limits life's chances.
The Viewer's Declaration, finally released in August 1996 offers a way of empowering communities, parents and children, religious institutions and civic organisations, with regard to media content and programming. The market cannot do this as it is purely an abstract postulate, a 'force' which organises consumers into consumptive units. Rather, the Declaration argues that consumers need to organise the market - not only through conferring legitimacy on what they consume, but through politics which through popular and systematic organisation shifts the balance of power towards, and facilitates cultural agency for, ordinary people who wish to reclaim the right to make meaning within a late capitalist era characterised by an ecstasy of consumption.
CEM affiliates ask the question: 'Who tells the stories today?' Our children are born into homes in which the dominant story-tellers are a small group of global conglomerates that have something to sell.
CEM was born to build new mechanisms of independent citizen initiative and participation in cultural decision-making.
The Liberating Alternative
As a "liberating alternative", CEM is a coalition of 130 organizations in the USA and 57 other countries. The Launch in March 1996 investigated:
* moral and ethical issues relating to depictions of unnecessary violence in the media, especially on TV;
* issues of regulation and privatisation of the electronic media, with reference to public access and accountability;
* the relationship between global ownership and violence-driven images. Such narratives travel more easily and cheaply than other genres. Will the 'V' chip (which can censor violence) to be built into all US TV sets from 1997 really make any difference?
CEM also:
* identified strategies on how to empower parental authority over children's programming in an age when children know more about how to manipulate technology than do their parents. How to replace 'stories that sell' with 'stories that tell' underlined an imperative to restore the function of storytelling to the cultural, family, religious and civic domains;
* discussed ways of opposing the glorification of drugs, alcohol and tobacco and the stereotypical media representation of women, blacks and other 'minorities'.
These questions backgrounded activities and working groups which recuperated oral story-telling, music, small group communication, dance and video, and interfaith forms of prayer, as means of engaging transnational media. The US stands almost alone in failing to have developed policy on such issues. In South Africa, while cigarette adverts are not accepted by either M-Net or SABC-TV, they continue to pull in millions of rands a year for radio. And then there are the 'sponsorships' like the Rothman's July, the Gunston 500, the Benson and Hedges music events, and so on, all broadcast on TV and radio.
The Relevance of the Charter for South Africa
We examine The Charter: a) within our studies of Philosophy; and b) our identities as South Africans living in a different context, where public service broadcasting remains a social value, and where violence-driven US TV programming has been on the retreat since the empowerment of agencies of civil society to impact programming and commissioning decisions of the national broadcaster.
Our responses to The Charter thus reflect this different location and experience. The Charter makes explicit the very political contradictions at the heart of present socio-economic strategies within the Group of 7, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, World Trade Organisation, and other transnational groups within the US ambit. The comments below therefore draw on our understanding of US issues and discourses, highlighting what we see as lacunae in US democratic discourse. We are also aware that the comment below may jar in some way with certain theories on the relation between media and certain kinds of behaviour, found more broadly within the 'cultivation' thesis. This holds that the media cultivate audiences into particular behaviours and world views and that the source of social reference for our children is no longer traditional institutions like the family, religious institutions or the schools, but the media.
We can certainly live with broad statements which argue that media do shape attitudes and thereafter behaviour, over long periods of time. But these attitudes and behaviour also result from the complex interplay by individuals with other social, political, economic and historical trajectories. In other words, a charter which implicates these constraints in the shaping of values and attitudes is necessary. These arguments are contained in the Charter's identification of big business control of the media industries.
We support the right of NGOs like CEM to draw attention to the statistical disparities that may exist between society and its representation of different constituencies and actions in the media vis-a-vis the actual demographics of media production, imaging (eg. numbers of murders vis-a-vis abusive sexual behaviour, and so on, etc.) In fact, The Charter positively calls for a constant monitoring of representivity in the media reflecting the actual distributions and values of the audiences at which is it is targeted. As audiences we have this right. This kind of research also stimulates public debate on ethical issues regarding media representation, and whatever impacts the media have on society or groups within it.
1. The Problematisation of Culture
The Charter seems to oscillate between two fundamentally different conceptions of culture. On the one hand, there is an identification of culture with 'media'. This follows certain trends in US thought, particularly in the light of the history of critical communications studies (Hardt, 1993), in which 'cultural studies' has become synonymous with 'communications studies'. On the other hand, the document also draws on a literary-critical paradigm in which culture is identified with 'stories'. While this has greater anthropological and ethnological authority for one approach to culture as a problem, it fails to address the actual breadth of ethnographic and anthropological study of cultures.
The conflation of culture with media seems to follow the authoritative but largely unprovable tenet that watching violence on the screen somehow has a causal relation with viewers' potentially violent behaviour. In this case, the political potential of the statement is nullified outright: for every case study linking social violence to media depictions of violence, a dozen others will be produced showing either the opposite, or no connection. For the statement to have real cultural clout, it needs to problematise the relation between permissions for violence inherent in the Bill of Rights (the right to bear arms comes immediately to the non-American mind) in terms of the actual influences and constraints these permissions place on the environment in which children grow up away from the media.
Similarly, the relationship between consumer industries like the Tobacco conglomerates and the junk-food giants has to be seen in wider terms than the way in which the electronic media carry their advertising messages. In social and public spaces (shopping malls and streets; schools) children encounter not just images of these commodities, but also their actual purveyors and users: how does a civil government right like the freedom to choose coexist with the political government right to a protected 'principle of fair profit' when people's long-term health is at stake?
At the most general level, then, the statement has to articulate the wider problematic where culture is a political issue, both in its history and its present-day realisations. In this case, the problem lies in the somewhat ambivalent way in which Rights are bandied about.
In a society where weapons are a right (as in the USA), it is likely that violence will occur anyway. This is exacerbated by the frontier mentality and common sense arguments about the rights of individual security vis-a-vis the rights of 'the community'. These values derived from the way that colonial histories played out in the USA. South Africa has a different inflection on this history and the rights and values that have come down to the present. The same can be said of each and every other society. So the problem of writing a UNIVERSAL declaration becomes less easy.
2. The Problematisation of Right
The Charter obviously draws on the civil government model of right enshrined in the US Constitution, and in the Universal Declaration. In general, this makes sense given that the document originates in the US. However, the document also makes an implicit appeal to the conception of right based on the model of political government. In Articles 7 and 8, the demand is made that the state should protect, impose penalties, and so on. This contradicts the analytic freedom associated with the 'natural Man' of John Locke's Two Treatises on Civil Government, which is the theoretical origin of the civil government paradigm. The power of the state to impose on activity is specifically a feature of Thomas Hobbes's model of political society, which is based on a radically different 'natural Man' posited in the Leviathan.
From the point of view of culture and right, this contradiction is clearest in Article 9: the right of protection of cultural space and identity is an ex post facto right defined by some 'cultural' body which pre-exists individuals. This therefore assumes that culture is possessed of some body which imposes itself on the growing individual, and therefore passes or fails individuals according to their agreement or otherwise with the dictates of this body. The explicit outcome of this is Bosnia, Justus Township in the USA, and Rwanda. The relativisation of culture to itself cannot protect people in the form of a right, from other people whose cultural claim is backed up by armoured vehicles.
This particular problem is not just specific to this document. It appears throughout the latter history of rights-based politics, and is starkly drawn out in Arendt's The Burden of Our Time (1951). From the point of view of US experience, the issue is further muddied by the rise of the post-Keynesian federal state: the tradition of civil government had to be extended because of its stress on individual achievement, which had not 'operated' to correct the Great Depression. The problem remains cultural in the sense that the 'political anthropology' constituting the 'Men' of civil and political government are mutually exclusive, ahistorical, and plainly false. In general, this ambiguity as found in Article 9 seems to me to be a fatal one: the document could serve the Isolationist Right far better than the broader group who are genuinely concerned about a better global situation. As with apartheid, when is the right to cultural protection an infringement on the political and civil rights of others? This may be an insurmountable problem. How to rewrite this Article is the problem. We have to draw the attention of civil and political society to the ambiguous theoretical origins to the concept of Right. And at the same time it should return attention to the actual everyday nature of cultural experience in a global post-national context.
3. People have the right to protect their cultural identity.
Article 8 on cultural identity and cultural space and heritage raise crucial questions of 'whose identity at what cost'? How is cultural identity to be protected? Who decides? By what mechanism? Apartheid, for example, was declared a crime against humanity, as was ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, both of which expressly claimed protection of cultural authenticity. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia is another example, in his murderous reign to create non-bourgeois cultural values. The Charter negotiates these questions by making reference to the human rights of others. This necessarily proscribes certain kinds of violent behaviours.
People's right to the protection of their cultural space .... The two conceptions of right are in conflict here. This right arises from political government theory, while the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on which The Charter is drawn, is explicitly based on a theory of civil government rights. This problem is what keeps lawyers rich because the minute one makes any claim based on political protection the Bill of Rights automatically opposes it from a civil point of view. Conversely, civil claims are equally validly opposed on grounds of political rights enshrined in class or cultural or other separationist concepts.
4. Cyberspace
We Suggested that an extra precision be brought to 'cyberspace' (Article 12). We argued that it should be defined as a mystification of the sum total of the available hard-drive space connected into the Internet at any one time. By this means the focus can be expanded to include equitable access to applications as well as 'information'.
5. Implementation
On Article 18, we suggested that the action agenda focus on monitoring be widened from cultural indicator analysis, which provides the empirical foundation to the CEM initiative, to that of cross-ownership between media corporations and interest groups like tobacco, arms, junk-food and so on.
Conclusion
Cultural studies derived from contexts of struggle and empowerment. It is an extraordinary conclusion that the ability to subversively decode a TV image is now thought by some scholars to constitute resistance activity. Certainly, this is a first step, but struggle relies on organisation, on change and on public accountability, by those who have the rights to use a public resource (the frequency spectrum) or other kind of licensed transmission technology. The Peoples Charter and the Viewer's Declaration of Independence, for all the difficulties of application across different societies, cultures and value systems, are a clear manifestation of a growing community of interest, of an organic social movement, and of a force to be reckoned with by the multinational TV companies especially. The audience, upon which these companies rely for their profits, is fighting back. This is an organised movement working for fundamental social change across the world.
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