Coming up with alternatives: the World Social Forum, held in Porto Alegre, Brazil,
in January 2001.
© Dave Cutler/SIS, Paris
“Nothing
is won in advance because we’ll also have to be appealing, to win over hearts and
souls” |
The
Internet offers an unparalleled chance to spread an alternative to the news served
up by the mainstream media, the “second power” of globalization, affirmed the World
Social Forum in Porto Alegre
The organizers of the
World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, were expecting 2,000 people to attend
a debate on “another possible world” in the last week of January. To their surprise,
this “anti-Davos” attracted 5,000 fans. So how did the organizers of the forum, who
like to cast themselves as visionaries, explain their all too modest forecast? Why,
the Internet of course: they had set up a website one month before the Forum. Although
very basic, it spurred much greater interest than anticipated.
The unexpected turnout was one more feather in the cap of the anti-globalization
movement. Activists had already spent much time pleading for communication in general—and
the Internet in particular—to be considered a leading “issue in the fight against
neoliberalism.” As such, it deserved the same attention as the campaign for the Tobin
Tax, the cancellation of Third World debt or the control of world financial organizations.
If not, they argued, cyberspace would become their adversaries’ haven. According
to the conclusions of a Forum workshop on communication and citizenship, the Internet
has already been instrumental in shaping the economic and “ideological” revolution
that has marked the process of globalization.
An
ideological machine
Workshop participants launched a stinging indictment: “If the first power is economic
and financial, the second belongs to the media,” declared Ignacio Ramonet, director
of the monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, upon opening the workshop. “It is the ideological
machine of globalization.” Participants asserted that mainstream news “is essentially
transformed into a commodity…that does not obey any rule except that of the market.
It is uniform, one-dimensional and based on a single source.” Continuing the attack,
Ramonet asserted that the mainstream media strikes a tone that is “emotional,” “impressionistic,”
“sensationalist,” “rhetorical,” “simplistic” if not outright “infantile,” and which
is dominated by a quest for “immediacy.” In short, “the supreme criteria” of media
“mega-groups” is not truth but profit. “They’re selling consumers to their advertisers.”
The organizations attending Porto Alegre decided that it was high time to take on
this “ideological apparatus,” using the Internet as their chief weapon. One strategy
involves criticizing the news produced by the “mega groups”—criticism that must not
only be systematic, but should also be diffused as widely as possible. A leading
example is FAIR, the best known media watchdog in North America. The organization
aims to show how the structures of media conglomerates dictate content: the topics
and viewpoints developed are those of an economic and political elite because these
media belong to multinationals and are financed by others via advertising.
According to Seth Ackerman, one of FAIR’s staff members, the Internet boasts three
advantages over other forms of communication, including the group’s magazine quarterly
Extra!. First, it provides instant access to a wide range of alternative news sources,
allowing the network to pick up on important matters ignored by North American mainstream
media or to reveal a fine-tuned understanding of biased coverage. Secondly, FAIR
can dispatch to-the-minute analyses at minimal cost to subscribers. Thirdly, it can
involve subscribers in the organization’s campaigns by encouraging them to email
protest messages to media in FAIR’s spotlight. “Thanks to the Internet, our activities
made such a huge quantitative leap that they’ve also changed qualitatively,” says
Ackerman.
The second front that anti-globalization organizations are intent on opening is far
more ambitious. The goal is to make the Internet the vehicle for a stream of “counter
information” or “alternative information” aimed at a mass audience, far larger than
the narrow circle of activists that all other mediums charged with the same purpose—the
written press, radio and television—have managed to reach.
Diverse
sources, grand ambitions
“What’s really new about the Internet—and its chief asset—is that the entry ticket
is infinitely more affordable than for any other more traditional media,” says Jean-Pierre
Marthoz1 of Human Rights Watch. “The technical and political obstacles, such as getting
around potential censorship, and above all the financial ones, in terms of investment
and operating costs, bear no comparison with those faced by someone wishing to start
up a newspaper or a radio or TV station. Internet opens the way for a diversity of
voices that has been unheard of until now.” Antonio Martins, head of the Brazilian
edition of the Monde Diplomatique, adds that distribution channels are nearly unlimited
on the web, whereas hertzian wavelengths have to be shared among a limited number
of users.
In short, the Internet radically changes the information on offer because it can
harbour an unrivalled number of information sources. Given that one of the main criticisms
of media conglomerates is their “single source” character, this makes the Internet
all the more appealing says Henri Maler, of Acrimed (Action-critique-médias),
an NGO devoted to media monitoring. According to Maler, the rising costs of keeping
a staff of journalists up and running means news is based on an increasingly narrow
range of sources.
A first attempt at striking back was made last December in Bangalore, India, by some
30 journalists and writers. Their starting point was twofold: throughout the world,
they stated, “discouraged” or “disillusioned” professional journalists want to restore
some “nobility to their job, based on a social and democratic commitment.” They can’t
do so, however, because employers stand in the way of publishing “articles that the
public wants but never sees in print.” Their goal is hence “to enrich the public
information space… and create a critical mass of alternative information” through
“articles in the written press and broadcast reports that can contribute to a socio-economic,
cultural and political alternative” to globalization. The ambition is titanic: to
launch a news service on the Internet that would sell its products and succeed in
“becoming a counterweight to the mainstream media’s stereotyped information.” It
would be “a complementary channel,” rich in professionally packaged content.
Professionals
or not?
To “communicate well, you need a range of skills,” underlines Ramonet. “You can know
the truth and have no impact because you don’t know how to communicate. To think
that the truth will naturally impose itself is to take an arrogant and contemptuous
attitude towards citizens. The price of this is an absolute absence of communication.”
“A diversity of sources does not necessarily lead to an avalanche of quality information,
something which only results from a thorough process of checking, selecting and setting
in context to give meaning,” says Marthoz. “The process still requires the hand of
intermediaries who may not be journalists in the classical sense but ‘para-journalists’.”
He points to his organization’s site, which has become an almost indispensable source
of information for anyone wanting to keep abreast of human rights in the world. Some
10,000 cybernauts visit the site each day, according to Marthoz, because the information
placed online is collected by reliable experts and edited by seasoned experts in
communication.
If this type of alternative service is anything to go by, audience rhymes with credibility,
which in turn calls for some form of professional involvement. Not true, declares
Roberto Savio of the Inter Press service, which has been serving up alternative news
since 1964: this strategy risks running a lap behind current trends. Although IPS
relies on a network of journalists in over 100 countries and counts more than 30,000
NGO subscribers on its online service, Savio, a pioneer of alternative news, is getting
ready to step down and launch other ventures.
Civil society, he asserts, and youth in particular, reject outright all institutions
or outfits functioning along vertical lines. It follows that the attempt to use the
Internet as a carrier for a news counterweight while upholding the key position of
the journalist—producing information from on high for the public below—is doomed
to fail. It even rests on a deep contradiction, reproducing via Internet the same
vertical model characteristic of all other media even though the web offers the chance
to start a “communication society” operating horizontally.
The
Brazilian model
Brazil’s Rits (Information network for the third sector) is one such new communication
network that believes the Internet’s advent will allow the well-worn revolutionary
slogan “of giving a voice to the people” to come true at last. “Let the people who
live the story tell it,” declares the network. For a start, you do away with the
costs of financing a team of journalists. Red’s associates—some 200 organizations
from the “third sector” (neither public nor private)—exchange around 10,000 messages
a week and express themselves without any supervision or editorial advice. The only
protection is an ethical code that dictates what can be put on the site.
With or without professional intervention, whether raw or edited, can alternative
news find its place in the limelight simply because it’s alternative? Judging from
present trends, Ramonet is mildly optimistic. “As the overall education level rises,
that of the media is getting worse. There will come a time when the two will cross
over: more and more groups and social categories are dissatisfied with the media’s
infantile discourse.” While “nothing is won in advance, because we’ll also have to
be appealing, to win over hearts and souls,” Martins insists that once a site is
up and running, the Internet gives a chance to take on media conglomerates on equal
terms, an impossible task in the print press or broadcasting. Marthoz, however, is
more sceptical. “There’s no reason for the Internet to escape the newstand effect.
Just as the average reader first buys the most prominent publications at a newstand,
the average cybernaut will first go to the best-known portals (Yahoo!, Google etc).
But the latter select what information is posted, just like the gatekeepers of the
traditional media. While Internet offers room for a large number of information producers,
the tunnel effect is well and truly there on the receiving end.”
Marthoz also foresees another scenario. “Rather than think that the Internet will
become an authentic information counterweight, its main effect will stem from how
it influences the mainstream media. In this respect, there is no comparison with
what the alternative print press or broadcasting can do. An alternative site can
immediately be seen by the whole planet.” Proof of this is how the world’s press,
including the most prestigious publications, consulted the Human Rights Watch site
to keep up on the Chechnya war and even find “stories.”
The
force of the alternative
The “Internet mystique” does not convince Acrimed’s Maler “Making the web’s immense
democratic potential a reality does not depend chiefly on the tool itself,” he says.
“The space given by the public to alternative news, as opposed to commodified news,
will be a reflection of the alternative forces carrying it.” In other words, between
the Internet and anti-globalization activists, who’s the chicken and who’s the egg?
1. Jean-Pierre
Marthoz, European news director of Human Rights Watch and author of Et maintenant
le monde en bref (“And now the world in brief”), Editions Complexes, Brussels,
1999, and contributor to Human rights and the Internet, Orbicom/UNESCO, 1998,
as well as the UNESCO World Communciation Report 2000.
The organizers of the World Social Forum created a site at
www.forumsocialmundial.org/br; comprehensive reports
on the event can be found on the site of the Latin American Information Agency, at
www.alainet.org. For more information
on FAIR, see www.fair.org Other sites that keep
a close watch on the mainstream media include Media Channel (www.mediachannel.org) and ACRIMED for the
Francophone media (www.samizdat.net/acrimed/).
The Human Rights Watch site is at: www.hrw.org
Although the participants of the Bangalore meeting have not set up a site yet, major
alternative general news sites include One Word (www.oneworld.net) and Indymedia (www.indymedia.org).
For the Inter Press Service, see www.ips.org and for the Rede de
informaçóes para o tercero sector: www.rits.org/br |
