Our Media, Not Theirs by Robert W. McChesney

Author:Robert W. McChesney
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: non.fiction
ISBN: 9781609802820
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2011-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 2

Global Media and its Discontents

“Broadcasting is too important to the functioning of a democracy for decisions to be left entirely to the broadcasters.”

—TONY BENN, British parlimentarian

“Our democracy depends on the free flow of ideals and information. When that flow is blocked, and our access to information is controlled by the few and the wealthy, our ability to make informed choices suffers, as does our democracy. This is exactly what is happening as media conglomerates continue to increase their share of the communications market unfettered by government regulation or control … [A] healthy democracy demands an informed electorate. We need policies that limit media concentration and ensure a rich exchange of ideas. We believe that diversity of expression must be promoted through tax incentives to assist community groups, cooperatives, or entrepreneurs to invest in community media, and that newspaper owners should not also own broadcasting corporations.”

—Platform of Canada’s

New Democratic Party, 2001

“There cannot be a democratic country, democratic society without freedom of the press.”

—JOSE RAMOS-HORTA, Nobel Laureate,

Minister of Foreign Affairs for East Timor

AMERICA PUBLIC LIFE features little in the way of debate about the role a truly free and diverse media could play in shaping a truly free and diverse democracy. In other countries, however, media is treated as a core issue. Indeed, if there is a measure of the seriousness with which a nation ponders its potential to address fundamental issues, then that measure may well be found in the depth of its discussion about media and democracy.

Surely that is the case in East Timor, the Pacific island state that proudly bills itself, “The World’s Newest Democracy.” In August 2001, East Timor emerged from a quarter century of brutal repression at the hands of Indonesian military rulers and held a historic round of free elections for its Constituent Assembly. More than two dozen political parties jockeyed for position in a competition where there was a powerful sense the winners would not merely govern but would in fact define the scope and character of a freshly minted democracy.

In this election contest, issues of media and democracy were not abstractions. The Indonesian military had limited democratic discourse at every turn and, after the East Timorese voted overwhelmingly for independence in 1999, the offices of the region’s only daily newspaper were sacked and burned during a rampage by the Indonesian soldiers and militias allied with them. In East Timor, political leaders and citizens well understood that media was a serious political issue. The different parties developed detailed policy statements and platforms on issues of broadcast diversity, concentration of media ownership, and the role that the new government of East Timor ought to play in fostering the free flow of information and the open debate that is fundamental in a democracy. The party that swept those elections, FRETILIN (The Frente Revolucionaria do Timor Leset Independente), produced a manifesto, “Towards the Restoration of Independence and the Freedom of our People, “that touched on issues ranging from health care to housing to the role that the new nation would play in the world.

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