Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

150 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
‘national’ and ‘local’ culture. We have argued earlier that the issue of
national sovereignty cloaked ‘internal’ injustices within Third World societies,
just as the Fordist social contract failed to distinguish gender and
racial discrimination. In both the North and the South, feminist groups
along with a variety of ‘new’ and transformed social movements have challenged
the role of states to represent what is accepted as public interest.
In the field of global communication policy, we see that as the majority of
Southern states were signing on to the new terms of the neoliberal information
economy in the 1990s, it was Northern-based civil society organizations
that began to formulate an oppositional humanitarian agenda.
Calabrese has argued that the ‘legacy’ of the MacBride Commission
has engaged ‘people’s’ movements in order to ‘stimulate support for a new
global constitutionalism aimed at establishing social and cultural policies
that would parallel the already well-developed efforts to constitutionalise
global market principles’ (Calabrese 1999: 272). The CRIS campaign,
which has coordinated an official civil society voice in the WSIS process,
reinforced the right to communicate as a foundation for debates about
social justice:
Our vision of the Information Society is grounded in the Right to
Communicate, as a means to enhance human rights and to strengthen
the social, economic and cultural lives of people and communities. The
information society that interests us is one that is based on principles of
transparency, diversity, participation and social and economic justice,
and inspired by equitable gender, cultural and regional perspectives.
(http://www.crisinfo.org/content/view/full/79)
This statement clarifies the continuities and ruptures from the social justice
vision of the earlier NWICO era. The redistributive focus emphasizes
open public communication and equitable access, while the claims
for recognition displaces the earlier emphasis on the role of the nationstate,
and instead focuses on the cultural autonomy of communities and
the human right to communicate.
Calabrese has argued that at the ‘core’ of the ‘movement lies the widespread
recognition that the media are profoundly essential to the fulfilment
of human needs and the realization of human dignity in the
modern world’ (Calabrese 2004). Advocates of the CRIS campaign have
argued that their more expansive articulation of the human right to communicate
attempts to overcome the narrow and legalistic rendering of
the individual right to the freedom of information (Hamelink 2003).
In practice, however, we argue that the ‘transcultural resonance’ (Keck
and Sikkink 1998) of the narrower claims for recognition without redistribution
would prevail in the WSIS process, in some ways serving as