MAJORITY CENSORSHIP, MINORITY BROADCASTING

Amir Hassanpour
[First Draft]

INTRODUCTION

1. The broadcasting environment of the world consists of a diverse
multitude of broadcasting initiatives, both small and large, open and
clandestine, public and private, licensed and "pirate," national and
local, specialty and general, etc. The relationship among the
broadcasting undertakings of a nation or of the world is complex, one
of coexistence and conflict. They are the site of struggle among
individuals, communities, languages, nations, social classes, genders,
races, and other social and cultural formations.

2. Broadcasting is a highly complex social, economic, political,
ideological, cultural, and technologically-based institution. An
adequate understanding of broadcasting demands a holistic approach,
which does not reduce it to any of its many components.
Majority-minority relations are socially constructed; they cannot be
adequately understood if they are seen as a relationship of size and
quantity, which is itself socially constituted. This paper examines
the dynamics of exclusion and inclusion in the world broadcasting
system.

THE LANGUAGE OF EXCLUSION

3. Language is the most important means of communication. It is the
dominant mode of communication in daily life, in radio, print media,
and even television. In spite of the centrality of the visual image in
television, this medium uniquely combines visuality with both oral and
written varieties of language. Television is thus distinguished from
the print media by its predominantly aural-oral mode of language use,
while visuality separates it from the exclusively aural medium of
radio.

4. Contrary to a widely held assumption, language even in its
direct, face-to-face, mode of orality is not a neutral means of
communication. While face-to-face communication is not mediated by
technology, it is mediated by relations of power (between speaks and
hearers, e.g., parents and child, teachers and students) and by the
way power is engrained in the structure of language in its
phonology, morphology, lexical repertoire, and semantic and syntactic
systems. Power is also inscribed in language on other levels. For
instance, a language usually consists of numerous varieties rooted in
socio-economic differentiation (e.g., working class language, legal
language), gender (male and female languages), age (e.g., children's
language), race (e.g., Black English), geography (e.g., Texan
English), ethnicity, and other formations. Each variety may include
diverse styles with distinct phonological, lexical, semantic and even
syntactic features.

5. Orality is generally viewed as the "normal" or "natural" mode of
communication through language. Being face-to-face, interactive,
immediate and non-mediated (e.g. through writing, print or electronic
media), oral communication and the oral tradition are considered by
some theorists to be indispensable to a free and democratic life
(Innis 1971:190). Unlike oral communication, which is usually dialogic
and participatory, written language separates the writer and the
reader in space and time, and relies on the sense of seeing at the
expense of other senses. According to this perspective, audiovisual
media, especially television, restore the pre-print condition of
harmony of senses by using the ear and the eye and calling into play
the remaining senses of touch, smell and taste (McLuhan 1964). This
view is rejected by those who argue that the "mechanized" orality of
radio and television provides a one-way communication flow from the
broadcaster to the hearer or viewer, thus eliminating a fundamental
feature of the spoken language: its dialogue and interactivity.
Television, like writing, overcomes the barriers of space, reaches
millions of viewers, and contributes to the centralization of power
and knowledge (Innis 1971:80, 81).

6. Dichotomies such as standard/dialect or language/vernacular point
to aspects of the unequal distribution of linguistic power. Inequality
is engrained within a language, between language varieties, and among
the languages of a single country or the world. Born into an unequal
linguistic environment, television followed radio in adopting the
standard, national or official language, which is the main
communication medium of the nation-state. While the schools and the
print media established the written standard long before the advent of
broadcasting, radio and television assumed, more authoritatively than
the "pronouncing" dictionaries, the role of codifying and promoting
the spoken standard. In Britain, for example, broadcasters were
required until the 1960s to be fluent in the British standard (Lewis
1966:48-51) known as Received Pronunciation. In spite of increasing
tolerance for dialectalisms in many Western countries, news and other
information programming on the public and private national networks
continue to act as custodians of the standard language. Thus, the
broadcasting allows a minority of educated elites to impose their
language on the majority, who rarely speak in the standard variety in
informal contexts of communication.

7. Television and radio have actively participated in the exercise of
gender power through language. In the U.S., female voice, especially
its higher pitch, was marginalized for "lacking in the authority
needed for a convincing newscast," whereas male lower-pitched voices
were treated as "overly polished, ultrasophisticated" (Henneke and
Dumit 1959:19). Thus, in the 1950s, about ninety per cent of
commercial copy in the U.S. was "specifically written for the male
voice and personality" (Barnhart 1961:21). According to a British
announcer's handbook, women were not usually "considered suitable for
the sterner duties of newscasting, commentary work or, say, political
interviewing" because of their "voice, appearance and temperament"
(Lewis 1966:30). Thus, although men and women are equal in terms of
numerical strength, male political and linguistic domination, turned
the female population into a minority. By the 1970s, however,
television responded to the social movements of the previous decade
and gradually adopted a more egalitarian policy. Women appeared as
newscasters although male anchors still dominated the North American
screens in the mid-1990s. The 1979 edition of an American announcer's
manual added a chapter on "the new language," which recommended the
use of an inclusive language that respects racial, ethnic and gender
differences (Hyde 1979). 8. The languages of the world, estimated to
be between five to six thousand in number, have evolved as a "global
language order" or system characterized by increasing contact and a
hierarchy of power relations. About one-fifth of the 5,000 existing
languages are used by at least ten thousand speakers each, i.e. too
small to survive. Only about 200 are spoken by more than one million.
About sixty are spoken by ten millions or more, comprising 90 per cent
of the world's population. Twelve languages are spoken by one hundred
million or more, accounting for sixty percent of the world's
population (de Swaan 1991:310). Although Chinese is spoken by one
billion people, it is dwarfed by English, half a billion, in terms of
cultural power. Most of the world's languages remain unwritten while
half of them are, according to linguists, in danger of extinction; if
state policy was once responsible for language death, the electronic
media, including satellite television, are now seen as the main
destructive force (Haney 1995). Although broadcasting in the native
tongue is increasingly viewed as a communication right of every
citizen, the majority of languages, especially in developing
countries, have not been televised yet (Cormack 1993: 102). In Turkey,
where Turkish is the only official language, some twelve million Kurds
are constitutionally deprived of the right to broadcast in their
native tongue, Kurdish. Even listening to or watching transborder
programs in this language is considered an action against the
territorial integrity of the state (Skutnab-Kangas and Bucak 1994). In
countries where linguistic and communication rights are respected,
economic obstacles prevent multilingual broadcasting. In Ghana, for
example, there are over sixty languages or dialects, but in 1992 only
six out of 55 hours of weekly television air-time were devoted to
"local" languages; the rest was in English, the official language.
Television production could not satisfy local tastes and demands.
While the rural population did not afford the cost of a TV set, the
urban elite tuned to CNN (Anepe 1992).

9. Before the age of broadcasting, contact between languages was
primarily through either face-to-face or written communication.
Overcoming spatial barriers and the limitations of literacy, radio and
television have brought on-the-air languages within the reach of those
who afford the receiving equipment. However, contrary to a common
belief that access to broadcasting is easier than to print media,
small and minority languages have often been excluded by both radio
and television. Being multilingual and multiethnic, the great majority
of contemporary states seek national unity in part through a national
or official language. As a result, the states and their public
television systems either ignore linguistic diversity or actively
eliminate it. Private television is equally exclusionist when minority
audiences are not large enough to be profitably delivered to
advertisers, or if state policy proscribes multilingual minority
broadcasting (e.g., in Turkey). Even in Western Europe, indigenous
minority languages such as Welsh in Britain had to go through a
difficult struggle in order to access television (Tomos 1982). Both
the centralizing states and minorities realize that television confers
credibility and legitimacy on language. The use of a threatened
language at home and, even, at school does not ensure its survival any
more; language vitality depends increasingly on broadcasting (Howell,
Jr. 1986:196-97).

10. New technologies such as satellites, computers, cable and VCR have
radically changed the process of televisual production, transmission,
delivery and reception. Television is helping the further spread of
English as the dominant world language. This is in part due to the
globalization or transnationalizaion of the medium, which has for the
first time in history created audiences of the size of one billion
viewers for certain programs. Although the linguistic fragmentation of
the global audience is phenomenal, English language programs, mostly
produced in the United States and England, are popular throughout the
world. Television has accelerated the spread of English as a global
lingua franca. For instance, in Sweden where subtitling allows viewers
to listen to the original language, television has helped the further
spread of English. Also, since the United States is the most powerful
producer of entertainment and information, American English is
spreading at the expense of other standards of the language such as
Australian, British, Canadian, and Indian (Findahl 1989).

11. While some observers see in the new technologies the demise of
minority languages and cultures, others believe they empower them to
resist and survive. Cable television, for instance, has offered
opportunities for access to small and scattered minorities. Satellite
empowered the refugee and immigrant Kurdish community in Europe to
launch a daily program in their native tongue in 1995. Thus, unable to
enjoy self-rule in their homeland, they gained linguistic and cultural
sovereignty in the sky, beaming their programs to Kurdistan where the
language suffers from Turkey's harsh policy of linguicide. While this
is a dramatic achievement, other experiences, e.g. aboriginal
languages in Western countries (Riggins 1992), are mixed.

12. Truly empowering is television's potential to open a new door on
the prelingually deaf community. The World Federation of the Deaf in
Helsinki demands the official recognition of the sign language(s) used
by the deaf as one of each country's indigenous language. Television
is the main medium for promoting these languages, and providing
translated information from print and broadcast media (text in
Skutnab-Kangas and Phillipson 1994:400-12). It is possible to launch
channels in sign language. However, it is important to note that the
same technology is used by the more powerful states to promote their
linguistic and political presence among the less powerful. Thus, the
Islamic Republic of Iran's state-run radio was made available via
satellite to the sizable refugee population in North America in 1995,
and television was to follow soon.

Ø

 

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF EXCLUSION

13. Liberal, neoclassical, and neoconservative theorists look at the
state as the only regulator of power in politics, economy and culture.
They treat all state interference as censorship and propaganda.
Although they are aware of the power of the "invisible hand" of the
market, they refrain from viewing it as a more powerful regulation, as
a far more effective distribution of power in society.

14. Although the invisible hand of the market works in diverse ways,
the way it engages in the regulation of broadcasting power has been
adequately theorized. Dallas Smythe, a Canadian political economist of
communications, argued that private broadcasters, as capitalist
investors, do not produce programming. Programming, i.e. information
and entertainment, is offered (sometimes free, recently at an
affordable price) in order to produce audiences. Once the audience is
produced, it can be sold to advertiser. The larger the size of
audience, the bigger the advertising revenue. This theory of "audience
commodity" has been critiqued for its failure to account for the
"activism" and "resistance" of audiences. However, the job of this
theory is not to account for the complexity of media life. It is
rather a theorization of what the owners of every private broadcasting
station are ready to admit.

15. New communication technologies have allowed an unprecedented
fragmentation of audiences. However, the market is increasingly
packaging audiences of the size of one billion. The relationship is
thus dialectical. The largest audience is created in the midst of the
a most fragmented viewership.

16. In the developed capitalist economies and in countries which have
recently switched to an "open" or "free" market economy, the market is
allowed to concentrate its ownership of media. The 1996
Telecommunication Act of the United States, for example, aims at the
further deregulation of the broadcasting market, a policy which is
usually adopted in other countries, too.

THE TECHNOLOGIES OF EXCLUSION

17. It is often claimed that technological innovation has rendered the
concept "broadcasting" obsolete. We now have "narrowcasting,"
"datacasting," "netcasting" and "satcasting." We are in a post-mass
media and post-television world. Moreover, the Internet seems to
develop into what Bertolt Brecht called a "giant network of networks."
While a handful of media empires dominate (trans)national
broadcasting, small broadcasting initiatives continue to thrive in
late capitalist societies. For instance, "micro-radio" is making
progress in the U.S., though often in its "pirate" form (the number of
microstations was estimated between 200 to 400 in 1996). According to
a study, "micro-radio pioneers aren t interested in making money
with no commercials and little outside support those who choose to run
their own radio stations usually do so at a financial loss. They re
interested in using radio as a tool for establishing community-based
and non-corporate communications..." (Morgan 1997: 24).

18. Technology is now readily available for starting one s own
micro-radio station. Equipment kits are available on the World Wide
Web. In 1997 in the U.S., it cost $1,000 to buy a transmitter and
antenna; one also needed music equipment, a landlord either didn t
know or didn t care, and, preferably, a P.O. Box address and a direct
phone line. All of this has the semblance of illegality, but,
according to Morgan (1997: 25), "No one has ever gone to jail yet
--for pirating airwaves." However, the empowering role of new
technologies is dwarfed, here, by the disabling power structure of the
market and the state.

19. Even if all legal and economic constraints on the use of
micro-radio stations were removed, and thousands of stations could
bloom, the main question remains to be: Who speaks to whom? Would, for
instance, labour be able to speak to the whole population in the same
way the Wall Street talks, almost on an hourly basis, to the whole
nation and the whole world on CNN? Will minorities able to talk to the
majority? It is therefore still a struggle for audiences. If market
forces want to create audiences and sell them to advertisers and, by
doing so, also deliver them to the nation-state, minorities interested
in democratization of society would need audiences for dialogue, for
community building, and for the cause of democratization of politics
and society, maintaining the ecosystem, and promoting peace,
socialism, and solidarity.

THE STRUGGLE FOR RIGHTS

20. In modern states, individuals are treated as citizens entitled to
a diversity of rights. According to the liberal democratic tradition,
this regime of rights imposes considerable limits on the power of the
state over the citizens (Waldron, 1993, p. 575). Ironically, however,
it is the institution of the state that grants these rights. While the
state recognizes, constitutionalizes or guarantees such rights,
individuals only "exercise their rights" to the degree that the state
permits (Schneider, 1993, p. 508). Many poststructuralists and
postmodernists reject modernity s state-centered politics by pointing
to the advent of a radical rupture in governance, the regime of
rights, and citizenship. According to one account, there is a "growing
dispersion of the capacities of governance to agencies above and
below the nation state... States are losing their monopoly over who
governs in their territories; nation-states are becoming just one,
albeit vital, part of a division of labor in governance and the nature
of that division is no longer under their exclusive control" (Hirst,
1996, pp. 98, 99). According to another, Foucauldian, theorist of this
"new era" or "postmodern world order," the "facts of sovereignty and
territoriality as described by international law, then are becoming
transnational legalistic fictions. As the proliferating
sub/supranational nuclei of decentralized power now author(ize)
contra-governmentalistic law-unmaking and law-breaking within
uncertain territories, each sovereign finds itself on its own
territory constantly challenged from within and without" by divisive
forces such as "ethnic tribalism," "linguistic separatism," "religious
fundamentalism, pan-national racialism, or global environmentalism..."
(Luke, 1997, p. 8). In this actually existing "cyberspace," sovereign
territorial powers "cannot determine for themselves what laws will be,
for whom, and why" (p. 12). Modernity s "centered sovereignty" is
replaced by "decentred power centers, illegitimate law-making bodies,
unruly rule-setting agencies." Throughout the world, these
"decentralized power nuclei set the rules within their particular
domains of space, regions of operation, or communities of meaning
where the rulings of governmentalizing states are ineffective,
illegitimate, or powerless" (p. 14).
Other poststructuralists envision a "global civil society" in which
the actions of non-state actors allow the theorist to challenge the
representation of the state as "a pure presence and a sovereign
identity reflecting a coherent source of meaning" (Marden 1997, p.
51). Here, the main concern is not the loss, real or imagined, of
state sovereignty. The problematique is, rather, to deny the state
"a single coherent sovereign presence." This may, then, bring into
play "other modes of sovereign being besides the privileged figure
of the state." Once the irreducibility of the state is abandoned, it
will be possible to see alternative sources of sovereignty; closure
may give way to new openings (Ibid).

21. The map of rights drawn by poststructuralists seems quite
promising. However, not only the state is not withering away at the
pace suggested above, it is powerfully present (at least as far as
non-market actors are concerned), and its regulatory power has been
shifting to the market. This process began in fact long ago with the
coming to power of democratic states in Western Europe and North
America. The transfer of state power to the market is only
accelerating. It is a process of privatization of political rule the
transfer of power to an institution that is not accountable to the
citizen. Its power is both centred and decentred. It has been sold to
the citizen and often has been bought as the foundation and guarantee
of democratic life.

22. The regime of rights has been critiqued, by feminism, democratic
theory, Marxism and other theories, for granting equal rights without
guaranteeing the equal exercise of these rights by citizens who are
unequal in "reality." Citizens struggle for rights, they impose it on
the state, and the state grants them. However, economic, social,
political and cultural inequalities prevent citizens from exercising
their rights on an equal basis. This contradiction is not easy to
resolve within the framework of a market-based society. Still, we
should continue to struggle for communication rights, no matter how
abstract they may be. The struggle itself is a source of change, no
matter how limited it may be.

23. If in democratic states, the market is the main locus of
censorship and propaganda, in dictatorial regimes, dictatorship is
exercised primarily by the state. The case of Med-TV is a telling
story of the conflict between the emanicipatory powers of new
technologies and the combined dictatorship of the market and the
state.

A CASE STUDY: THE DIALECTICS OF CLOSURE AND OPENING

24. When Med-TV, the world's first and only Kurdish language satellite
television channel, was launched in March 1995, media watch groups and
human rights activists hailed it as "a defeat for political
censorship" and a pioneer of "broadcasting to ethnic groups without
homeland." A Kurdish newspaper called it "a media revolution... more
important than all our armed revolutions" and "a great historical
leap." On the other hand, even before it went on the air, Turkey,
denounced the channel as the voice of the "terrorist" Kurdistan
Workers Party (better known in its Kurdish initials, PKK), and
actively moved to silence it. Med-TV went on the air with a daily menu
of news, educational and entertainment programming. Although there is
no significant audiovisual repertoire in Kurdish, broadcasting time
was soon increased to six hours, and late 1997 to 18 hours a day. Some
of the programming is in Turkish and the language of the Assyrian
people who live in Kurdistan. Having been denied a public forum to
discuss Kurdish issues freely, viewers are fascinated by debates in
which, for the first time, Kurds from all parts of Kurdistan sit side
by side and examine their own political destinies. Although news
production is paralysed by the channel's lack of freedom to report
from the Middle East, it is an obvious alternative to the censored
reports in the media of Turkey and neighbouring countries. Indeed the
Kurds are not the only stateless nation with satellite TV. The
Aboriginal peoples of northern Canada, for instance, have had their
government financed satellite TV since the early 1980s. What
distinguishes Med-TV is a geopolitical space created by the entwining
of a complex web of local, regional and international power struggles.
Turkey or, rather, its predecessor the Ottoman empire, appropriated
the physical or geographic space of Kurdistan through military action,
and now claims it as a sacred and indivisible part of the Turkish
state. Clearly, the very definition of a sovereign state involves
first and foremost a physical space where state power can be
exercised. Unlike Canada where the First Nations (name widely used to
refer to Aboriginal peoples) are allowed to exercise some form of
self-rule, the Turkish state has chosen to eliminate every trace of
the original inhabitants of the land including banning the names Kurd
and Kurdistan, and replacing them by "mountain Turks" and "the
Southeast." In order to delink the Kurds from their geographical
space, Ankara uses, among other means, both military power and the
extensive Turkish language media network. The political system in
Turkey, as in Iran, Iraq and Syria, can be best described as etatism,
i.e., a regime in which the state is the ultimate power. In Turkey,
the army is viewed as a sacred national institution, which has "saved
democracy" three times by launching coups d'etat in 1960, 1971 and
1980. Thus, under conditions of etatism, a civil society capable of
checking the powers of the state has not been allowed to emerge. The
media do not function as a public sphere where dissident or
non-official ideas can be debated. The current constitution, drafted
by the military and amended in 1995, clearly bans any "thought or
consideration contrary to...Turkish historical and moral values, and
the nationalism, principles and reforms and modernization of
Ataturk..." A Turkish citizen is one who is a Turk. The racial and
ethnic definition of citizenship is a basis for punishing individuals
or institutions that claim a Kurdish or Armenian identity. Two
developments are, however, undermining the ability of Turkey to forge
a nation-state based on an indivisible Turkish racial, linguistic,
national and territorial identity. One is the formation of a sizable
Kurdish community in Europe due largely to the exclusion or
elimination policies of the states that rule over Kurdistan. The other
is the access of Europe's Kurdish community to satcasting. While
Ankara has been able to deny the Kurds communication rights within its
borders, it has failed to ban the airwaves coming from the sky. Med-TV
is undoing what the Turkish state has done for seven decades. Every
day, it brings into Kurdish homes a classroom setting where children
learn their native tongue; two newscasts which empower the viewers to
make Kurdish interpretations of major events; and cultural programming
which promotes Kurdish national identity on a scale never achieved by
the print media or radio; even more significantly, it airs Turkish
voices, journalists, artists, academics and political activists, who
demand a peaceful and democratic solution of the Kurdish demands for
self-rule. The airwaves from the sky not only evade but, in a powerful
way, tend to eliminate the international borders that have cut
Kurdistan into separate spaces. Thus, although the Turkish state and
the Kurds are worlds apart, they share one interpretation: Med-TV
amounts to Kurdish sovereignty in the sky; it is a historical leap to
sovereignty on the earth. It is not difficult, therefore, to account
for Turkey's repression of Med-TV. Once the channel went on the air,
Turkish police and gendarmes in Kurdistan began to smash satellite
dishes, arrest and intimidate viewers, dish sellers and installers of
the equipment. These forms of violence against the medium were not
effective, however. Jamming was done, for the first time in the
history of satellite broadcasting, when the PKK leader A. Ocalan was
scheduled to announce a cease-fire. In Europe, Turkey began a massive
diplomatic and espionage campaign in order to find out about the
financial and organizational make-up of the channel. Ankara pressured
the British government and the regulatory body in London to revoke the
broadcasting license; part of this was a letter writing campaign aimed
at harassing the ITC and forcing it into dumping Med-TV. Other actions
aimed at intimidating the businesses working with the channel: a bank
account was closed down; at least one lawyer of the Med Broadcasting
Inc resigned; a French satellite company refused to renew the contract
(April 30); this was followed by the unilateral breach of contract by
Portuguese and Polish satellite providers who forced the channel off
the air in July. Although the channel was able to resume broadcasting
in August, the worst came in September when police simultaneously
raided the Med-TV office in London and their main studios in Brussels.
Five staff members were detained, archival material and computers were
removed from the premises and the studio was closed down; although the
court hearing in Belgium failed to find any financial or other
malfeasance and the detainees were finally released in November, the
act damaged the channel's reputation, violated the linguistic and
communication rights of the Kurdish community including the right to
free expression guaranteed in the European Convention on Human Rights.
If Med-TV is a unique phenomenon in the age of "information society,"
so is its repression, which requires the combined forces of the state
(several European governments and Turkey) and the market (satellite
companies, banks, etc.). For Western powers, the security of Turkey, a
NATO member and their indispensable ally, is more vital than the
communication and linguistic rights of the Kurdish people. The
silencing of Med-TV will, however, question all the Western claims to
democracy and respect for fundamental rights such as the freedom of
expression and minority rights. To its credit, the ITC has refused to
give in to pressures from the British and Turkish governments, arguing
that Med-TV has not breached the British codes of neutrality in
broadcasting.

CONCLUSIONS

25. The surface of our planet is divided among some 200 states. This
space consists of thousands of minorities, which form a bright mosaic,
coloured by languages (about 6,000), ethnic groups, religions,
cultures, and races. The unequal distribution of power has led to
numerous cases of linguicide, ethnocide and genocide. These practices
continue rather than recede in both democratic and dictatorial states.
It is predicted that by the end of next century, about half of the
languages of the world would disappear. The two forces at work are the
state and the market, operating usually in tandem. Even when languages
are legally equal, they remain unequal in the marketplace. For
instance, while French is legally equal to English in Canada and is
the only official language of its predominantly francophone Qu'ebec
province, it is dwarfed by the cultural and economic power of English.
If Kurdish is threatened by the dictatorship of the state, French, one
of the world s most prestigious languages, is threatened by the
dictatorship of the market.

26. Underrating the powers of the market and the state does not
enhance the struggle for maintaining the mosaic of the world s
minorities. The extremist position in poststructuralism totalizes
"openings" by ignoring "closures." A more constructive approach, at
least for communication and language rights activists, is to see the
dialectics of opening and closure. The evolving world communication
order is both a prison-house and sanctuary of minorities and
languages. On May 15, Med-TV celebrates its third anniversary. It is a
minority station which has turned into a majority one. It is, at the
same time, minority and majority; it operates as the "national"
television of a non-state nation. The turbulent short life of this
channel dramatizes the coexistence and conflict of the opposites. The
existence of a regime of communication rights in Europe, although
still limited and incomplete, has been indispensable in its survival.
Neither law nor right is a neutral regulator of power relations. They
are themselves sites of power. Rights can enhance the power of the
powerful or confer power on the powerless. It all depends on those who
make rights by demanding them. We as citizens of individual nations
and citizens of the world need to struggle for communication rights
that empower the powerless. We need communication rights that
contribute to the democratization of the communication and society.

 

Appeared first in Videaz4  (Conference: The Right to Communicate and the Communication of Rights. May 1998, Week 2) in two parts:

http://commposite.uqam.ca/videaz/wg4/0028.html

http://commposite.uqam.ca/videaz/wg4/0029.html