[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about the power of the media and the need for claim holders to counter it. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
As people are bombarded with irrelevant information, they must understand that the real context of what they are bombarded with is power (Alex Hammer)
–The challenge thus is to, first, have claim holders acquire a critical perspective on the existing power structures and how they deceivingly influence them.
The ground strategy is to build counterpower
1. The effort must include a two-way communication with feminist, popular, youth and first peoples organizations given the need to reflect the experiences of historically marginalized communities and their struggles against oppression. To achieve this, we must prioritize the incorporation of voices and cosmovisions of these communities. Breaking the Northern-led dominant narrative, that is mainly English-language-based and human rights-blind, is another must. Communications must be made a vehicle with key messages in non-colonial languages, using new means including (community) radio and all sources of multimedia formats, i.e., putting a face to the numbers so that popular media keep talking about holding the human rights (HR) violators accountable.
2. In other words, these media must not limit themselves to documenting and amplifying voices of the most affected communities, but also be used to connect people’s dialogues and struggles in their fight against ‘the diabolically astute’ corporate power (Fred Spielberg) –and, these days, against multistakeholderism.* Only this will break the walls of the corporate ecochamber.
*: Six fundamental challenges presented by multistakeholderism to multilateralism and G77 governments: (a) an erosion of sovereignty; (b) the outsourcing of global governance; (c) a decline in accountability and trust in the international community; (d) a shift in implementation from OECD governments to TNCs based in OECD countries; (e) a narrowing of the range of policy directions to those that are compatible with a commercial return; and (f) a corruption of diplomatic language by masking the legitimate difference in governance actors as ‘equivalent stakeholders’. (Harris Gleckman)
3. The messages must show that these communities are agents of their own change and their own rights. And for this to succeed, alternative media must be used in ‘a more popular format’ actually directly countering the prevailing hegemonic governance, as well as the host of obsolete and dismal techno-academic analyses. Moreover, these media must also denounce the hegemonic position and deceitful influence of particular countries in the media designed to dupe us.**
**: Italians, it is said, are given to a perspective on politics that they call ‘dietrismo’. Dietro means behind, and dietrismo means a conviction becomes habitual that what you see and hear is designed to hide what actually is. This is done by powers operating behind a curtain that divides the world into a stage and a backstage –the latter being where the real action is, the former where it is purposely mispresented. You read something, or hear about it on the radio or on TV, and as a well-trained dietrista you wonder, not so much about what you are being told, but why you are being told it, and why now. (Wolfgang Streeck) Be a dietrista! …and do not only wonder, do something!
4. Television news organizations, just one of the culprits, rebel against any attempt to revise the legal status of the media and continue to lead the fiercest attacks in defense of ‘their freedom of expression’ –and, of course, their commercial interests! Analyzing the information aired by the main television news programs, it is proven that the pattern of behavior of the owners of the particular TV networks is to systematically and consistently give us an ‘interpreted’ version of the truth, and, therefore, forego the most elementary journalistic ethics: Their analyses and editorializing present partial and distorted information, devoid of objectivity, impartiality thus violating the privilege that their licenses and the law of the land allow them –and this, in a wide range of diverse matters and fields. This, not only in electoral matters, but also in the field of social, economic and cultural rights where they too often present factional and ideological interpretations against certain persons, parties and authorities. (Oscar Gonzalez)
5. So, with the information circulating these days being a commodity, it has a cost and is a source of profit; it is, therefore, reserved for those who have the financial means to acquire, produce and exchange it. (Henri Leclerc) Conversely, ethically principled media defend citizens from oppressive governments… but who defends citizens from oppressive commoditized media?
6. My opinion here is that ethics and truth can be taken as equivalent. The false, the erroneous, the untrue would be the unethical and, in modern times, the ethics of the hegemonic powers comes from their mercantilistic vision of the world that then becomes the predominant and hegemonic ethics of our days. This ethics has been spreading its hegemonic powers worldwide for a long time seeking to ideologically homogenize the collective consciences that make up the so-called ‘public opinion’. …are you part of it?
7. Contemplated from a HR point of view, ethics and the media have to do with the freedomof communication, of expression and of information. In other words, with a specific right: the right to (unbiased and open) information. We should not be surprised, then, that the discretion to legislate, comply-with and enforce the laws regulating the freedom of expression and the right to information, as well as the system of electronic media concessions, all respond to interests that go beyond merely the ownership of the media to what is ultimately the function of maintaining the broader power structure mediated by the predominant interests, local and foreign. Therefore, the ethics-truth of the owners of the media, at this time, cannot coincide with the ethics-truth of the real generators and consumers of information, which are we-the-citizens. Television and the written press are still in debt with ethics and truth. This, because of their bias in presenting the different actors; because of their lack of objectivity in editorializing and contaminating information; because of their open induction to factious and ideologized interpretations against certain persons, parties and authorities. What is required today is a more effective social participation in the media, with citizen power: i.e., vox populi. (O. Gonzalez)
8. Moreover, as you know, in ‘mediaworld’ (a place that should never be confused with the real world), reporting on celebrity gossip is thousands of times more important than reporting on existential risks, e.g., how global heating hits food security. Actually, all existential risks were, for long, largely or entirely ignored or underreported by the media. So why are not all these risks all over the front pages now? Well, great power being in the hands of the few, we cannot solve our common problems. Corporations and oligarchs with massive fortunes can and do hire as many junktanks (so-called thinktanks) to devise justifications and to demonize, demoralize, abuse and threaten people-trying-to-sustain-a-habitable-planet. The struggle to avert systemic failure is the struggle between democracy and plutocracy; it always has been, but the stakes are now higher than ever. (George Monbiot)
Bottom line
9. I said above that popular media need to take up the challenge to keep talking about holding the responsible accountable. But HR cannot be really an inalienable entitlement if and when our ability to exercise them is meddled by probabilistic algorithms and now by AI. This is precisely what is happening, for example, when automated content moderation and content takedown systems limit what we can express and call-for over the social media. The complexity of the tools being deployed to influence and control human understanding create space for the consolidation of power in the hands of an ever smaller and unaccountable elite –an elite that reserves for itself the right to interpret. Unless we take a stand, this process will reshape our understanding of identity and outsource our HR system to a secretive lottery. (Juan Ortiz Freuler)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com