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Latin American researchers and activists in social communication from all over Brazil gathered at the Methodist University of São Paulo, in São Bernardo do Campo, São Paulo, 28-30 November 2005, to evaluate a Brazilian Charter of Media and Citizenship.
Discussion revolved around media contexts and public policies of communication, in addition to gender issues. Four subjects considered essential for promoting citizenship were examined: local media, community media, digital media, and folk communication.
Considerations started out from the belief in the universal right to communication, which is internationally recognized but not fully secured due to political, economic, and social factors. Social exclusion, aggravated by poor education, further limits this privilege, making it difficult for various social groups to have access to the media, in particular to the production of their contents. In a mass mediated society, citizenship presumes both access to information and the capacity to understand it. It also assumes one‚s right to become an agent in the processes of communication.
Recent discussions at the World Summit on the Information Society, convened by the United Nations (UN) in Tunis, as well as UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, reasserted the importance of preserving difference of opinion and cultural diversity in face of the growing power of the countries and groups that dominate the means to produce, store, disseminate, and use information.
After three days of presentations, debates, data analyses, and focus group discussions, participants in the WACC / UNESCO / METODISTA Seminar on Media and Citizenship signed the Letter of São Bernardo, with the intention of contributing to the strengthening of citizenship in Brazilian society.
1.We reassert that, as a fundamental human right, communication presupposes not only access to information but also the shaping of its contents, ownership of technology, broadening of cultural diversity and socialization of knowledge, attending to public policies toward the preservation of local/regional/national contents and the creative industries.
2. We call for a common endeavour aligned with free access movements regarding intellectual property and the movement for technological patterns open to the exchange of information and the integrated use of distinct technological platforms regarding the development of free software as a means toward the collective and participatory production of knowledge.
3. We understand that the concept of public interest transcends the realm of the state, as indicated by our Federal Constitution. For that reason, we propose to expand the use of public resources intended to sustain local media and create public funds for community media. Debates on public policies of communication must also be broadened through the implementation municipal councils of communication.
4. We emphasize the role of local/regional media in the development of citizenship, taking into account one’s right to communication and the various interfaces between the media and social, economic, political, and cultural issues. We are reminded of the fact that despite the growth and diversity of local media, patterns associated with large scale, national/global media tend to persist, leaving little room for new formats, languages, or contents shaped by a local/regional perspective.
5. We call upon the state to institute public policies and clearly defined criteria for decentralizing funds meant for publicity at the federal, state, city, and district level, creating policies that will favour regional communication and will secure the lawful use of information, education, entertainment, and culture by media companies. The idea is to secure the sustainability of local and community media that are aligned with public interests.
6. We invite media companies to broaden their social role through actions and contents that follow the principles of citizen-oriented media. We also call upon them to value the principles of social responsibility and train their workers according to those principles. We invite them to use local/regional contents, thus respecting and securing cultural diversity. We ask them to encourage the presence of minorities and to publicize human rights in their messages, thus preserving local and regional identities and peculiarities.
7. We call upon the whole of society to participate in the process of regulating the emerging digital media (radio and TV), insisting on the adoption of open technical models and patterns, which meet the objectives and principles of interactivity, usability, inter-operationality, universality, and shared system.
8. We believe that, insofar as they are executed together by the state, the civil society, and the university, such principles and actions will contribute to narrow social inequities caused by digital, educational, and cultural exclusion, among other factors.
9. We emphasize the importance of training social actors in basic technological capacities to create models that allow for the superimposition of information and that remain available for use by citizen-oriented media.
10. We propose that the federal government create micro-policies that might be institutionalized in practical local ways, thus facilitating the management of digital media in relation to citizen-oriented media.
11. We call upon the universities to institutionalize, broaden, and occupy the public domain as political actors alongside federal, state, and local governments, participating in projects aimed at developing citizen-oriented media. To accomplish this, it is necessary to invest in the training and education of students, researchers, professionals, and university professors who will perform public interest actions.
12. We urge the University to remain in touch with social movements, given the fact that it can contribute to them. Universities count on infrastructure and human resources in the field of social communication and can contribute to the use of technology and the training of community agents towards a critical reading of the media and the support of citizen-oriented media.
- 13. We ask that higher education institutions take up the responsibility to promote programs to train communicators/entrepreneurs and modernize companies and institutions, creating the necessary conditions for the emergence of local/regional media. To accomplish this, they must start new research projects in their graduate school programs, focusing on the relationship between communication, on one hand, and education and community development on the other. These projects must also be integrated with undergraduate programs. Funding agencies must secure resources for these research projects, which will start with the charting of citizen-oriented media at the local, regional, and national levels, and will lead to the implementation of concrete and innovative actions.
- 14. We emphasize the intersections between folk communication and the mass media, which can share the same space and whose common contents can strengthen cultural diversity. This type of action should not be limited to the appropriation of technologies; it must be extended to the communication processes and their contents. In this sense, we see a pressing need for a constant and critical evaluation of media productions that attend to the themes and approaches related to the practice of citizenship in the context of folk communication, which is itself a catalyst for cultural resistance amongst subaltern classes and socially and politically marginalized groups, and therefore has a fundamental role in the struggle for media inclusion.
- 15. We reiterate that the academy must encourage the production of dialogical contents, which should involve entertainment and education for different media and technological convergence, valuing local identities and peculiarities as well as social responsibility. In addition, the academy must promote partnerships between the civil society and education and communication institutions in order to research the culture and history of peripheral communities through projects of citizen-oriented media, biographical reports, and oral histories.
- Strategies to be developed
Based on the considerations and proposals listed above, researchers and activists gathered in São Bernardo do Campo demand the implementation of the following strategies, to be developed and supported by the state, by social movements, and public and private institutions committed to the development of citizen-oriented media. They also call for the joining together of different social actors in an effort to elaborate Action Plans at the regional, local, and community levels in order to:
- a) encourage the improvement of citizen communication within the domain of social movements;
- b) promote debates and create courses aimed at citizen communication and education;
- c) monitor local/regional media through discussions and analyses that will enable future denunciation of violations committed against ethics and human rights;
- d) discuss and demand the observation of regulations regarding local/regional contents;
- e) denounce all forms of communication monopoly/oligopoly that might jeopardize the development and growth of local/regional media;
- f) propose that Educational Radios, University Radios, and School-Radios, as well as community TV channels, work together with social movements on the elaboration of projects for community media and the production of specific media contents;
- g) secure room for community radios within the digital radio system to be established in the country;
- h) encourage commercial and educational broadcasting companies to open new free slots for community organization programs, considering the nature of the broadcasters‚ license to use the airwaves;
- i) recognize and support the recommendations from the federal government’s Grupo de Trabalho Interministerial de Radiodifusão Comunitária regarding licenses for new community channels and the amendment of Federal Law 9.612/98, which refers to increases in power and number of channels, to advertising and licenses for network operation, lifting of legal impediments for community channels that operate without authorization, etc, thus securing the broadcasting of programs produced by community organizations;
- j) strengthen community autonomy regarding the content of their messages;
- k) suggest that community agents intensify the use of media other than radio and expand access to various technologies, both digital and traditional;
- l) encourage gender and ethnic diversity in decision-making positions at media organizations, as well as commitment to the participation of the civil society in their productions;
- m) execute P&D projects, with the development of specific contents from the perspective of citizen-oriented media but without losing track of their multidisciplinary character. Similarly, encourage P&D projects, specifically regarding the production of new contents and the dissemination of new genres, formats, models, and digital languages;
- n) encourage the execution of social inclusion projects using the resources of digital media, to be developed at universities in partnership with the civil society. The projects will focus mainly on the training of monitors, management of telecenters, and production of innovative content;
- o) suggest that the Portal Mídia Cidadã of the UNESCO Communications Cathedra at the Methodist University of São Paulo remain online, facilitating the exchange of experiences in community, local, and regional media.
São Bernardo do Campo, 30 November 2005.
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