Page 115 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Commun cat on R ghts n a Global Context

flow doctrine was amended to read: “free-flow and wider and better balanced
dissemination of information.”
The MacBride Commission’s report to the 1980 UNESCO general assembly
built upon these earlier provisions with a wide range of recommendations that
would effectively redistribute global media power, such as television imagery,
the distribution of radio receivers, and the journalistic right of reply, to name
several. By suggesting structural changes, including regulations on information
flow, UNESCO invited the wrath of a burgeoning pro-market neoliberal order
championed by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. By the early 1980s
anti-UNESCO fervor in Western elite circles reached a feverish pitch, abet-
ted by right-wing groups such as the Heritage Foundation. The United States
and United Kingdom subsequently pulled out of UNESCO in 1984 and 1985,
respectively. Following the pull out of UNESCO’s largest sponsors, NWICO
gradually receded into relative obscurity. However, annual MacBride panels
persisted for many years and helped bring together a new civil society coali-
tion that would form the basis for a new theater of contestation. Indeed, two
decades following the lost alternatives of NWICO, the crystallization of a new
civil society alliance was evident when similar issues involving democracy and
communication reemerged at the World Summit on Information Society.

CommuniCaTion righTs aT ThE wsis

Recent years have witnessed a resurgence in reform efforts around commu-
nication rights. During the International Telecommunications Union (ITU)–
sponsored discussions known as the World Summit on the Information Society
(WSIS) in 2003 and again in 2005, communication rights emerged as a rallying
theme for global media reform groups. The original goal of the WSIS was to
“define a common vision of the information society.” Given the summit’s initial
focus on important social problems like the global digital divide, the coalition
behind the Campaign for Communication Rights in the Information Society
(CRIS), the World Forum on Communication Rights (WFCR), and other reform
groups saw opportunities for advancing communication rights. However, initial
hopes for the WSIS to seriously address communication rights were dashed early
on when discussions devolved into a technical dispute over Internet governance.
Nonetheless, both phases of the WSIS saw a genuinely progressive presence.
Groups like the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) and
the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), among others, articu-
lated alternative policy visions based on social justice and human rights, and
worked hard to get less technocentric language into official WSIS documents,
focusing on structural inequities such as lack of access to new communication
technologies. Drawing heavily from Article 19 language, the continuity between
NWICO-era and WSIS rhetoric was partly due to the involvement of similar
groups and individuals. For example, people associated with WACC partici-
pated in both movements, as did many veteran activists and academics.
Arguably the most significant alternative vision to emerge at phase one of the
WSIS was the “civil society declaration.” Overall, this wording is very similar