Global Media Journal

Volume 7, Issue 13 | Fall 2008 | Table of Contents

A Note from the Main Section Guest Editor of the Fall 2008 Issue

The Right to Communicate:

History, Current Debates, and Future Challenges

Freeing human communication, and treating it as one of the basic unalienable human rights is a central goal, ongoing project, and ultimate dream that not only preoccupies our present day communication and media researchers and right to communicate activists, but has historically concerned several thinkers and philosophers. Arguably, this investigation originated in the seventeenth century when John Milton fought for liberty of the press and an end to government control over political and religious writings, thereby advocating for freedom of thought and speaking out against pre-publication censorship. Further key contributions to the debate were made by such philosophers as John Locke, Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey and Jürgen Habermas who investigated the ways of democratizing our modern media and emancipating the public sphere, and advocated for an undistorted communication.

Additionally, communication, or some aspect thereof, has often been considered in formal “legal” languages—starting from the American Bill of Rights (1789), the French Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen (1789), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), and the UNESCO Media Declaration—all of which “state” that communication is, universally, one of the “basic” human rights. Here, we are left with important theoretical and practical questions as to whether such important human right is endorsed or not? Taught and educated or not? Practiced in our daily life or not? And importantly, studied and researched or not?

While our digital world opens novel ways for us to communicate—through blogging, online activism, global communication rights movement (i.e. the United Nations sponsored World Summit on the Information Society – WSIS 2003), civic participations, etc.—one has to question the different social and political implications of the digital divide. Investigating access, democratic engagement in the public sphere in the age of media conglomeration, and sustainment of cultures and cultural expressions are all possible approaches to critically theorizing the field of the right to communicate.

Given the centrality of this concept, and the importance of researching it, the Fall 2008 issue of the Global Media Journal—American Edition offers a unique and a divergent collection of articles and commentaries tackling issues surrounding the right to communicate, its history, current debates, and future challenges.

This issue specifically aims to address the pressing importance of “researching” the right to communicate as an important thread in communication studies. Jean d’Arcy, the father of the right to communicate, predicted more than 38 years ago that “The time will come when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will have to encompass a more extensive right than man’s right to information, first laid down twenty-one years ago in Article 19. This is the right of man to communicate”. Indeed, with the growing use of different means of communication, the right to communicate does not merely include a right to information; rather it also encompasses a right to express our languages, our cultures, and our thoughts using media of our choice.

The main section of this special edition comprises a group of leading scholars who are currently engaged in the most cutting-edge practices and research in the field of the right to communicate, participatory democracy, and global media activism. Precisely, this main issue comprises three different sections: invited, refereed, and commentary. Five invited papers are introduced by Cees Hamelink and Julia Hoffmann; Mustapha Masmoudi; Philip Lee; Jan Servaes, Patchanee Malikhao, and Thaniya Pinprayong; and Vanda Rideout.

Cees J. Hamelink (University of Amsterdam)—a renowned right to communicate scholar—and Julia Hoffmann (University of Amsterdam) lead the invited articles section with their paper “The State of the Right to Communicate” where they provide a historical exploration of the modern origins of the right to communicate, from its birth during the work of the MacBride Commission, to the call for a new information and communication movement, and finally until the recent revival during the UN’s World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Significantly, the paper asserts the urgency for more academic investigations on the right to communicate specifically after highlighting its centrality in global activism.

A prominent scholar coined with the birth of idea of the right to communicate, Mustapha Masmoudi (University Tunis El Manar), investigates the responsibility and the ethics of the freedom of expression in his paper “Freedom of Expression and the Social Responsibility of the Media in the Information Society”. Through this critical examination, Masmoudi underscores the importance of planting the ethics of the right to communicate in practice by proposing a combination between the duties and responsibilities on the one hand, and the practice of the right to communicate on the other in order to ensure equitable rights in our global world.

In the light of this discussion, Philip Lee (World Association For Christian Communication) assesses the current communication rights movement in his article “How Communication Rights Might Contribute to Achieving the Millennium Development Goals”. In particular, Lee highlights the importance of “participation” in all levels of society in order to empower the public to self-expression and to create an effective, “inclusive”, and anti-discriminatory social dialogue. Such practices, Lee concludes, indeed affirm the concepts of human dignity and the rights of different groups and communities to equitable and inalienable rights.

Jan Servaes (University of Massachusetts), Patchanee Malikhao, and Thaniya Pinprayong (University of Queensland) bring forward one of the most important case studies in this issue in “Communication Rights as Human Rights for instance in Thailand”. The article makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of the right to communicate in a non-western society through its analysis of the role of the civil society movement in Thailand during the period of 1997 to 2006 in advocating the right to communicate as a fundamental human right. It articulates the importance of having a “free media” to pursue democratic objectives in a given society, an idea that might represent a stronger tide to oppression than merely traditional political oppositions and mainstream media.

From Canada, Vanda Rideout (University of New Brunswick), presents another crucial dimension of the practice of the right to communicate in her paper “Public Interest in Communications: Beyond Access to Needs”. From a communication policy perspective, Rideout argues that the public service aspect of public interest in communications (one important pillar of democratic rights) become threatened with the “neo-liberal” communication policies recently adopted by the Government of Canada. A plausible solution, she proposes, is extending the democratic communication rights by adopting social collective obligations as part of the public interest in the field of telecommunications in order to fulfill the different individuals and communities’ needs for self-realization, interaction, and participation in society.

Secondly, and subsequent to receiving a large number of submissions, and conducting a competitive triple-blind revision process, the refereed section includes three papers introduced by Vladimir Bratic, Susan Dente Ross, and Hyeonjin Kang-Graham; Anandam Kavoori; and Gregg Payne.

In their critical examination of the role of journalism during the time of violence and conflict, Vladimir Bratic, (Hollins University), Susan Dente Ross and Hyeonjin Kang-Graham (Washington State University) analyze one of the crucial challenges to the practice of the right to communicate in the field of journalism in their article “Bosnia’s Open Broadcast Network: A brief but illustrative foray into peace journalism practice”. Here the authors examine the case study of the Open Broadcast Network’s (OBN) coverage of the Bosnian conflict particularly addressing the different problems behind the practice of peace journalism principles in violent conflicts by underscoring the media role and involvement in embracing the practices of peace journalism.

Anandam Kavoori (University of Georgia) attempts to link the practice of video gaming to terrorism and the right to communicate in his article “Gaming, Terrorism and the Right to Communicate”. Kavoori highlights the need for new conceptual research on the relation between the gaming industry and the right to communicate. Identifying the different approaches to gaming research (gaming as a drama, as a grammar, and as a narrative), the paper analyses a sample of games produced in the United States and the Middle East arguing that such games produce concepts of terrorism, construct national identity, and perpetuate the portrayal of the other.

Finally, the referred section includes a critical examination of the practice of a right to communicate in our present day democracies by Gregg Payne (Chapman University) in his paper “The Exile of Dissidence: Restrictions on the Right to Communicate in Democracies”. Payne argues that the availability of information is a key ingredient in the enjoyment of a human right to communicate in western societies, by analyzing the different barriers posed by the political, social, and media powers using the concepts of agenda-setting and gate-keeping in the mainstream media. He concludes that providing “access” to media technologies (sending and receiving) is one vital solution to the realization of a human right to communicate.

Thirdly, in the commentary section, the invited papers are introduced by William F. Birdsall; Ariel Dougherty; and Jukka Jouhki and Il-hyun Baek.

William F. Birdsall articulates in the first invited commentary article the possibility of constructing a right to communicate in his paper “Constructing a Right to Communicate: The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples”. Birdsall proposes to focus on the real experience of different groups and individuals struggling for their communication rights as a more plausible strategy to construct a right to communicate rather than merely focus on the legal and philosophical analysis. He provides an in-depth investigation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (DRIP) to illustrate that such a declaration embodies key concepts intertwined with the idea of the right to communicate.

From a feminist activism perspective, Ariel Dougherty (Media Equity Collaborative) provides a historical exploration of women centered media in her commentary “The Intersections of Women Centered Media: Funding and the Struggle for Our Human Rights”. Dougherty argues that women centered media and their successful activism policies that started from the late 1960s necessitate close attention and research. Providing examples of women centered media from around the world (Latin America, Africa, Asia, and North America), the article asserts the importance of media as a global participatory activism tool for applying and enhancing the women’s right to communicate.

Finally, and in a timely investigation, Jukka Jouhki (University of Jyväskylä) and Il-hyun Baek (Seoul National University) provide a contemporary account of the Korean public’s right to know in their commentary “The Public Right to Know: Government – Press Relations in South Korea and the Debate about Press Rooms”. The paper discusses closure of press rooms by the Korean government and the implications of such action on the freedom of the press in Korea. The commentary analyses the political and cultural context of this controversy through a critical examination of public statements, news reports, and interviews concluding that the right to communicate in Korea embodies various rhetoric, as well as power relations from both the Korean media and the politics, that require more in-depth and critical investigation.

Finally, it is hoped that this issue will highlight the importance of researching the right to communicate idea within communication and media studies, as well as contribute to an insightful and valuable understanding of the current debates and future challenges that such research intersects.

Aliaa Dakroury, Ph.D.

Carleton University, Canada

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