Global Media Journal

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

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

The Right to Communicate:

History, Current Debates, and Future Challenges

Article (19) of the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is considered the cornerstone of the concept of the human Right to Communicate (RTC). It states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” However, the RTC encompasses many ambiguities and debates, especially today with the ongoing proliferation of new kinds of media due to continual technological advancements. And so, many questions remain to be answered. For instance, what is the RTC? Does the RTC mean a total freedom of expression regardless of frontiers? And what are those frontiers? How can this right be practiced? And what are the mechanics of its enforcement? Who are the agents who can enforce such a right? What are the current global debates on the RTC, and how valid are they? Finally, what future global challenges need to be overcome before such an idealistic right can be achieved?

A major goal of this Fall issue is to contribute to an intellectual and multi-disciplinary framework of the RTC that will help to better illustrate the different emerging issues in the practice of this important and complex human right. Further, this issue aims to explore the interplay between the various global legislations that frame the RTC. For instance, one might consider the language found within Article 19 of the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its relationship to the diverse ethical practices and beliefs exercised in different corners of the world.

The Graduate Section of the Fall 2008 Issue includes five refereed papers and one invited paper. In the first refereed paper, Lauren B. Movius (University of Southern California), analyzes the three-decade evolution of the RTC debates in “Global Debates on the Right to Communicate”. The paper explains that the intergovernmental efforts reached an impasse when they were crippled by cold war pressures and the politicization of the RTC. However, civil society and non-governmental organizations have also promoted communication rights. The paper investigates a noticeable example of a global expression of the RTC movement—the Communication Rights in the Information Study (CRIS) campaign—as a specific case study of transnational collective action for communication rights.

Next, Jason Hannan (Carleton University), in his paper “Religious Arguments in the Public Sphere: Rethinking a Free Speech Controversy”, examines John Rawls’ principle of constraint and reviews the controversy concerning the use of religious arguments in the public sphere. Rawls’ model of public reason had first excluded religious arguments from the domain of democratic discourse, but then allowed them on the condition that they be supplemented by secular reasons. Critics argue that such constraint amounts to an assault on freedom of speech, and defend the right to invoke religious arguments in public moral discourse, even in the arena of formal deliberation. Hannan argues that the disagreement between Rawls and his critics hinges on certain problematic assumptions, not the least of which are Rawls’ concepts of freedom, religion, and truth.

Applying the debate to a specific region of the world, Miriam Wimmer (University of Brasilia) and Octavio Penna Pieranti (Getulio Vargas Foundation) provide a comprehensive overview of the challenges that are faced in Brazil for the development and consolidation of the RTC in their paper “The Right to Communicate in Brazil: Historical Development and Current Challenges”. Focusing on civil society access to traditional mass media, Wimmer and Pieranti critically examine the existing legal and constitutional framework and discuss debatable issues, by analyzing the historical aspects of media development and exploring the way political practices have shaped the RTC in Brazil.

Investigating another region of the world, Hossen M. Anwar (Carleton University) explores the interrelationships between economic globalization and the changing forms of local cultural lifestyles in Bangladesh in his paper “Economic Globalization: An Episode in Cultural Homogenization?”. He argues that the western development partners promote economic globalization with their own agenda, which then organizes and shapes the standpoints of the local people. Anwar calls for a new and inclusive perspective with the capacity to embrace a wider domain beyond economics that is driven by the imperative of social justice and the integrity of national cultures.

Looking at Iraq in his paper “The Post-Saddam Iraqi Media: Reporting the Democratic Developments of 2005”, Benjamin Isakhan (Griffith University) highlights that the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 resulted in the emergence of the nation’s free press. Isakhan discusses the developments in post-Saddam Iraqi media and the return of an Iraqi public sphere, which has openly debated the issues surrounding Iraq’s shift from despotism to democracy. The paper presents evidence of the role played by the Iraqi media in hosting a rich tapestry of debate, discourse and deliberation from a panoply of political, religious and ethno-sectarian factions throughout the elections and the national referendum held in 2005.

Finally, in the invited paper “The Imagined International Community: Dominant American Priorities and Agendas in Google News”, Elad Segev (Keele University) focuses on the ability to maintain a plurality of political views, as a crucial aspect of communication rights, with an investigation of Google News, a multilingual interface that pulls articles from thousands of popular online news sources. To examine the biases of online news, the paper analyzes the top news articles in Google News, looking at the most frequent issues, countries and links between countries. Findings indicate that the United States is a dominant actor in the most popular news sources, and that both English and non-English online news display U.S.-centric priorities and agendas. Segev suggests that Google News and similar services, which aggregate various news sources into one interface and become popular and “authoritative” news channels, intensify certain perceptions of the World based on the page-ranking mechanism and its popularization of content.

Collectively, the papers of the Graduate Section provide valuable research on the RTC—from various perspectives with examples from different regions of the world. It is hoped that these papers will stimulate further research that will investigate this rich research area of the RTC from even more angles and encourage academic dialogue within more regions of the world.

Mahmoud Eid, Ph.D.

University of Ottawa, Canada
Graduate Guest Editor, Fall 2008

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