Keynote Address to Global Fusion 2006

by

Aram Aharonian,
President, Telesur (Televisor del Sur)

In the face of attempts to impose one way of thinking, one message, one image, it the need is emerging for a social mass media that is able to reflect our own realities, our own interests, all from our own point of view.

The topic of the mass media has to do with the future of our democracies. Nowadays, a media dictatorship tries to decide our peoples’ destinies. The big economic groups – most of them, transnational enterprises - use the media for deciding who has the right to speak or not. In the same way, they usually decide about the protagonist and the antagonist.

Commercial speech – bombed by through information, advertising, and mass culture - is an ideological, aggressive speech, which limits our freedom as citizens. Let’s talk about only one point of view.

Development and participation

It is becoming increasingly clear that information and communication are fundamental to any action the international community wishes to take. If development cannot exist without participation, it is difficult to understand how one can have participation without communication.

New factors are bursting forcefully onto the scene, impossible to understand if analyzed in an isolated and incomplete fashion. Ideas such as international cooperation or solidarity are rapidly loosing ground, while development aid has drastically fallen off, with an over 50 percent drop – among member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And a similar tendency is occurring in the policies of the United Nations.

You can talk about development aid when the resources really reach the people of poor countries. Issues from the South have also steadily been losing relevance in the North. In United States, the gap separating rich from poor is steadily widening, while in Europe a dramatic splintering of society can be seen, accompanied by political processes in which citizens participate less and less in the their countries’ public arena.

And, as in the seventies, we are now talking again about multilateralism, South–South cooperation, and communicational cooperation development.

Development, understood as the general improvement of a population’s standard of living by satisfying its basic needs, occurs only when there is consciousness about the realities that must be promoted. It is necessary for a society to grow mentally before it can develop materially.

It is useful to recall that the McBride Report, which is already 26 years old, pointed out that in order to transform the verticality of communication, we need to accelerate the increasing participation of a larger number of people in the communication activities, to promote the progress of the democratization trends of the whole communication process and an expansion of the multidirectional information streams, coming from several sources: upwards, downwards and horizontally.

Development of a country begins with the evolution of its intellect, and with the change individuals make about their notion about men and women, and about the whole world.

The progress of thinking begins with knowledge of reality. And it depends on the degree and quality of truthful and opportune information that is available about this reality. Thus, the production, storage, processing, and diffusion of information are the crucial premises for overcoming conflicts and for promoting growth and development.

The more widespread and objective the information circulated is, the more our conscience will grow. A new policy for the distribution of the information will lead to new forms of conscience, which can result in indispensable behavioral changes necessary for the transformation of a nation and a region.

Obviously, it is not just the amount of information that encourages development - as development theories propose. It is rather the quality (and organization) of that information (in regards to the priorities of growth), which needs to be determined.

So, it is critical to create and distribute information that links to a new consciousness about programs and concrete actions carried out by the State and by civil society, in order to encourage growth. . Information will be the engine for social changes, but only if a society is culturally ready for such change.

Rather than producing huge and indiscriminate torrents of massive information, (which merely achieve the alienation of our senses) a hierarchy with involved needs must be constructed in accordance with the priorities of growth and integration.

An important issue is getting the truth and sharing it. The information we currently receive usually is contaminated with an array of half-truths and manipulations. Nobody doubts the requisite for cultivating community media, spaces for expression and information organized horizontally. All this is basic for allowing the construction and promotion of an active and informed citizenry.

Community-level media is a step towards democratization, but is not enough by itself. We can have hundreds of community-based magazines, radio stations, and television channels, but if 93 percent of the audience is still controlled by the monopolistic structure of the corporate media, we will have little the progress towards an enhanced democracy.

For sure, those of us who over the years have advocated for the concept of an a alternative means of communications and expression haven’t known how best to achieve our goals. By large margins we’ve been losing the ideas battle, conceptually and on the battlefield. So, it is time to think big. We require the creation of a hemisphere-wide audiovisual alternative that could serve to broadcast the reality of our social and cultural diversity. It means to allow us to know and recognize each other, to aid in the process of integration.

The objective identified for Telesur is to develop and implement a communicational strategy focused on the hemisphere, using a worldwide distribution. Telesur is a tool to serve Latin American and Caribbean regional integration. Telesur focus on the continent’s diversity and plurality while serving as an alternative to media hegemony. The idea is to respond to the single images and thoughts bombarded at us from the North.

Before we can integrate ourselves, we need to know each other, to recognize each other. Thus, we need copious information about everything going on in the region and in the world. First hand information, timely, contextualized and balanced, in opposition to fragmented, general information, of accomplished facts and non verifiable, superficial information: an atomized contents model. We need to rescue the old journalistic genders, such as the chronic and the reportage, the investigation, the analysis, the ideas debate. Because our goal is not to create consumers or politic sheep, but citizens.

Telesur is the primary project of "La Nueva Televisión del Sur", a multi-state Latin American corporation. Its Board of Directors is composed not only of government representatives, but also of media experts. Skilled people with diverse backgrounds and oriented to aid in the regional integration process for the expression of our region’s diversity.

Telesur is not merely a tool; it is a strategy for taking back the power of the word that was for so long the province of dictators, corrupt politicians, and the eternal "experts". The same kind of experts that oversaw the pillaging of our nations and that tried to convince us that the neoliberal globalization process is a way to make everything better. Thanks to them, a large part of the Latin American people are now excluded from education, lacking in health care, spared of the most basic guarantees of citizenship. Thanks to them they are invisible statistics, millions of them without even the most basic forms of documentation.

Over the last few decades, our mainstream intellectuals and academics found refuge in universities, think tanks, or bureaucracies, leaving important public functions in the hands of politicians and "experts". This group used their position to impose their beliefs and versions of reality. Or, better said, realities aligned with the interests of the powerful elite.

To be able to change, we must start by criticizing ourselves. We are persuaded that there is no way to change reality unless we start to see it as it is, since in order to changing reality, we have to be able to understand it. This is the main problem Latin Americans have had: we have been blind to our own selves, to our own problems. Eduardo Galeano, a well known Uruguayan writer has said that for the past 514 years we have been trained to see ourselves through other people’s, foreigners’ eyes.

And we need to begin by building our own sources of information, because 80 per cent of the news transmitted by the media worldwide are selected and manufactured by the big trasnacional news agencies, with their own interests, who impose their agenda to all us.

Today we begin to see ourselves with our own eyes. We are tired of having others explain to us who we are, how we are, and what we should do. From the North we have been seen in black and white. Especially in shades of black, appearing merely in the news when something disgraceful occurs – while, the truth is, we are a continent in Technicolor. We are now starting to see ourselves through our own eyes, to learn about ourselves, to recognize ourselves in hopes of a regional integration to come.

This deals with taking back the power of the word, recovering our history, traditions, and ancestries. It is time to look into the mirror and move from eternal reflection to action.

There are those that say: "another world is possible". They may be right. But we, the Latin American and Caribbean citizens, have known for many years that another world is not merely possible, but necessary and indispensable, so we need to build it together, and every day. For more than 514 years the politics of exploitation have been the policy of dividing us. And we are convinced that we cannot serve this process of regional integration without mobilizing within our own countries and social movements.

Today, from the North, we are constantly bombed whit a huge quantity of infotainment that serves only to misinform us and feel dependent. We know of Chechnya, but we don’t know about ourselves.

Telesur is a television station intended to build new bridges, and to create new spaces of integration and encounters. It is a place in which we can discover and reinvent ourselves through our own eyes. The idea is to get away from the stereotypes that characterize the views of others. With a language of our own, with a visual identity that allows us to see ourselves from a different perspective – our own one.

Latin America is a continent in permanent construction. It is a territory constantly reinventing itself. We are full of contradictions, textures, and colors. We are packed with battles, failures, frustrations, and resources. And we are also full of history, glory, dignity, and above all, full of an uncontainable vital force.

People insist on asking us this question: what will prevent this form becoming a television station dedicated to governments, to propaganda? And we respond: "Nothing". Nothing more than the credibility of states that are re-vindicating themselves and their political and historical roles. Nothing more that the credibility of a project founded on the principles of diversity, plurality, and the resolution to integrate ourselves as an alternative to the fight against hegemonic and monochromatic messages transmitted by the transnational media.

Faced with the intention of individuals trying to impose one way of thinking, one message, one single image, Telesur emerges in plurality, reinvigorating the people of the region, fulfilling a longstanding collective dream of Latin America.

Our goal is to create a world-wide high quality structure for broadcasting progressive political contents. We want to present realities of the South immediately, veraciously, and credibly, with balance and context, so it promotes opinion matrixes in favor of our peoples’ integration.

The target is to promote cultural diversity to strengthen historical memory and our peoples’ collective identity. The idea is to stimulate the people’s protagonistic participation, organization, and articulation by creating spaces to give voice to our social organizations.

The objective is to democratize the contents, guaranteeing diversity and plurality. A new TV station without new contents would be a new frustration, and that’s why we need to create in our countries content factories, linked to our idiosyncrasies, traditions, identities, diversity and plurality. For that reason, together with Telesur, we are launching the Latin American Content Syndicate (FLACO), whose purpose will be to co-finance documentaries and series that will serve not only Telesur but also national broadcasters. It will not be a large production company, but rather a horizontal structure aimed to organize and to give new life to a struggling Latin American audiovisual industry.

The target is to recover to the word in all our colors. And to not resign ourselves to watch our information and reflection in the black and white style steadily coming from the North, in accordance with their colonial and neocolonial interests.

Many have stated that similar projects tried to be carried out in the past without success, especially due to the lack of interest in developing countries. Maybe times have changed – and information and communication technology is more available – or the strategies understood only the technical aspect and not the political-strategic one.

Today, the emerging and consolidation of the New TV Station of the South (Telesur), is a demonstration that a massive project of communication integration is possible. Telesur is a multi-state Latin American enterprise which has been broadcasting for more than one year, via satellite, a 24-hour TV channel.

Without any doubt, Telesur is a political and strategic project. It is a tool created by national states to help Latin American and Caribbean integration. And it is, at the same time, the alternative against the hegemonic media, the single thinking, and a tool for democratizing information and communication.

I am talking about a structure of global reach and high quality, able to present hemispheric realities immediately and in real time, and in a credible and balanced manner, placed in proper context, and geared towards expressing opinions that support the integration of our nations. Telesur is a means of communication capable of expressing diverse perspectives alongside the larger issues that concern us all, a strategy to foment debate and a critical conscience.

I am also taking of promoting cultural diversity for strengthening our collective historical memory and identity, for promoting participation and organization and for creating space so social movements are able to express themselves. I am talking about democratizing the production of content to guarantee diversity and a plurality of voices. To secure that diversity, we will start with ten correspondents and contributors in 35 countries in the region, as well recruiting on-air talent from different countries.

There are those who express concern over the channel’s political independence and the eventual pressure that could come from those that put money into the project. Meanwhile, we have started to disassemble the media monopolies and we will not stop until we have democratized the audiovisual spectrum in our region. We have started to make our people visible and to put an end to the muteness that they had for almost 514 years.

This much is true: we are aware and conscious that we will only create a path as we move forward.