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Community radio muzzled

Won’t get fooled again?

Al-Jazeera television offices closed in Iraq

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Community radio muzzled

By Stefania Milan

Porto Alegre, Brazil, Aug. 8 (IPS)— Brazilian police have shut down Radio Restinga, a community station broadcasting from a low-income neighborhood of Porto Alegre, birthplace of the global summit of alternative social and economic ideas, the World Social Forum.

On Aug. 4, federal police officers broke into the community center in Restinga from where the station has operated since 1999 and seized equipment preventing the radio from going on air, say its organizers.

It is the second time that police have silenced the community’s radio voice. With the closure, about 12,900 community radio stations have been shut down in Brazil and equipment from 117,755 operations confiscated since 1998, when the government passed a new broadcasting law, according to police figures.

Since then, prosecutors have launched 10,142 trials against illegal radio stations, and courts have convicted 3,600 people under the restrictive legislation on community broadcasting.

Ironically, 100 practitioners and researchers at the annual meeting of the global OurMedia network visited Radio Restinga on Jul. 24 to see a local example of a successful community channel.

“The radio was a public space open to everybody. Margin-alized people from the area used it for their needs,” station coordinator Marisa Godinho told IPS. Restinga is home to 150,000 people, most of them living in precarious conditions.

“The Brazilian government has no political will to create good conditions for community media. Since long ago, the government has not given permission to operate community channels,” added Godinho.

But Restinga’s is not an isolated case. “This is nothing new: violence and unconstitutional practices against community radio are usual in Brazil,” said Thiago (who asked to not reveal his surname) from Radio Muda, a station broadcasting from Campinas in the São Paulo region that has been closed twice by police.

The Community Radio Law (1998) created under the presidency of Fernando Henrique Cardoso fixes the maximum strength of community radio transmitters at 25 watts, limiting stations to a reach of one km.

In March 2004 a federal resolution allocated only one frequency for community broadcasting in the entire country — the world’s fifth largest in area and with a population of about 170 million people — from 87.4 to 87.8 FM.

The law also prevents community radio stations from carrying advertising or belonging to a network. And if a community broadcaster interferes in the operation of a commercial station, it can be shut down — but the law cannot be applied in reverse.

Telecommunications regulatory agency, Anatel, has applied the law by closing the “clandestine” channels or by asking the federal police to seize equipment and even arrest station operators.

There are between 5,500 and 10,000 community radios in Brazil, but Anatel recognizes only 2,620 active radio channels, community radios included, plus 1,270 waiting for approval. The rest are considered illegal and persecuted.

“The main problem is the inertia of the Brazilian government. The Communications Ministry must make Anatel stop the process of arresting people and taking equipment away from the radios until it can analyze the process of radio legalization,” says Adilson Cabral from the association Intervozes.

“The Brazilian state does not give its people the conditions of basic communication rights. It is necessary to redefine the Brazilian legislation on community radio and TVs and to establish budgets for its functioning,” says Regina dos Santos from Dombali Cultural Society, a non-governmental organization (NGO) that works for inclusion of racial minorities in the Brazilian media.

Paradoxically, the Brazilian Federal Constitution signed in 1988 considers communication a fundamental human right. Article 5 says, “the expression of intellectual, artistic, scientific, and communication activity is free and independent from censorship or license.”

The news of the radio’s closure has started to spread worldwide via Internet mailing lists, turning local mobilization against the move into an international struggle.

The World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC) is planning an international campaign to pressure the government to change the legislation and recognize the right to communicate in Brazil.

“Restinga is just another example of a very grave national Brazilian problem. The pressure of the international human rights organizations has proved to be an efficient ally of the communitarian social movement,” said Gustavo Gómez from AMARC in a statement issued after the shutdown of Radio Restinga.

OurMedia Network also expressed solidarity with Restinga and the entire community radio movement in Brazil, which participated actively in the network’s conference in Porto Alegre last month.

“Radio Restinga people were our hosts in Porto Alegre, a local community media group where we came to discuss our ideas of community communication. It is especially important for OurMedia as an international network to do what we can in support of them,” said the group’s Aliza Dichter, who called people to act against the closure through the network’s mailing list.

OurMedia was already helping Restinga pay a fine of $652 for broadcasting without authorization in 2002. Now the main problem facing the radio’s operators is to find equipment to permit it to return to the air, because the community cannot afford to buy new gear.

The citizens of Restinga, who last week protested in the neighborhood’s main street to demand medical care, are organizing a huge demonstration against the radio’s closure. But the struggle for legalization of the area’s — and the country’s — community radios looks to be long and difficult.

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Won’t get fooled again?

By Marty Logan

Montreal, Canada, Aug. 6 (IPS)— When US Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge stood in Washington last Sunday to warn that some of the country’s largest banks were being targeted by al-Qaida terrorists, the mass media splashed the news on front pages and television screens — despite recent well-known intelligence failures in the “war on terrorism.”

And then it emerged that some of the information that provoked the warning and deployment of heavily armed police in New York, New Jersey and Washington, DC was three years old.

The media also diligently reported those developments Aug. 3 (and subsequent denials from Ridge that the alert was the administration’s attempt to divert attention from Senator John Kerry, who had just been officially nominated as the Democratic contender for President George W Bush’s job) — but should it have been more skeptical in the first place?

“We covered Ridge’s announcement live on Sunday. We also covered the fact that some of the information was a few years old, on The Early Show the next day and on the CBS Evening News,” says Marcy McGinnis, senior vice president of news coverage at CBS.

“We have to balance the public’s right to know when the government is issuing terror alerts with a bit of healthy skepticism regarding the motivation,” she added in an email interview.

Right to know what: what the government is saying about the threat of a terrorist attack, or if there is, actually, a genuine threat of such an incident?

“It’s very clear that intelligence has been manipulated by the Bush administration [in the past]. And part of the job of the media, as much as to repeat what officials tell you, is to evaluate the credibility of those claims,” says Jim Naureckas, editor of Extra, a magazine published by the group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).

“That’s really why you have the freedom of the press guarantee in the constitution, because that function is so critical for a democracy,” Naureckas added in an interview from New York.

Just over two months ago the New York Times printed an extraordinary article admitting its journalists had been misled by sources who confirmed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, the main justification used by Bush to order an attack on the regime of President Saddam Hussein in March 2003.

The weapons have yet to be found.

“In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged,” Times editors wrote. “Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged or failed to emerge.”

But could the Times and other outlets just ignore Sunday’s more pointed threat, knowing that — given the air-borne attacks against New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001 — a new attack was a possibility, regardless of the administration’s intelligence record?

“If you’re a police officer,” says Naureckas, “and need to make a difficult decision about how to deploy your personnel, then you’re in a terrible dilemma if you have an untrustworthy government putting out warnings like this because you make critical decisions that could cost people’s lives.”

“But with the media, it’s far less clear that that’s the case ... if al-Qaida is in fact planning an attack on the Prudential building in Newark, it’s unlikely that the population of New Jersey will be able to do something meaningful to prevent that from happening just because they read about it in the New York Times,” he adds.

But not everyone agrees.

“If you don’t warn people and something happens, and you knew about it, you have a real problem,” Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein, a member of the Senate’s intelligence committee, told the Times this week.

“The other thing is, by warning people and causing them to be alert, you may very well pick up somebody who has been skulking in a doorway around the World Bank or the stock exchange,” she added.

The Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Fox News did not respond to IPS requests for an interview for this story.

In hindsight, journalists might have heard a little warning voice inside on Aug. 1 when Ridge — who took the unusual step of issuing the alert directly to newspaper editors and network anchors via a conference call — used the occasion to plug his boss’s record.

Americans should “understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the president’s leadership in the war against terror,” said the Homeland Security chief, almost three months to the day before November’s presidential election.

Naureckas argues that in this pre-election period, when the public is increasingly divided between those who are “very much frightened” by terror warnings and others “who don’t have any faith left in the Bush administration,” journalists must press officials harder to back up their claims.

“Particularly when you have problems of trust with the government, you need the media to do more to separate factual information from political spin, from manipulation, and I don’t think they’ve been doing enough to make that happen.”

But according to McGinnis, CBS “certainly check(s) out the facts and report on them in a timely way, whether complimentary toward the government or not.”

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