JMS

I was in Buenos Aires last week attending a Ford Foundation workshop on Freedom of Expression. There was a small US delegation attending but the main focus was for Latin American participants to talk about the media landscape and the regulatory and commercial factors at play.

Here are some photos of Buenos Aires from the trip. It’s an amazing city and we walked everywhere, soaking up Tango, cuisine, art, leather goods, peaceful labor protests, and a very favorable exchange rate…

The workshop was part of the Freedom of Expression Project, organized by the Ford Foundation and Global Partners and Associates based in the UK.

I was there courtesy of Ford along with several other grantees from the public media group they have been supporting (including the National Black Programming Consortium, New American Media, Future of Music) and about 40 participants from Latin America, UK and Africa.

Global Partners put forth a helpful framework for envisioning the interaction between technological, political and economic factors that shape the communications environment. Yes it’s yet another chart with orbs and arrows but as we talked through various real-world scenarios it proved to be a helpful tool and they will be developing it further.

Some excerpts from my final report:

As an active participant in the evolving “public media” field in the U.S. I initially struggled to understand that there is no direct comparable sector in Argentina and most Latin American countries. The tightly limited spaces between government-controlled media and monopolistic commercial media do not yet add up to a robust independent civic media culture. As a result many of the analyses of media policy and the realities of journalistic efforts focused on an extensive list of grievances about the flaws and failures of the existing architecture across broadcast, print, and digital platforms.

By comparison the US public media sector has a strong identity and despite many difficult pressures seems to have carved out an important and recognized role for a large part of society. I’m also an optimist about the potential for public media to leverage technology and the new social capacity of the Internet to increase its reach and relevance.

So I found it helpful if discouraging to listen to the stories of intimidation, corruption, political and legal threats, bureaucratic barriers, commercial “extremism” and self-censorship in Latin American media. The cumulative impression was of a beleaguered sector that struggles even to identify the means of advancement.

I was also struck that discussion of the potential for the Internet to become a powerful tool and place for leveraging independent voices and freedom of expression was largely absent from the presentations of the Latin American participants. Partly this seemed to be due to the significant “digital divide” that is more severe in these countries than in the US and elsewhere, but even so there was little sense of the promise and potential for this dynamic medium to play a positive role.

Some of the regional policy discussions were hard to follow and the international regulatory and policy frameworks are new to me. But the consistent theme of enforcing broad internationally-supported definitions of freedom of expression in a human rights context rang through, and has added an important dimension for me to put my work in public media in the US in a larger context.

Ultimately this was a positive and productive experience that nonetheless felt like we were just scratching the surface for what promises to be a greater cross-pollination of domains and geography. Having participated mostly in an observer role I now feel I could contribute more directly in subsequent workshops, illustrating aspects of the hands-on efforts of PRX that could be relevant and helpful to others trying to build new intermediaries for independent media.