From Media Niche to Policy Spotlight: Mapping Community-Media Policy Change in Latin America

Abstract

Policy change has coincided with increased academic interest in non-mainstream alternative, community, radical, citizens', or civil society-based media practices (e.g., [Bailey, Olga], Cammaerts, & Carpentier, 2008; Coyer, Dowmunt, & Fountain, 2007; Downing, 2001, 2010; [K. Howley], 2005; Rennie, 2006; Rodriguez, 2001; Rodriguez, Kidd, & Stein, 2009). This interest has been fuelled partly by the emergence of new media technologies that have allowed activists and grass-roots groups to create substantial media operations with a worldwide reach, partly by the continued spread of community uses of older technologies such as radio and video. Yet with the growth of the sector, policy questions have become more prominent According to the World Association of Community Broadcasters (AMARC), "the lack of proper enabling legislation is the single principal barrier to [community media's] social impact" (AMARC, 2007, p. 5). Thus some community-media organizations (such as AMARC and the Community Media Forum Europe, or CMFE) and researchers (e.g., Hadl, 2010; [Arne Hintz], 2009; Milan, 2010; Reguero & Scifo, 2010) have increasingly been interested in the regulatory rules and norms that shape the media landscape: where they originate, how they are created, based on which values and interests, and how they shift. Policy analysis has traditionally focused on national legislation, the implementation of legal texts, institutional design, administrative processes, and the existence or non-existence of support measures that may condition legal rules. National laws, as we will see below, continue to be a crucial framework that enables, constrains, or obstructs media operations. However, they increasingly intersect with developments taking place at other levels than the national one, and they are subject to both normative and material influences by actors other than the nation-state. Geographically, both the local and the national have "become embedded within more expansive sets of interregional relations and networks of power" (Held & McGrew, 2003, p. 3). As for the actors involved, global policy debates such as the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) have experimented with new forms of multi-stakeholder processes that include non-state actors such as civil society and the business sector. As arenas where actors and interests clash in a "battle for justifications" and where "consensus mobilization" (Khagram, Riker, & Sikkink, 2002, p. n) is a prime target, such forums offer specific leverage for new "players." Latent and invisible policymaking, such as standard-setting by technical communities and informal actor alliances, have opened further doors for non-state actors to shape policy (eg., Braman, 2006; DeNardis, 2009). The vertical, centralized, and state-based modes of regulation have thus been complemented by collaborative horizontal arrangements, leading to "a complex ecology of interdependent structures" (Raboy, 2002, p. 6) with "a vast array of formal and informal mechanisms working across a multiplicity of sites" (p. 7). The recent political changes have started to weaken these long-lasting ties. Moreover, governmental and administrative change has been carried by a wave of social movements and protests against the predominant social and economic order and has thereby reflected the strengthened role of civil-society groups and social movements. The Zapatista uprising in Mexico in 1994 provided a starting point for regional mobilizations as well as global struggles against neo-liberalism and, eventually, for the alter-globalization movement and its protests against summits of major international institutions. Indigenous uprisings followed in many countries, such as Ecuador, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Brazil The economic breakdown in Argentina in 2001 led to an outbreak of massive protests that took down several successive governments and carried the slogan "que se vayan todos" - "they all must go." A year later in Venezuela, President Chavez was ousted by a coup that was supported by the commercial media, but he was brought back into power by a popular movement that included community and alternative media. These moments in the recent history of the region, and many others, led to a reactivation of social movements as "the social and organizational fabric, seriously affected by adjustment policies and new mechanisms for repressing and criminaUzing social protest, began to gradually recover" (León, Burch, & Tamayo, 2005, p. 25).