Report presented at the International Forum “Globalising Social Transformation and Role of the Alternative Media”, held in Seoul on 31 March and 1 April 2006.
Three political powers should exist according to Montesquieu’s traditional distinction: legislative, executive and judicial. Contemporary States are still organised under this doctrine, which is based upon constitutional monarchy. However, nobody can deny the existence of other powers: economic and media ones. For quite some time economic power has started its assault of media power. Once both become concentrated into one, the political powers are either mere marionettes in their hands or else economic power directly assumes all powers as a natural second phase of this process. Berlusconi’s reign in Italy was the most transparent example of a merger between economic, media and political powers.
The analysis of the instruments of the mass media shows that in spite of their differences - whose origin rests within the fight for power, market and audience - they all faithfully follow the commandments of capitalist economy. This compliance can be easily applied if there is economic growth and macro-economic stability, but not so in places where the 1944 Bretton-Woods agreements - which were the germ of economic neo-liberalism - have failed.
Nowadays the so-called Unique Thought not only exists in the media: we live in a “unipolar” world, because for the first time in history only one State holds international power: The United States of America. With the Soviet block already vanished and considering that 1) this unique political and military government is located in Washington and 2) financial markets exercise the real economic power, any flaws of the system can only be attributed exclusively to them.
Not only have hunger, disease and oppression not disappeared under this globalised regime, but instead inequalities continue to increase according to the 2005 Human Development Report of the United Nations Program for Development, which states that “of the 73 countries for which data are available, 53 (with more than 80% of the world’s population) have seen inequality rise, while only 9 (with 4% of the population) have seen it narrow. This holds true in both high-and-low growth situations.” [1].
As it is simply impossible to defend this economic system with objective data or truthful information, mainstream media transforms itself into apparatuses of social control through informative manipulation and ideological propaganda.
The current state of disinformation was debated on January 2003 at the World Social Forum held in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. During this forum, Ignacio Ramonet - editor of Le Monde Diplomatique - lectured on the role of corporate media and denounced their concentration on gigantic group structures with universal vocation. In his speech he said that thanks to the new technologies these groups have new expansion possibilities, since the “digital revolution” has eliminated the frontiers that used to separate writing, sound and image. He concluded that due to both their economic weight and their ideological importance these mega-companies have become the main actors of neo-liberal globalisation [2].
Unique Thought’s propaganda media holds the informative monopoly in the analogical world: TV, radio, newspapers, magazines... with some exceptions, like TeleSUR in Latin America or Radio Klara in Spain, or even the Diagonal newspaper, although all them suffer from many economic and technical limitations and cannot compete on equal terms with communication corporations, which have all kinds of analogical and digital equipment.
The importance of information in Internet is relentlessly growing without any apparent slowdown in the short term. According to Jakob Nielsen, an estimated 1,000 million people at the world level already have access to the Net, that is, more than 15% of mankind [3]. In the Spanish State, the Telefónica study “La Sociedad de la Información en España 2005” [The Information Society in 2005’s Spain] states that our country has 15 million Net users. Other data indicates that 85% of the connected homes use ADSL, 5 million people will have access to broadband by the end of this year and 41,4% of Spaniards older than 14 are Internet users [4]. This level of penetration is slightly higher than that of the written press (40%) and the increase of readers may be due to the free press phenomenon [5].
The main problem of any progressive Internet media is that it does not reach popular classes, and this limitation is even higher in underprivileged regions in the current economic system. The table below shows the scarce penetration of Internet in Latin America, where the top statistical figures only amount to 14.3% [6]:
WORLD STATISTICS OF INTERNET AND POPULATION [7]
Regions
Population (2006 Est.)
% World Population
Users, more recent data
% Population (Penetration)
% World Use
Growth (2000-2005)
Africa
915,210,928
14.1%
22,737,500
2.5%
2.2%
403.7%
Asia
3,667,774,066
56.4%
364,270,713
9.9%
35.7%
218.7 %
Europe
807,289,020
12.4%
290,121,957
35.9%
28.5%
176.1%
Middle East
190,084,161
2.9%
18,203,500
9.6%
1.8%
454.2%
North America
331,473,276
5.1%
225,801,428
68.1%
22.2%
108.9%
Latin America/ Caribbean
553,908,632
8.5%
79,033,597
14.3%
7.8%
337.4%
Oceania / Australia
33,956,977
0.5%
17,690,762
52.9%
1.8%
132.2%
WORLD TOTAL
6,499,697,060
100.0%
1,018,057,389
15.7%
100.0%
182.0%
Internet has become a widespread phenomenon, winning adepts by subtracting them from the written media (and even from TV), a fact that is creating a crisis in the traditional press. According to Ignacio Ramonet, one of the reasons for it is the loss of credibility nowadays suffered by the written press. First of all this is so because it increasingly belongs to corporate groups that control economic power and often collude with political power, but also due to non-stop partiality, lack of objectivity, lies, manipulation and fallacies [8].
Of course, the digital world is also dominated by the big communication corporations, which have perfectly learned how to use mental intoxication though Internet. But it is also true that Internet has witnessed the development of a strong alternative opposition to Unique Thought. The real possibility of creating a media only with the help of volunteer work and without any big economic investments has permitted blogs, electronic publications and e-mail lists to denounce the continuous falsehoods flooding from corporate media.
There are other data which increase the level of digital media penetration in the Latin American working class. First of all, although citizens with direct access to the Net are scant, practically all social and popular organizations have such access, which is bi-directional, because through email or websites they diffuse their information to the communities, which then redistribute it either on bulletins or by simple oral communication. This cascade of information not only takes place inside social movements but also through different means, being it a fact that corrects the lack of access to Internet, because many of the most influential left wing voices, the so-called “intellectuals” – academics, professionals - continually receive information through Internet and transmit it by means of their personal prestige to wide strata of population.
www.rebelion.org : an opposition alternative media
Rebelión was born on September 1999. At that time the informative project sought by its founders was only possible to carry out through Internet. Rebelión did not need any monetary investment and it could be read from anywhere in the world, but the main objective was to create an alternative media for all Latin America, taking advantage of the almost universal use of the Spanish language there.
In that year e-mail already was starting to be a common tool and all internationalist social communities already used it, mainly to denounce human rights violations. Such was the case of the Mexican Zapatistas, who sent their reports to several organisations having computer resources and these then transmitted them to their members because most of the people did not have an Internet connection. On the other hand, almost no communities had a webpage and even less capabilities to seriously update one. All Rebelión’s founding members agreed to the necessity of creating a media with press agency functions to feed free radios, local bulletins and other alternative and community media, which had very good local information but lacked technical and human capacities to cover international news.
Although in the beginning the idea was not to publish Rebelión on a daily basis, we soon saw that readers pushed us into doing it, they were faithful readers whose access to our pages exponentially increased any time we updated them and decreased when we didn't. It was evident that citizens were fed up with corporate media. Without any doubt, Rebelión success was due to the synergy between computer experts and journalists who shared the same desire to inform about what others kept silent. Along with the increase of readers many writers, journalists and other intellectuals have supported this project by sending their texts without asking for anything in return.
Translators have been very important in Rebelión’s development as they started to put into Spanish hundreds of papers, mainly from English, but also from Arabic, French, German, Italian, Russian and Portuguese. At present some of these Rebelión translators have also helped to create a parallel group named Tlaxcala - the network of translators for linguistic diversity [10] - in order to make alternative information flow in many directions. Not being enough for them to translate texts into Spanish, they have also begun to translate into other languages, either French, German, Italian or Arabic, even into English. Tlaxcala is very critical about the excessive dependence of alternative information on papers written in English and coming from the US. We hope that this Congress will help us to take a step ahead in the exchange of information between the many different languages of the world.
At present in Rebelión we divide the news by sections, some of them by geography and others with a general character, like Free Knowledge, Culture, Social Ecology, Economy, Lies and the Media, Women, Opinion and Another World is Possible. The geographical sections are Africa, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, USA, Spain, Iraq, World, Palestine, European Union, Uruguay and Venezuela. We also have sections dedicated to special collaborators: Heinz Dieterich, James Petras, Marta Harnecker and Noam Chomsky. And, lastly, a section called Free Books in which we wanted to show the Copyleft spirit in culture, before the Creative Commons licensing ever existed.
The work method at Rebelión is based upon what we call persons who are responsible for a section, who are those people in charge of the regular and daily maintenance of their own section and of taking care of the texts they receive. The different persons responsible for a section try also to feed other sections with contents they are not responsible for and, at the same time, accept comments and proposals from the group. Any doubt about whether a text must or must not be published or even be retired after publication is always decided though a majority vote with binding character. The creation of either a special or a new section also requires a vote. Any urgent question is solved though email in real time.
The relevance of our information on Internet
The journalist Pascual Serrano participated on behalf of Rebelión at the Meeting in Defence of Mankind, which was held in Mexico City in October 2003 [11], where he declared, “corporate media has lost the credibility battle.” Nobody trusts it, we are witnessing how the citizens of the world feel knowing that the information they receive is just not true. Two months ago an academic report by Columbia University confirmed that thesis. The 500 page “The state of the news media 2004”, conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism asserts that Usamerican journalism is in a lamentable state “from which only seem to survive the alternative media, the people operating through Internet and the media in communities like the Hispanic one” [12].
This space abandoned by the self-proclaimed “serious press” is being occupied by digitally distributed free Information, which is more democratic and immediate, and this not only due to the existence of alternative media, but also because information is then redistributed by the virtual communities [13] existing in the Net through the multiple tools at their disposal: forums, mailing lists, blogs, chats, instantaneous messaging... The added consequence of it is that Internet’s alternative media have higher relevance than mainstream media and an infinitely superior economic efficiency.
The Google Search Tool does almost 60% of all searches on Internet. According to the company, Google responds to more than 200 million consultations a day [14]. The access to information is usually carried out through this or other search engines, so the ranking of results they provide has paramount importance.
Large virtual communities generate a massive amount of interlinks so that the more linked a website is the better its popularity or PageRank will be [15], which is the system used by Google to decide the importance of a site. Although interlinking is not the only factor that determines the position on the results of any search it is one of the most important ones. All other search engines operate in a very similar manner.
For instance, if we enter in Google the term “información alternativa” the first result on a list of about 261,000 entries will be Rebelión. The same will happen if we look for “Noam Chomsky” or “antiglobalización”. Rebelión’s privileged position is not only a consequence of its own merit but also to the multiple Internet media which link us with these terms and it indicates to us what kind of readership we have. If we look for “ecología” or simply “información” Rebelión will be in fifth place. This position means that Rebelión has a high “PageRank”, a value anyone can know by downloading Google’s bar [16]. Let’s now compare Rebelión with the most influential moderate to more extreme right wing Spanish language digital media:
Media PageRank http://www.rebelion.org 7
http://www.libertaddigital.com/ 6
http://www.cope.es/paginas/home21.asp17 3
It is both amazing and encouraging that a media managed by a bunch of volunteers and without any economic investment has the same Internet relevance (according to these parameters) that mega media like Terra and Abc, which have hundred of employees and powerful investors behind them. This Google classification indicates that in the digital world alternative media has the opportunity to compete with corporate media, something totally impossible in the analogical world.
As well, in order to proceed to a comparative study of both types of media we have to keep in mind not only this quantitative aspect but also the qualitative one. A simple observation of electronic media like El Mundo or El País shows that they have much more sections or pages than alternative media. Many of these pages are not dedicated to information (for instance, both newspapers have virtual stores where people can buy goods) and others concentrate on leisure information like sports, social events, horoscopes, hobbies, classified ads... These contents, which have an important weight on the readership demands, are not available in any alternative digital media.
If we compare the high level of incidence of alternative media on Internet with their limited number of pages the conclusion is that on the most important questions the opinions published on these non-corporate media have a larger diffusion than that of corporate media. Pascual Serrano carried out a limited study on this topic in his article El Pais.es y Rebelión.org frente a frente [18], where he reached the same conclusion after comparing the number of visits of Rebelión’s opinion columnists with those of El País, a moderate right wing newspaper which is the most important and influential corporate media both in Spain and in the Spanish-speaking world. Serrano’s piece cites the following examples: [columnist] Rosa Montero’s text Homofobia (7 June, 2005) was read by 620 people. Also, on 15 June of the same year “La calle y las Cortes”, an article by El País organic ideologue Javier Pradera was only visited 427 times. Let’s compare it now with a piece by Javier Ortiz, which appeared on Rebelión after being published on the newspaper El Mundo:
En defensa del voto francés (1 June 2005) was read by 1,111 people. A piece by Ignacio Ramonet, also previously published by La Voz de Galicia, “El peligro de Corea”, appeared on Rebelión on 12 June and was read by 2,080 people. An article by Rebelión columnist Higinio Polo, La marcha (fúnebre) hacia la democracia published on 25 May was visited by 1,540 people. In order to adequately evaluate all previous figures I must add that the opinion articles which appear either on El País or El Mundo are only accessible by subscription, whereas Rebelión contents are free. All texts from a source other than Rebelión’s are redistributed through a Creative Commons license (i.e. stating both name and source and respecting the wording integrity) [19].
Rebelión’s informative status
The role played by Rebelión and other alternative media has been double, first of all informing about things the corporate media keeps silent about and second deconstructing all Unique Thought’s “myths”. The unrelenting increase of collaborations we received denouncing informative manipulations ended up with the launching of our section Mentiras y medios [Lies and the Media] in June 2002, dedicated to “revealing all falsehoods and lies that corporate media publish on a daily basis” [20]. This text of presentation underlined the role played by mainstream media (including those pretending to be progressive) in the failed 11 April 2002 Venezuelan coup d'état.
That event in Venezuela - one of the most beautiful democracy lessons of recent times - revealed the authentic soul of corporate media. While that same night Rebelión opened a special section (“Golpe de estado en Venezuela”) to follow the sequence of events, the next morning edition by El País greeted the coup’s main actor calling him a democrat and accusing the democratically elected President of dictatorship. In that instance the alternative information “only” helped citizens from all over the world to know the reality of what was happening in Venezuela, but let’s not forget that the Venezuelan working class was able to mobilise itself and defeat the coup d'etat without the technical digital tools we have in Europe, because down there only a few have cellular phones to diffuse SMS messages.
Alternative digital media’s social control function is reinforced by the (still very weak) interaction with readers. The editors’ task is made easier by the real possibility they have of knowing what are the most visited pages. Statistic data indicates that we at Rebelión do not set the informative agenda because our top news are always the same ones heavily covered by either TV or radio stations. For instance, last 13 February Rebelión published a scoop on the existence of “death squads” in Iraq, which had 3,070 visits that week (and three days later was picked up by mainstream media). In spite of the importance of such a story, it was surpassed by a much more trivial opinion piece on Mohammed's cartoons (more than 6,000 readings during the same days). The conclusion we draw is that most readers first obtain information through other media (mainly radio, TV and newspapers...) and later they switch to Internet in order to find a different perspective and make up their mind. This is even more noticeable during crisis situations, when both the number of visits and users significantly increase, a fact indicating that some people are not interested in following alternative media on a daily basis but read them whenever they need additional information not covered by corporate media. As Santiago Alba Rico points out, the alternative media reader wants to know what he has to think about the events.
Informative freedom, privacy and legal liability
The limits set up to control freedom of speech on the Net can be technical or economic, but there are other ones much less publicised although more important. I am referring to the legal liabilities that either authors or editors can incur in, a fact that has been reinforced by the Information Services Act in Spain, the European Parliament’s Data Retention Directive [21] and the US Patriot Act.
The functioning of any media without the support of a managerial conglomerate has many advantages, the most important of them being independence. But it also bears inconveniences and servitudes. The retention of data imposed upon Internet service providers is being universally applied in order to facilitate possible prosecution against anyone considered liable of any damage caused through Internet.This is not a mere hypothesis because many websites are disappearing every day due to more or less founded lawsuits. Considering that Internet alternative media belongs to people without an economic backing other than the scant money necessary to subsist, their work on the Web is becoming more and more difficult as it is unthinkable that they could meet the expenses of a court trial.
By using with ambivalence “freedom of speech” – a concept under attack on the Net but heavily defended when it refers to corporate media’s ability to lie or even to create conflicts, as had happened when an ultra right-wing Danish newspaper published cartoons depicting Mohammed as a terrorist - both legal and judicial pressure are on the increase.
In conclusion, alternative digital media is beginning to undermine the media empire created by big corporations but their growth is difficult and unstable due to multiple threats against survival and independence.
However, the future of Rebelión.org or other alternative media does not depend so much on these “external threats” or even on the daily work of their editors, but rather on the multiple collaborations we receive from authors and translators - out of solidarity, unselfishness and free of any charge - as well as on the technical assistance from computer specialists, on the NGO which kindly hosts our website and, above everything else, on the daily support of our readers.
Thank you for your attention.
NOTES:
[1] http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2005/pdf/HDR05_chapter_2.pdf
[2] Ramonet, Ignacio, Abecedario (subjetivo) de la globalización, Seix Barrral, Barcelona 2004.
[3] http://www.useit.com/alertbox/internet_growth.html
[4] http://www.computing-are.com/Actualidad/Noticias/Comunicaciones/Internet/20051214024
[5] http://www.20minuto.es/noticia/88522/0/gratuitos/fomentan/lectura/
[6] According to other statistics the rate decreases to 13%, See: http://www.ciberamerica.org/NR/rdonlyres/
e6l55ipmfrbfssb7rfil2duanrhw3xrh2fz6jo5
wpsv54jc5wwzjzdcda54ahidycjnf7i2k2zarvh/
DesarrollodelaSociedaddelaInformacinypenetracindeI.pdf and http://www.n-economia.com/pdfhome/Panorama_TIC_lat.pdf
[7] The world Internet user statistics were updated on 31 January 2006. Population data is based upon World Gazetteer’s current figures. User data is from Nielsen//NetRatings, ITU, NICs, ISPs and www.exitoexportador.com.
[8] www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=13512
[9] Rebelión.org, historia de una lucha- La Honda de David, www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=10881
[11] Pascual Serrano, “Llegó la hora de sustituir a los grandes medios de comunicación”, www.pascualserrano.net 30-10-03.
[12] Ernesto Carmona. La gente está dejando de creer en los medios, Adital, www.rebelion.org/medios/040409ec.htm
[13] http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comunidad_virtual
[14] http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
[15] http://google.dirson.com/pagerank.php
[16] http://toolbar.google.com/
[17] It is the home page of this chain, and doesn't allow to measure in the ranking of the domain.
[18] http://www.altercom.org/article125932.html
[19] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.1/es/
[20] http://www.rebelion.org/medios/presentacion070602.htm
[21] http://barrapunto.com/article.pl?sid=05/12/15/0955248
[22] On February of 2006 the publication by a Danish newspaper of several cartoons assimilating Mohammed to a terrorist provoked uproar in many countries with majority Muslim population. See “Lo que es sagrado para el otro” by Sami Naïr, http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=27617
Carlos Martínez is the person responsible for the Section CULTURE at Rebelión. The original text of this translation can be found at: www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=29547.
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