continued: "Something to Be Done: Transnational Media Monitoring" by Kaarle Nordenstreng
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Notes and references

Initiatives to Act
In his foreward to "New International Information and Communication Order Sourcebook" (Nordenstreng, Kleinwaechter and Manet, 1986), Sean MacBride reflected on his Commission's work and pointed out half a dozen major issues that he saw ahead, six years after the MacBride report "Many Voices, One World," "in the hope that each one of us will in our own sphere of influence seek to find solutions to these problems" (p. i). One of these was the "growing tendency for the ownership of the means of communication and information to pass into the hands of either governments or multinationals" (p. ii). In this connection MacBride wrote that "it would be very useful to devise some system for monitoring the extent to which certain newspapers and chains of newspapers distort news concerning disarmament in the world" (p. ii).

This was not just a passing remark, as a casual reader might think, but reference to a project that had been initiated in 1983. That year the Mass Media Declaration of UNESCO was five years old, and Sean MacBride addressed attendees of a ceremony commemorating this landmark document of international communication in Paris in November 1983 (for background, see Nordenstreng, 1984). He made a strong point about media concentration and called on professionals and scholars to trace and document this phenomenon, which was working against the positive trend of the time that MacBride used to characterize as a "shift in the center of gravity of power from governments, from established authorities to public opinion."(3)

On that occasion MacBride did not go on to recommend a system of monitoring media performance simply because the idea was not yet articulated. Actually, the first sketchy notes on it were put on paper during that reception by the present author together with MacBride and the chief of UNESCO's Division for Free Flow of Information and Communication Policies, Hamdy Kandil. On that basis a short memorandum was drafted (by Nordenstreng) outlining the idea of two levels: first, on a scientific groundwork by pooling together empirical evidence of content analysis concerning the media coverage of global problems such as peace and war, and second, by a commission of internationally known public figures, who would issue an annual review and assessment of the overall media's performance. A rough estimate of financial resources needed to get such a system established, not counting the actual content analysis work that was supposed to be nationally funded, was US $50,000 a year-something that at the time seemed realistically could be raised by UNESCO and/or the UN. This informal memo served as a reference when MacBride met the UN Secretary General Perez de Cuellar in early 1984 and raised the monitoring idea, among other things, receiving a generally positive response.(4)

Then, in the summer of 1984, Johan Galtung paid one of his seasonal visits to Finland (addressing a seminar of the Finnish peace movement), and he was consulted on the idea by the present author. Galtung reacted enthusiastically and invited a planning workshop to his then base, a free university in Paris in spring 1985, but this offer could not be acted on by the intended core group (including Herbert Schiller and Tapio Varis) due to timing problems. Moreover, the United States announced at the end of 1984 its intention to withdraw from UNESCO within one year, and that spread an atmosphere of caution and controversy around everything related to UNESCO's communication program. MacBride especially was of the opinion that one would be ill advised to go ahead with the idea for the time being.

However, in 1986--the International Year of Peace--MacBride was already prepared to raise the idea in his foreward to the NIICO Sourcebook. By that time he, like many others, had come to the conclusion that it was pointless to wait for UNESCO to come along. In a more general sense, the intergovernmental structures were seen as increasingly doubtful partners. Instead, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) appeared as more and more relevant carriers of initiatives such as the monitoring project and the MacBride Round Table a couple of years later (see Vincent, Nordenstreng and Traber, 1999). It was a move away from established political structures towards the so-called civil society.

It should be added that two related initiatives emerged around 1990, promoted independently of the present project by like-minded activists. First, George Gerbner started what is called the Cultural Environment Movement (CEM) in the United States based on his cultural indicators research and turned into a grassroots movement reflecting the media consumers' interests (among others a "Viewers' Declaration of Independence" was prepared). Second, Cees Hamelink in the Netherlands, with partners such as the Third World Network in Malaysia, began to develop the idea of an international tribunal to examine the structure and performance of particularly transnational media enterprises. The latter initiative has led to the Peoples' Communication Charter (PCC), laying down the normative basis on which later mechanisms are to be established.

Finally, to complete the review of earlier attempts to act-and to demonstrate that this is not just an isolated idea entertained by advocates such as MacBride, Gerbner, Hamelink, and Nordenstreng-it is worth recalling a paragraph from the chapter by Alfred Balk, former editor of Columbia Journalism Review and World Press Review, included in an anthology on media freedom and accountability based on a seminar held at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University in 1986. This is what Balk (1989) wrote under the title "The Voluntary Model: Living with 'Public Watchdogs'":

Therefore I submit this modest proposal: that the Gannett Center join with Columbia University's president and journalism dean to select a nationwide steering committee of university, media, and foundation leaders to convene a successor to the Hutchins Commission. Its specific charge should be finally to bring to reality-with Ford, MacArthur, and Carnegie-scale funding-the Commission's vision of "a new and independent agency to appraise and report annually upon the performance of the press"; to coordinate "the creation of academic-professional centers of advanced study, research, and publication in the field of communications"; and to emphasize "the widest possible publicity and public discussion on all the foregoing." This should include an adequately funded monthly journalism review, public television or C-Span and video-cassette distribution of appropriate forums, and MacArthur Foundation-magnitude multiyear grants to experienced analysts who would return the spirit of Lippmann and Liebling to our newspapers, magazines, books, and classrooms (p. 73-74).(5)

Today it is encouraging to note that so many national studies and even institutions have emerged with parallel objectives and tools. For example, in the United States, "Project Censored" is already over 20 years old (Jensen, 1997; Phillips, 1998). Sometimes, such monitoring efforts link up with movements for citizen participation or community media production, as in the Cultural Environment Movement (CEM) in the United States or the Media Foundation and its Adbuster programs in Canada. In the United States, organizations interested in revealing the political biases of news reporting have spring up across the political spectrum, from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) on the left to Accuracy in Media (AIM), funded and supported by fundamentalist Christian groups on the right. Organizations such as the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, DC and the Media Studies Center of the Gannett-funded Freedom Forum work to maintain a non-partisan image and claim to provide objective scientific analyses of news and media content. Further examples are found in Italy, where the media monitoring organization Citta' Invisible recently launched a "Media Watch" web page to report on Italian media, and in Sweden, where media monitoring has been known as an establishment-oriented rather than radical initiative, with heavy involvement of the business community.

A genuinely international media monitoring project is shaping up in the European Union around the topic of racism and xenophobia with the establishment in 1998 of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, based in Vienna, Austria. Its task it to provide the "Community and its Member States with objective, reliable and comparable data at the European level on the phenomena of racism, xenophobia and anti-semitism." The monitoring at issue here is understood quite broadly to cover education and socialization in general as well as the areas of social and legal policy, but media are also part of its mandate. Therefore it is expected to launch, in collaboration with national institutions (governmental and academic), a permanent system of media performance monitoring in an area so consequential to both the political and economic prospects of Europe.

While official initiatives such as the European Monitoring Centre take shape, the academic community of media scholars could establish its own global media monitoring system by simply pooling together the thousands of case studies being carried out around the world by students and faculty alike. Existing studies already provide a vast potential of evidence regarding specific themes as well as the overall performance of media in society. They need only to be brought together for collective and comparative review.

Obviously the monitoring of media performance is an idea whose time has come. It does not need any UN or UNESCO resolutions for implementation; it is evolving quite independently of governmental and intergovernmental structures. Nevertheless, the idea is also being promoted by governmental concerns such as those currently prevailing in Europe in relation to racism and xenophobia. Both the Council of Europe and the European Union have programs to encourage media and journalists to combat these phenomena and to support at atmosphere of tolerance in society.

As a matter of fact, the media coverage of race, ethnic minorities, and symptoms of intolerance such as xenophobia has become recognized as a social problem by politicians and professionals alike. It is logical, then, that the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) proceeded in 1994 to establish, with the support of the Council of Europe and the European Union, a working group against racism and xenophobia-something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. And one of the priority activities pursued by the IFJ working group is precisely media monitoring more or less in the sense advocated here.(6)

The IFJ monitoring project will be pursued first and foremost in Europe, with highlights such as an international journalism prize for combating racism and xenophobia (sponsored by the European Union). It will be supported by a parallel academic project that has grown out of the IAMCR working group on ethnicity, racism, and the media coordinated by Charles Husband (ERaM) as well as the action program proposed by Teun van Dijk (see their chapters in IMM).

Thus, the idea is moving ahead along two tracks: professional and academic. Significantly, there is little or no friction between the two: they seem to support each other, unlike many previous cooperative efforts. Yet there is a recognition that the two should remain distinct or else there is a risk that professional journalists would no longer be actively engaged, but would instead turn defensive with well-known arguments about freedom suppressed by outside forces-including academic forces with their intellectual challenge.

Another impressive indication about the timeliness of the monitoring idea comes from the circles concerned about the representation and portrayal of women in news media. The date January 18, 1995 was chosen as an "ordinary" newsday when activists in 70 countries recorded the main outlets of newspapers, radio, and television news, coding the stories and people in them, using over 20 common variables (see Margaret Gallagher's chapter in IMM). Although this media monitoring was limited to one day only (which moreover happened to coincide with the catastrophic earthquake in Japan), the number of participating countries makes it still perhaps the largest exercise of comparative content analysis ever carried out. Moreover, participation in this exercise was voluntary, which demonstrates how spontaneous interest can be mobilized around a good cause and with the help of an informal network.

The global women's monitoring as well as the European project on race and (in)tolerance show how the idea proposed may materialize thematically instead of as an overall survey embracing various global issues at one time. Both topics have also been promoted through EU-sponsored reviews of relevant research literature (see "Images of women in the media," 1999; "Racism and cultural diversity in the media," 2001). Other currently attractive themes, in addition to gender and race, are environment and disarmament-the latter a topic that MacBride and others started to pursue more than a decade ago.

The implementation may occur spontaneously or with the support of a political niche in some thematic cases, but a true materialization of the monitoring idea needs something more. It needs a worldwide network of collaborating scholarly activists. It needs an annual review summarizing tendencies of media coverage in the world, prepared by scholars and eventually elaborated by an authoritative commission that will issue it as a high-profile annual report. TBS

Notes and references