Media today is mostly as far from this as we can imagine. Yet, this kind of engaged, purposeful media would be a reality if we had communications policy that was grounded in a human rights framework. This framework , known the world over as the right to communicate, seems so basic, so natural, such an inseparable part of what it means to be human that it is hard to believe that it is actually one of the newer areas of formal human rights policy – and little addressed in media policy here in the US.
The strategic decision by leadership in media policy to avoid content oriented reforms and the traditional focus, in human rights, on speech as a “natural,” civil and political right (that is, according to the standard dichotomy, not a right that required resource distribution like so called economic and social rights) left important gaps in the development of a comprehensive media rights framework. As a result, media reform increasingly distanced itself from efforts to address representation and politics of programming (like the fairness doctrine or mandates for programming time for underrepresented communities) in favor of “content neutral” reform.
In human rights, the focus on “free speech” rights without addressing the relationship between communications capacity and resources made it difficult to address concepts of “speech” in this new era of technology. What did it mean to have equal access to speech in the age of television and the web? To what extent should lack of access to media production and distribution be considered a restriction of speech? These and other questions exposed the growing connection between human rights and what it means to be ”heard” in today’s communications context.