Abstract
When it comes to community media, autonomy and independence would come into the spotlight of liberal understandings, whereas Naomi Schiller, the author of Channeling the State, suggests the ‘binary approach to state and society’ (167) needs to be re-examined. Schiller reckons the community media in Venezuela as poor neighbourhood (barrio) based organizations by and for the urban poor and their allies to participate in revolutionary state formation during the Bolivarian movement in the first decade of the 21st century when the ‘Pink Tide’ was still in full speed. She tries to defy the liberal assumption of autonomy and independence of media from state as the necessary premise of press freedom by demonstrating how community media actors interact with official state institutions and actors on a day-to-day basis through her long-term fieldwork and ethnographic accounts.
Formal democracy and television were both introduced in Venezuela in the 1950s. Democracy was a de facto two-party oligarchy with a pact that excluded the left-leaning political organizations. Television has been mainly privately owned and supported by advertising with a long-lasting American presence politically and economically on the air as well as state channels of very limited reach. The two spheres extensively overlapped and intertwined. The neo-liberal structural adjustments since the 1980s undermined the legitimacy of the two and sparked a mass protest in 1989. Under such circumstances, the advent of barrio media is not simply that of alternative media outlets to commercial media, but rather the redistribution of the means of media production as part of the social programmes supported by oil wealth under Chavez who was elected in the late 1990s in an election that ended the oligarchy.
Catia TVe became the first licensed community television in Venezuela in 2001. Its beginnings can be traced back to the early 1990s when its founders set up Cineclub (Film Club) in their barrio to document the local life and screen the footage to challenge ‘the hegemony of the commercial media’ (43) after the popular uprising against the neo-liberal reforms was violently suppressed and stigmatized by the monopolized mainstream media in 1989. Through participant observation of this community media outlet as a grass-roots organization and the means of media production for and by the poor in the Venezuelan context, Schiller revealingly documents the ‘radical interdependency’ (17, 164) between the community and the state. This interdependency can be seen in the appointment of a female founder of Catia TVe, who had more than ten years’ experience as a community media activist, as president of a new state-run television outlet (ViVe TV), Catia TVe producers and their community media fellows’ participation in shaping the laws that regulate community media with state institutions, and so on and so forth.
The author argues that statecraft could be ‘a weapon of the weak’ (15) in radical interdependency with the state. And she reveals this interdependency in scenes alive with ethnographic data.
Though politically aligned with the Chavez government and financially dependent on state institutions, Catia TVe’s staff criticized the government right before Chavez at a press conference of the then president at the presidential palace. On the one hand, the unprecedented presence of community media at the president’s press conference signals the official sanction of the participation of barrio actors in media production. On the other hand, the barrio actors regard Chavez as ‘their agent inside a hostile institutional structure’ (49). The community media actors were neither passive media viewers nor active audience in the sense of meaning-creation, but rather part of an active society that ‘pushed state actors to fulfill their commitments’ (88) with organized action (media production).
Even when Catia TVe producers acted within barrios, autonomy from the state was not the essence. With the motto, ‘Don’t Watch TV, Make It’, Catia TVe staff and volunteers produced most of the programming concerning barrios. One day, on a request for coverage, they came to a barrio to film a gathering to organize a community council, which was designed by the government to advance participatory democracy with a specialized community council law and the Ministry of Participation. The attention they drew from the local inhabitants helped encourage the barrio members’ involvement in local governance and to validate the legitimacy of the communal council. Hence, the process of media production, instead of the final programme, participated in a process of state formation in the Bolivarian Revolution.
Among the programmes made by Catia TVe, denunciation (denuncias) is a key category. When filming the problems and obstacles faced by barrio inhabitants while participating in social programmes supported by the Chavez government, Catia TVe producers attempted to advocate for barrio organizing to resolve the difficulties by denuncia makers themselves, instead of simply demanding change from the formal state institutions. Concomitantly, the barrio media as a vital space for criticism and discontent was coming into being in and through the process of Bolivarian state formation.
Though sympathetic with her interlocutors, Schiller recognizes the vulnerabilities within the Revolution by documenting the internal inequalities, especially in class and gender. The ‘hidden injuries of class’ (102) could happen to barrio media producers during the course of joint television production workshops for and by both Catia TVe producers and their state counterparts such as ViVe TV, who were mostly of higher social status, as well as disputes over the definitions of popular class culture. And within Catia TVe, power hierarchy was produced and reproduced while gendered oppression was concealed in the course of their participation in statecraft with official state actors and institutions.
When Schiller sporadically distinguishes the community media producers’ activities and ideals from liberal ones and socialist ones, it seems that there are blind spots in the latter, which is full of rich experiences in history and reality, e.g. Chinese journalism has long been practicing amateurism in the mass line (qunzhong luxian) as well as ‘criticism and self-criticism’.
The author enriches the literature on the communication scene in socialist experiments through the electoral path in Latin America since the time of Allende in Chile (Schiller & Smythe, 1972; Mattelart, 1980).
For those who are concerned about media democratization, the popular (grass-roots) cultural hegemony, the real existing relationship between state and society, and the dynamics of power relations in the Global South, this is an essential text.