Workshops
Cultural Diversity
 Organized by
Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU)
and Asia-Pacific
Institute for Broadcasting Development
11 December, 2003.
The projection of cultural diversity through the media has contributed to the enrichment of the human community, and to the promotion of peace and communal harmony amongst the diverse civilizations of the world. But in many parts of the world
there still remain significant concerns about one single global culture expanding to dominate
media content. With the so-called Information Society, and the rapid development of multi-media
and convergent technology, will the cultural gap widen along with that of the information, knowledge
and digital divide?
Content
Speakers
Chairman: K.S. Sarma, Chief Executive Officer, Prasar Bharati, India
- Jong-Ki Kim, former Chairman of the Korean Broadcasting Commission
- Widiadnyana Merati, Deputy Minister for Media, Ministry of Informatin and Communication, Indonesia
- Roza Tsagarousianou, University of Westminister, London
- Verena Wiedemann, Heaad of European Affairs, ARD Brussels
Report
The Chairman, K. S. SARMA, CEO of Prasar Bharati, India, reminded delegates of the Bangkok Declaration which had arisen out of the 1st Conference of the Ministers on Information and Broadcasting in the Asia-Pacific Region, organised by the AIBD in Thailand in May 2003. The Declaration included a recommendation on cultural diversity, namely that:
“The participants considered that, unlike ordinary goods, cultural and audiovisual works do not lend themselves to governance by general rules of free exchange of goods and services. They subscribe to the concept of cultural diversity, including in multicultural and multiethnic societies in order to prevent the global risk of standardization. All concerned parties, governments, civil societies, public and private broadcasters are encouraged to preserve and promote cultural diversity in their respective countries and internationally, to develop dialogue among various cultures.”
Jong-Ki KIM, Professor of Journalism at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, Korea, opened the workshop discussions by describing how Korea was gradually opening its doors to various genres of Japanese mass culture products, including cinema, performing arts, and broadcasting programmes.
He said the key question was whether the inflow of Japanese mass culture posed a threat to Korea’s national identity. He maintained that television broadcasting, in particular, had a crucial role to play in achieving the goal of cultural richness and proliferation, whilst still retaining the cultural identity of a nation.
Professor Kim proposed that Japan and Korea should set aside at least one direct broadcasting satellite channel for cultural exchange, and suggested that China could join later. He said that such a cultural exchange channel, combined with the multitude of new media outlets, would work to facilitate and accelerate cultural exchanges between those three Asian nations – and that this would lead to cultural proliferation and diversity in northeast Asia.
Widiadnyana MERATI, Deputy Minister for Media, Ministry of Information and Communication, Indonesia, presented a country report to demonstrate how mass media had made a significant contribution to the preservation of that country’s cultural identity. Dr Merati said that all broadcasters in Indonesia were presenting a wide range of cultural programmes every day. He said that even private commercial stations in Indonesia regularly showed cultural programmes, although they had to ‘lighten’ the content to make them more entertaining to mass audiences. The public broadcasters presented more traditional cultural programmes, and local stations also placed a lot of emphasis on cultural content. These were important in teaching young people about their cultural heritage.
 Roza TSAGAROUSIANOU of the Communications & Media Research Institute, University of Westminster, London, made a presentation outlining the some conclusions from academic research on media and minority audiences. She said that such audiences often expressed dismay at the lack of recognition by broadcasters of their needs. They felt that broadcasters treated them as second-class citizens – placing their programmes in non-primetime slots, or only scheduling content to make up quotas. She described this as a ‘ghetto provision’.
Tsagarousianou noted that there was evidence of a new trend of cultural separatism, whereby minority audiences use new media and alternative media such as the Internet and DVDs to satisfy their needs – and leaving behind traditional media. She posed the question: “How do broadcasters respond to this?” suggesting a range of responses including fair representation (i.e. no stereotyping) and giving minorities more visibility. She said there was a need for broadcasters to address diversity in novel ways such as addressing cultural difference without essentialising it, which was not happening in Europe. She said minorities wanted to be seen to be ‘seamlessly interwoven’ into society, not treated separately.
Her presentation prompted a debate from the floor on the issue of whether the media was really capable of changing stereotypes and perceptions of certain races given that some stereotypes had been in existence for thousands of years. The perception of Arabs in Europe was quoted as one example.
Tsagarousianou agreed that such perceptions would only change slowly, but that broadcasters must start addressing the issue and taking it seriously. This led to a discussion on whether programming for other cultures should in fact be integrated into a country’s broadcasting schedules, or whether this should be left to minority media coming from outside of the country. The Arab satellite channels being targeted towards Arab audiences in Europe was quoted as an example of how those audiences could be served more cost-effectively.
It was suggested that such channels also enabled other people to see cultural programming from other countries without encroaching on mainstream schedules. Other delegates believed that such programming should be integrated into mainstream schedules to avoid the ‘ghetto provision’ described by Tsagarousianou. One delegate opined that commercial broadcasters do not like variety and pluralism because that makes it more difficult for them to sell programmes on a global basis. He said that commercial broadcasters have an economic incentive to change audience preferences so that programming will appeal to audiences all over the world and thus provide more opportunities to sell that programming.
The discussions continued with a presentation from Verena WIEDEMANN, Head of European Affairs, ARD, Germany. She said that it was ARD’s public service mission to promote cultural diversity in all its television and radio programmes, and that its mission extended to online services. This was because ARD believed that in the information society, online services would play a key role for cultural diversity. She said that there was ample proof that the marketplace alone cannot ensure this diversity. Therefore the responsibility of policy makers to foster cultural diversity should extend to the digital environment.
Wiedemann said this meant that governments must safeguard their flexibility to pursue pro-active cultural and audiovisual policies at the international level. One key area that governments needed to look at was the legal regime of the WTO, and more specifically, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). She said that if audiovisual services were to be liberalised under GATS, as some countries are requesting, the most basic and fundamental audiovisual and cultural policies would be put at risk or even become illegal. She explained that this was because the main principles of the GATS are incompatible with many audiovisual policies, which, from the perspective of international law, totally discriminate against foreign audiovisual service suppliers.
Wiedemann said that broadcasting policies at odds with GATS included financial support systems for local audiovisual productions, quota systems and must-carry rules in favour of local content, and a number of media ownership rules. She explained that this was why, in the present GATS negotiations, the European Union was taking the position that no liberalisation commitments be made in the audiovisual sector and that the exemptions from the Most Favoured Nation clause that were negotiated during the Uruguay round be maintained. Germany and many other European countries welcomed the decision taken by UNESCO to start work on a convention on the protection of cultural diversity, Wiedemann continued. She said this would help ensure that our creative destiny would withstand the massive global pressures from dominant market forces for “more of the same”. She added that cultural diversity is as important for human beings as bio diversity is for nature.
The workshop delegates strongly supported Verena Wiedemann’s views. A UNESCO representative said that his organization was committed to supporting developing countries to produce content in conjunction with various international organizations such as the ABU. However, he expressed disappointment that when UNESCO tried to set up a free programme bank for public service broadcasters in developing countries, there were few requests for the high quality programmes that UNESCO had on offer.
There was discussion on the issue of immigrants not having access to programmes from their own countries, which resulted in an impoverishment of the cultural diversity of the countries in which they now lived. It was agreed that the Internet had an important role to play in providing access to such content. Several delegates raised the point that although the Internet can be used to narrow the cultural gap, there might have to be some public intervention to make this workable rather than leaving it to the market. The difficulty of accessing cultural content through search engines, which were manipulated by commercial interests, was discussed as an example. There was agreement that there was a need to source funding for capacity building and engaging indigenous producers so that countries could produce more of their own content. It was recognised that there was a need to work with UNESCO and other international organizations to do this.
Although the workshop did not reach any formal conclusions or recommendations, there was general agreement amongst the delegates that one of the key issues that broadcasters must address is whether to integrate minority cultural content into ‘mainstream’ programme schedules and promote diversity through such an approach, or whether to cater for minority and special interest audiences though separate channels or platforms, which whilst easier to implement and manage, may not achieve the objective of promoting cultural diversity
through mainstream broadcasting services.
Notes for a Broadcasters' Action plan
- Broadcasting is a cultural industry par excellence, and - depending on the way it is organized and regulated - it can and should make a key contribution to the preservation and promotion of cultural diversity.
- A future UNESCO convention on cultural diversity can help to recognize and strenghten this role, also stimulating local production (particularly in the developing world) as well as individual exchanges and coproductions.
- In most countries, there is an urgent need for more investment in local quality content.
- The debate is still open between the need to feed minority cultural content into mainstream media programmes of each country and being satisfied with distributing minority content on separate channels and/or platforms.
Guillaume Chenevière, Executive Director of the WEMF
Resources
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