Four steps to community media as a development tool
Community media are usually conceived as local alternatives to mainstream broadcasting, occupying only fringe positions around the edges of big media. However, they represent a crucial input in development processes, playing an important role in democratisation and building citizenship, social struggles, and awareness raising. Despite their role in fostering local development, particularly in the so-called global South, community media still face difficulties due to the constraints created by national media laws. Often regulators overlook their activities, and ignore that these activities, far from being simply ‘illegal’ from the legislator’s point of view, can have a real impact on people’s empowerment. This paper addresses development advocates and communities,1 offering them a concrete proposal for the inclusion of communication activities at the community level in development projects and advocacy work in the field of media policy. The four sections of the paper, which can be ...