María de los Ángeles Huerta Del Río

The Role of the Media in Creating a World Movement for Peace and Development

This is the edited transcript of the presentation by María de los Ángeles Huerta to Panel 2, “Peace Through Development,” of the Schiller Institute’s Nov. 22 conference, “For World Peace—Stop the Danger of Nuclear War: Third Seminar of Political and Social Leaders of the World.”

Mrs. Huerta is a former Mexican Federal Congresswoman. She spoke in Spanish, with simultaneous translation into several languages. The full proceedings of the conference are available at the Schiller Institute website.

Greetings to all of you, and a very good afternoon!

I believe, that in order to carry out a world mobilization for peace and development, it is also necessary that we who have made proposals here about what must be done, pause for a moment, to reflect seriously on the impact of how the great global powers have used the traditional communication media until now.

I’d like to briefly say that if we think about traditional, private, commercial media in the world, we can realize that they have functioned from the beginning, as what the Italian Antonio Gramsci described as the “ideological instruments of the State.” I’ll refer to these briefly. When we think of these media as instruments of domination and legitimacy of the structures of power, I think that they achieve this because conventional media, particularly radio and television, the printed press, they have a capacity to invade the mind space of the public collectively and individually.

This means that the imposition of economic and political models achieved by high-level global authorities have had a very important arm of support in the large, global media chains, not much different from what was accomplished during World War II, when Hitler himself and the Nazis repeated lies over and over until they had convinced a large portion of the population that those lies were true.

Think of what is happening now and how important this is. Eighty percent of television and radio viewers and listeners in many countries in the world depend exclusively—or that is, they feed exclusively from two or three media companies. This also happens worldwide. Seventy percent of communications equipment worldwide is in the hands of only six media groups; Seventy percent of production of information in the world is in the hands of six media groups. What does this mean? It means that the framework of a media oligopoly which exists on a global scale, is repeated also at the national scale of each nation.

I think that this is a global tragedy for the citizens of the world, because this global media oligopoly has dire consequences in terms of how these global powers exert their economic, financial, and political dominion throughout the world. Until national laws are reformed radically, which needs to be done categorically, they [the global media oligopoly] will continue to have practically total control over all communications. What does this mean? They can build narratives; they make up the stories that regular people end up believing concerning economics, the environment, politics, and everything else. It is decided and defined by narratives shared among the media conglomerates worldwide.

As I was saying, until national laws are instituted to radically change this reality in each nation-state, it will be very difficult to expect to reach global awareness of any issue; particularly the issue that we are dealing with here of world war. This can be extended to any situation, because they not only hoard the production of narratives, but they also monopolize the audience share on a global basis. Think, for instance, of what happens in countries like Brazil or Mexico. In the Mexican case, there are a mere two TV corporations that take up 94% of the viewer time. In Brazil, it’s a similar situation. It is highly unlikely that we can grow a world citizenship that is aware if we do not disperse these yokes that distort the global narrative.

I maintain that if we want to introduce changes in economics, finances, politics, we need to be able to build on the idea of a global citizenship. To achieve this, we must also organize in such a way that we can counteract these narrative schemes that prevent us from having a real view of what is occurring on the planet, and in each country in the world. So far, the ability of these powers to self-legitimize to the majorities with narratives that are only convenient to interests that hold this hegemony, is the rule.

For many years for instance, neo-liberalism was presented as the end of history; the last step. There are still people who defend neo-liberal policies as options to solve financial and economic problems in the world. There are still people who believe that certain economic policy measures, or policy measures in general, are the only ones that can save the planet. We as citizens of the world must ask ourselves if this is true, or should we perhaps also put in question the logic upon which this narrative is built.

Much could be said about this, but unfortunately, we don’t have that much time.

However, if in the last century and the century before last, the main enemies of equality and justice were the owners of the means of production, today we can say that the problem is also who owns the global communications media.

So, I propose that we, as humanity, cannot continue to be blind to this world phenomenon. Nor can we continue to aspire to assemble a true world citizenry unless we do everything necessary as nation states and citizens of the world to counteract the brutal power of global media monopolies. If we as citizens wish to succeed in the struggle that we have set for ourselves, we truly need to reflect deeply on the fact that information is what defines collective perceptions throughout the planet.

If people are influenced by distorted, erroneous information, or lying, most likely we will be unable to pull together the collective action we need to be able to transform this humanity, in which more than 70% or 80% of the population are impoverished, and deprived of their resources, their mines, their power, their forests, their water, by these powers which are hegemonic in the world and who perhaps represent a tiny minority of 1%, 2%, at most 3% of the people of the world.

It is very grave that we are living this way on this planet, and that so far, there are not many alternatives. We do have the internet and the social media, through which we may eventually be able to find a way to organize a first resistance to this.

How long must this war continue? How long will these lying narratives which prevent us from acting, continue to prevail? Perhaps until we are able to organize ourselves to counteract this great world power.