What is Community Media?
Paper delivered at Community Voices Conference, Media Institute of Southern Africa, October 6 ‑ 11, 1996, Club Makokola, Mangochi, Malawi.
Guy Berger, Journalism & Media Studies, Rhodes University.
(revised, Oct 24)

Abstract:
Community media should not be defined in the abstract, but in relation to a particular purpose, particular social conditions and a particular ethic. It is the purpose that allows one to distinguish between the features both necessary and sufficient for the definition. This purpose in turn is always closely tied to particular social conditions and the ethics associated with them. This approach means we can define community media by both its difference and its commonality with other media, especially independent media, and highlight the distinctive characteristics and their comparative utility. The neglected aspect of journalistic mission, agenda, ethics and practice based on democracy, human rights and liberation as the most fundamental characteristic is singled out for special attention. 

Personal note:
This paper is drawn on my experience in setting up a community newspaper "Izwi lase Rhini" in Grahamstown in 1979, running the Media and Resources Services (MARS)community media centre in Johannesburg 1983‑5, work in the Community CopyArt centre in London 1986, and editing and managing South newspaper in Cape Town 1993‑4. It also draws on reading materials cited below, plus numerous discussions with South Africans involved in community media work. Responsibility for its argument is of course my own. 

Introduction:
This paper begins by setting out its brief, and then proceeds to locate community media within the philosophical framework of the right to communicate versus other possible perspectives. It then examines several definitions of community media on this basis, and teases out the one that predominates in South Africa. Here, the features of ownership and control, local character, participation and professionalism are discussed. Attention is then given to the different concepts of community, and the distinct agendas of development and democracy, and the implications of this for defining the most valuable component of community media for Misa.

The brief:
Misa's brief for this paper is: what defines community media? "(I)s it a matter of of profits, participation, localisation, ownership or communications policy?", it reads. Several examples are given: Mozambique where government has the major stake in what Unesco calls community radio; Zambia has an entrepreneur wanting to start a "community" station; Namibia has a community radio station trying to become commercially self‑sufficient; South Africa has community radios that might be simply "commercial radio" in disguise. What is the difference between an NGO‑run community magazine that makes a profit, and a commercial paper like the High Density Mirror that produces information for disadvantaged communities? "Is it important that we have a tight definition of what is and isn't community media?" Should Misa's proposed Media Development Fund distinguish between commercial and community media, and how? And what is the role of community media in relation to pluralism and democracy?

This valuable contextualisation of the issues gives us a handle upon which we can develop an appropriate argument. Simply, what counts as community media in many contexts may not be useful for helping us understand this particular context. What is needed is an assessment of what Misa's particular interest is in the topic, which in turn means an assessment of the guiding philosophy of the association, and contrasting it with alternative agendas. The definition that eventually emerges might not be appropriate in other contexts, where different purposes might exist behind an exercise in trying to distinguish between community and other kinds of media. 

The Misa philosophy:
Misa is closely tied with the Windhoek declaration whose emphasis is unashamedly and explicitly political. The declaration defines the vital role of press freedom and diversity for a democracy. This is a different agenda to that, say, which  might emerge from an association of musicians who would stress culture, or a grouping of NGOs interested in development. 

In turn, Misa's philosophy is part of an historical period where communication as a basic human right has been put on the table. This is a development upon the 1980s in Africa which saw a far more diluted concept. Thus the African Charter of Human and People's Rights, drawn up in 1981, reads: "Every individual shall have the right to receive information. Every individual shall have the right to disseminate his opinions within the law." (Ansah, 1988:14) The catch in this limited concept is in the way its two provisions are interdependent: simply, what is the use of receiving information if there is a restriction on what information is disseminated? Censorship not only denies the rights of those producing messages, but the rights of those who might otherwise wish to receive such messages. 

But in the 1990s, we have gone further, to ask: what is the meaning of a right to receive and send messages (note: of all kinds, i.e. of information as well as opinion, of visual as well as verbal), without combining the two activities into a single right: the right to communicate? The stress in the 1990s has thus been to oppose a reality where the right to receive information was limited ‑ and, indeed, limited precisely because the right to send information was also limited: confined to those who have political or economic access to the means of sending information. 

The result has been to push for the recognition of a right to communicate: to ensure that individuals and groups really have a right to send messages as well as receive them. It has been complemented by two other developments: 
‑ firstly, a right to information, which imposes freedom of information obligations on the part of governments holding information: i.e. it makes more meaningful a right to receive information; 
‑ secondly, the right to disseminate information has been advanced in terms of the right to freedom of expression, with a stronger political edge to it. Part of the exercise of this right to freedom of expression is to produce a diversity of messages, which is a valued element of a democracy (ibid:14). 

This is not to say that every individual or group wishes to continuously exercise a right to communicate; i.e. sending and receiving a plurality of messages. But it is to place this potential at the hands of those who do. 

Misa's own position appears to provide for the right to communicate to operate at the level of different countries in the region, such that those who want to produce messages should be allowed and encouraged to do so (pluralism) and that the production and consumption of these messages should take place in an environment of freedom of expression, so that independent, i.e. non‑governmental, media can exist. 

Unlike some in the community media movement, however, Misa has not placed particular emphasis, and certainly not exclusive emphasis, on the marrying of these two thrusts. Thus while some people focus on the producers and consumers of messages being the one and the same group, Misa has allowed for a separation between the two. Not that the Misa position rules a fusion out at all: this kind of media project is accommodated with the broad right to communicate. Only non‑independent (i.e. state, government and party) producers of media messages are excluded from the Misa constituency. 

The point of this argument is to highlight that Misa's mission is essentially to do with media from the vantage point of their contribution to democracy. Misa is not a trade association, but an association uniting like‑minded media workers around common principles that are linked to promoting the right to communicate, a right that ‑ it must be said ‑ is part of a progressive package of human and democratic rights. 

Where does community media come from ‑ and fit in to the Misa philosophy?
Community media in one particular incarnation, and perhaps that at the heart of why the phenomenon has now come on to the Misa agenda, is a product of South Africa. This is not to forget that various versions of it exist elsewhere, but that there is a historically very specific formula that has emerged from South African struggle conditions (and one coloured by its primarily urban origins).

Thus, it is worthwhile trying to be rigorous when referring to community media, and distinguishing it from terms like grassroots media, participatory media, alternative media, democratic media, local media, etc. with which it is often loosely conflated. In the wide media landscape, we can distinguish between media produced by groups whose core activity is something other than media output (eg. churches producing religious media, trade unions producing a newsletter), and media institutions. We can also talk about "folk" media like dance, songs, rituals, drama and dress. For the purposes of this paper, however, I will concentrate on the media institutions. Within this section of the landscape, one can distinguish between state/public media, government media, corporate media, independent (commercial) media ... and community media.

According to South Africa's National Community Media Forum (NCMF), community media has been largely used as "a tool to counter state propaganda, inform, mobilise and educate the masses about their rights and to facilitate the building of strong community organisations" (1996:7). Congruent with this purpose, the NCMF identifies the following as the features of community media:

‑ Ownership & control: (by "the community through its representatives"; according to Chris Gutuza, these are organisations like religious, youth, women, civic, labour, education, cultural and sporting (1996:3);
‑ Non‑profit: (ownership and purpose should be non‑profit; NOTE: this is not a ban on commercial viability);
‑ Accessibility: (to its community);
‑ Type of community: geographical, or interest group, 
‑ Political criterion: to service disadvantaged communities (geographical or interest group).
South Africa's Independent Broadcast Authority operates with a less restrictive definition: giving out "community radio" licences to groups that do not service the disadvantaged.

The NCMF distinguishes its community media from these media groups, and it further distinguishes its constituency from what it calls "independent media", which it says do not meet all the criteria, but must at least conform to the last. From this, it is clear that for a community medium to count as such for the NCMF, it has to meet all FIVE criteria. These are linked together, and while all are necessary conditions, it is only sufficient when there are all of them. In other words, a medium that meets all the conditions, except for instance, the one barring profit‑making, does not count. (Independent media is defined as different from corporate media in that it is not owned by a parent corporation, according to Gutuza (1996:5)).

I think it is useful to stick with the NCMF position at this point in the paper, inasmuch as it enables us to delineate a certain kind of media from others: 
‑ its political criterion of servicing the disadvantaged marks it off from media rich sectors of society, or from media that targets groupings defined by criteria other than disadvantage (like religious media, big business‑community media); 
‑ its ownership requirements, even not taking into account its ban on profits, distinguishes it from independent media as well as from state, party or corporate ownership. 

However, it is also worth taking something from the IBA, and using it to elaborate on one of the NCMF's criteria: I refer here to the condition of participatory media, referred to as access by the NCMF. 

In fact, if one looks at the practice in South Africa, there are also other criteria that come into play in understanding what constitutes community media. I would thus point to:

‑ the link to a social movement in history; 
‑ an ethical alignment & journalistic mission which has resulted from this; 
‑ a range of popular activities cited by the NCMF as: 
	‑ a community telling its own stories and creating its own images;
	‑ skills development
	‑ job creation
	‑ freedom of expression
	‑ access to information
	‑ cultural enrichment
	‑ as a means of exercising rights. (1996:10).

This provides us in total with eight characteristics for community media. There is a ninth one informally in operation in South Africa, but which I believe is not intrinsic to a definition of community media. This is the criterion of locality. It is evident that the IBA in practice restricts the concept of community media to a geographic agenda, such that local operation effectively becomes a defining aspect of community media, even if it is a community such as classical music lovers. Yet, I would argue that local media per se is not the same thing as community media. This differs from the British‑based Community Communications Group (Comcom), which stressed the centrality of local finance, local training and local programming sources for community radio (Partridge, 1982:14). However, not all local media need be community media in the sense of the eight characteristics listed above, and ‑ as international discussion groups on the Internet show ‑ it is quite possible to have community media features on a global scale. The experience of community newspapers like Namakwa Nuus and Saamstaan, which serviced very large geographical areas (northern Cape and southern Cape respectively) also demonstrate this. 

Which of the eight characteristics then are really fundamental? To answer this, let me begin by spelling out in a bit more detail the point of these three additional, implicit criteria noted above: 

‑ the link to a social movement:
	As Chris Gutuza notes, "community media developed as a voice of oppressed communities who had been excluded from all mainstream processes." (1996:3) This background has meant that community media has changed shape and emphasis as the agenda and issues in the social movement have changed. Thus, for instance, the level of participation has risen and fallen with the changing state of social mobilisation (Berger, 1994). The point has been to see community media not only as reflective of a community, or as serving a community, but actually constituting an organised community involving a community of identity. Community media in the South African sense have been projects towards communities‑for‑themselves, not communities‑in‑themselves. To use another terminology, this kind of media is seen as being part of gemeinschaft (community), rather than gesellschaft (society): the former serving to highlight social bonds and local interrelationships (see Calabrese, 1991:108‑9).

‑ the ethics:
Some commercial media in South Africa have also tried to forge communities in this sense, as for example in the construction of the imaginary "702land" populated by "702landers" by the Radio 702 broadcaster. But apart from the difference in ownership (private), this is not the same kind of community medium for which South Africans prefer to use the term. A commUNITY is about fostering a real UNITY. In my view, it is difficult to have true community media without having a community (at least in the making). Community media may help consolidate a community, but in South Africa at least, this form of media has not given birth to a social movement: rather it has been the other way around. Misa may thus hunt high and low in a given society for community media without finding it, if the society does not have the civil society activity that underpins this medium.

Forged in the struggle, community media has a legacy that is strongly human rights oriented, including gay rights in most instances even if this category is not a major thrust of the media. The ethic then is one that believes passionately in justice, in progressiveness, in an oppositional state to injustices. Even where changing conditions, like democratisation in SA, mean that ethics of development, upliftment, education, etc come into play, this basic ethic does not vanish. While there is greater emphasis on being FOR various things, the characterisic of being AGAINST other things remains intact. Logically, this stance has a bearing on the mission of journalism in community media: providing for an activist flavour to media production activities. 

‑ the activities:
	The activities ascribed to community media by Gutuza are also integrally linked to the socio‑historical period. The activities by and large are not motivated by a desire to communicate as an end in itself, but are a means towards ends that are beyond media and communication. The end point are objectives linked to the particular social movement. We are talking here then of media workers who are not journalists as much as activists in the first instance, and media happens to be their arena of operation. 

Community media, then, is not a celebration of participation and dialogue for the sake of these phenomena, but part of a movement for liberation, social solidarity and progress (cf. Huesca, 1995:103). The focus on democratic, participatory communication for its own sake risks ignoring "the daily struggles occurring outside the sanctuary of the church and development agencies, making it potentially irrelevant to people's everyday lives." (ibid). This is a major factor in many countries where alternative media projects are usually linked to a development or religious organisation, a factor that is pertinent to southern Africa. 

Of course, the eight criteria outlined here exist only as an ideal type, and the real world has much more messy and incomplete instances than these neat categories may suggest. To actually make use of the concept therefore, one needs to see what the core issues are: what at the end of the day is the most important. I will examine here the cases of ownership and profits; participation and finally the ethics and activities. 

Ownership and profits

It is a mistake in my mind to place primary weighting on the question of ownership, or of profits. If we are concerned here with the right to communicate, then these do not have a decisive bearing on the topic. For instance, as in Denmark, one can have a situation where broadcast facilities are state‑owned and operated, but where "community radio" windows are provided for. In this case, the ownership is not a fundamental determinant on the character of the broadcast which could fit all the other criteria specified by the NCMF. It might be that a privately‑owned medium lends itself to other characteristics (such as limited access to communities) ‑ but this is not always necessarily so. For example, if the outcome, the end product of a specific commercial radio's activities and programmes, is thus the same as that of NCMF‑style community radio, then it is not hugely relevant that ownership is different. 

I doubt too that profitability in southern Africa is really a significant factor. What profits there are (and this is not at all certain!) will probably cover salary and other costs if a media project is to simply survive. If community media, like commercial media, can grow and provide jobs so much the better. It is true that the differences in this case don't vanish: community media makes money in order to publish, commercial media publishes in order to make money. Both may create jobs in the process, but both have primary purposes beyond job creation. If these different purposes achieve service for, and involvement of, disadvantaged people, this outcome would seem to be more significant than the commercial or non‑commercial dynamic of the project concerned. Thus, a privately‑owned, profit‑oriented medium fulfilling NCMF criteria on other counts, would seem to me to be close to community media, even if it remains distinct on this question.

There are already indications that community media in South Africa at least is not too "hung‑up" on the question of commecialisation. Thus, community video is weighing up whether to set up a profit‑making investment arm to be involved in commercial television, in order to make money to fund its core community activities. This too begins to bring community and independent/corporate media closer to each other in several respects, even if they do not blur into exactly the same thing. 

My main point, then, is that from the point of view of what is out there in the media landscape, and what role it is playing, the activities and content are more important than the question of where the money goes ‑ if, of course, there is money. So, in short, the question of profits is not in my view a critical issue in defining the core of community media. 

Control and participation:

The more important matter than ownership and profits is perhaps where control actually lies. Even, here, however, I will argue that this is not the most fundamental quality of community media from the point of view of Misa's interest. 

Community ownership is seen as providing the basis for community control, and this latter characteristic is important for defining the heart of community radio in particular. But what does it mean, in practice?  Control is directly linked to participation, and here the issue becomes extremely complex. As a result, I have some reservations about selecting participation as the key characteristic of community media and will spell these out shortly. Lots of people, however, have a completely opposing point of view to mine. 

For example, for Sue Valentine, in community radio, "the broadcasters are also the listeners ‑ it is participatory radio in a much more hands‑on way than any phone‑in talk show could ever be. People who make up the community of listeners have their chance to become programme contributors, producers or broadcasters as well. Comunity radio is premised on the belief that the airwaves are a public resource and that all citizens have the right to freedom of communication and expression." (cited in Currie, 1996:8).

The IBA, in line with its founding legislation, is firm about requiring community participation in the selection and provision of programmes.

An even stronger view is taken by British writer, Simon Partridge, for whom access means using broadcast facilities without "having your message watered down by the media professionals based there." (1982:69). In this kind of view, for each person to be a sender and receiver of information, "communication should be de‑professionalised to the largest extent possible. All those who feel the need to express themselves should be able to do so without unnecessary professional mediation" (1981:2, cited in Partridge, 1982).  Kivikuru (1993:161‑2) takes a similar stand, arguing that "media professionalism appears frequently as a significant `killer' of genuine peripheral media culture, creativity, and innovativeness ...". It is seen as leading to the modelling of endogenous cultural production according to exogenous, and often unsuitable, patterns like the inverted pyramid structure for news. 

However, as Jukubowicz (1988:11) points out, "deprofessionalisation of the media, one of the rallying cries of supporters of democratisation, has largely given way to concepts like `controlled professionalisation'. In other words, ... direct communicative democracy (which would turn every group member in to a sendceiver freely alternating between the roles of senders and receivers) has largely yielded place to a special type of representative democracy." Indeed, the NCMF itself recognises that one is not talking as much about direct democracy as community organisations acting as representatives of the community inasmuch as ownership and control is concerned. 
One of the reasons for this diluted populism is, related to the logistics of direct democratic participation in community media, which are huge especially in rural areas where distances and skill shortages are huge obstacles. Another reason for the diluted populism is in fact the populist purpose of community media. Says US broadcaster Bill Siemering, "listeners have a right to hear programming that is worth their time; programming should be accessible as well as provide access. Programming should reflect the same care and attention to quality that goes into creating the baskets, potter and music that comes from the community, not sound makeshift. ... Most of the stations I know in South Africa have ...clear, well‑defined missions that recognise to serve the community, they must reach the community. They are both mission and listener driven." (1996:11). In other words, a degree of professional selection, editing, packaging is essential to community media rather than being a disqualifying feature. Unprofessional participation is not something to be romanticised if it alienates audiences. There is no point in community media giving people a voice, if that voice is not going to be communicated so that others will listen to it. 

Another problem of putting participation at the centre of defining community media is the difficulty in actually explaining what this means. Bordenave (1994:46) cautions against "a disease called participationitis" in which everything is checked with everybody:  "the result is general efficiency, even anarchy". The same writer, however, goes further by warning against the opposite extreme where participation can also be banalised  ‑ "like using the term to decribe someone asking a radio station to play a certain piece of music, up to someone  donating money to an Aids campaign". Participation, in his view, should be reserved for "joint efforts of people for achieving a common, important objective previously defined by them." (ibid). 

But, even with this kind of qualification, participation, as Jukubowicz recognises, is typically a function of pressing historical conditions: "under ordinary circumstances, most people are prepared to accept representative communicative democracy." (1988:12) It is unrealistic in his view to expect continuous self‑expression, and one should note that participation can run out of steam. 

Participation, then, is a characteristic of community media, but not one that should be fetishised. As we shall see, the question is not only the extent ("how much participation makes a medium a community medium", but participation by whom and how this impacts on control: a question which touches on the character of a community concerned and its internal stratification, and to which I shall return. 

A developmentalist agenda does not equal community media:

It may be observed, though, that perhaps even more important than formal participation is the concept underpinning community radio as regards its listeners. This is something I would say is a very important quality of community media. 

One can follow Rahim (1994:134) here in distinguishing between an information model of communication which focusses on flow; and a dialogical model that focusses on meanings. The former model assumes that meanings are fixed in the messages. Dialogical sees meanings as related to the fact that senders and receivers are at the same time receivers and senders in relation to themselves and to others. Meaning is forged through coexistence, copresence and collaboration in a common world, not through transmission of neutral messages from A to B in a uni‑directional way (cf: Huesca, 1994:57). As Kivikuru, (1993:171‑2) says: even if people may be happy to be mere receivers of mass communications, i.e. not demand the right to communicate as such, they remain "active in their relationship with the media; they are far from an obedient mass. They ignore, they select, they compare media substance with their immediate surroundings; they might dance around the identification poles, but they make the melodies for the dance themselves. They are tolerant, but if the identification poles appear repeatedly outdated or irrelevant, they desert the vehicle. The power of popular taste is real..."

In short, community media ought to operate with a model that recognises the active audience. Too often, however, even with high participation, the model is an instrumentalist, informational one in the one‑way sense described above, with the old hyperdermic needle one‑way view where community media is a tool to inform and educate audiences. Says Kivikuru: "Big Brother still wants to inform, educate, and entertain the passive, helpless receivers. Big Brother might be indigenous or exogenous, but his mind tends to remain the same." (ibid:172). The NCMF here sometimes falls into this trap, by adopting a crude instrumentalist approach in specifying that community media should play a development role by causing certain changes in the target audience. As Huesca (1994:59) notes: "The instrumentalist notion of communication has been challenged most forcefully in popular culture from the findings of reception studies, which empirically positioned audiences as active in their own oppression, resistance, and opposition through complex processes of cultural appropriation, consumption and production". In this, the lines between oppressor and oppressed become more blurred (ibid:60). 

Media that sees its audience as simply customers to make money out of, i.e. a commercial agenda, or as dumb animals needing to be developed, i.e. a developmentalist agenda, are not community media, no matter how many of the NCMF's criteria are fulfilled. 

All this said, though, community media even if rejecting a crude instrumentalist role does adhere to an interventionist role, which is quite distinct. This interventionist role is compatible with, in fact requires, the notion of active audiences. It is also bound up with what in my view is the single most important feature within the Misa mandate: the ethic and mission of community media. 

Ethics and activities:

The assumption in SA media that community radio needs a progressive agenda is often neglected in the romantic, populist fixation on participation or non‑profit characteristics. However, the centrality of a progressive agenda has been noted in some quarters. Thus the British Comcom group has stressed "a programming policy which encourages the development of a participatory democracy and which combats racism, sexism and other discriminatory attitudes." (Partridge, 1982:14/5, my emphasis) Likewise in the USA, the founding movement for community radio stressed the service as an alternative to commercial and public broadcasting with not only alternative financing arrangements (listener subscriptions), but alternative viewpoints on the news and uncensored commentary from the community. (ibid:17,19).

Bill Siemering (1996:12) urges community radios to resist the temptation, in the absence of outside financial support, "to just play the most popular music to reach the largest possible audience to get advertising." They exist for a greater purpose. 
One is thus not talking about financial viability of community media for the sake of it, but for a particular purpose. I would go further and say that one is not talking about communities here in the sense of simply community of interests in locality, ethnicity, occupation, religion, or gender ‑ unless it is a community as against other definitions as well. Thus, we go beyond the idea of community as a classification of a collection of people and even as a live collectivity. It needs, in line with our insistence on the right to communicate, a sense of advancing the rights of this grouping against those forces that would deny them, and within the broader framework of general human rights and justice. In the USA, people calling in to talk radio it emerges, do not primarily want a platform for their views, but a sense of companionship (Jukubowicz, 1988:12). This is of course absolutely legitimate, but it is not community radio in the political sense described here.  

The ethical agenda of community media has implications for its journalism. If community media entails at least a degree of representative communications practice, this implies a new kind of "communication participants ‑ people who facilitate communications without necessarily becoming communictors themselves." (Jukubowiz, 1988:10) Yet this should not suggest that they are somehow without any socio‑political agenda, professional function or control. This can be seen in a  fascinating account of "people's reporters" in Bolivia's community radio presented by Huesca, (1996), who distinguishes their activist journalism from traditional journalism.  The latter stresses the qualities of being impartial, apolitical, skilled, independent; the former stresses responsibility, solidarity, participatory, mobilising, anti‑injustice, interdependent. (ibid:41). (In fact, the people Huesca worked with were less pure than this demarcation suggests, but it is useful to abstract these features in order to highlight the overall character). 

Clearly, it is possible to have participation and control without a progressive agenda. One can also have professional "people's reporters" with a progressive socio‑political agenda, but almost total control. Neither on its own is fully enough to constitute community media in the sense Misa would be interested in. Community Media for us should be participation PLUS a progressive agenda, probably with more emphasis on the latter. 

A liberatory mission for journalism:

It is often argued or assumed that community media entailing participation or utilising people's reporters are therefore intrinsically a democratic phenomenon. They are seen to be enfranchising those who are marginalised from other forms of mass communication. It is true that community media can put the means of communication in the hands of people at local level (Currie, 1996:8). It is also true that participation, "in commenting on, challenging and influencing decisions and programmes that affect people's lives, can be an integral part of democratisation, of people being empowered to take responsibility for their lives and the way government and society operates." (ibid). Community radio can especially enhance freedom of expression for illiterate people.

Similarly, the agenda of community media is sometimes seen as being one of clarifying domination in much communication, and facilitating opportunity for the right to communicate to resurface: i.e. to aim for a communicative democracy as advocated by Portales (cited in Huesca, 1994:63).

But as Currie observes, there is no automatic connection between community‑based media and democracy. (ibid). It may also be observed that democracy does not always engender full community participation. Thus, the people's reporters elected by communities in Bolivia, described by Huesca (1996:43,4), were mainly male: of 180 reporters trained by one station in two years, only 30 were women. A sampling of reports sent in over one month in 1993, showed only 6% coming from women. To understand this situation, one needs to recognise that the "people's reporters" were chosen by communities for a Bolivian community radio station. But, "asking the people of each village to nominate and vote on delegates was a seemingly democratic procedure that resulted in the perpetuation of gender inequalities. ... (S)eemingly democratic structures produce undemocratic results" (ibid:50). The situation described by Huesca is one where a whole arena of communication is curtailed, and as such it shatters the idea that the community media through democracy alone can represent the community as a whole.

Democracy, then, is not necessarily a guarantee of what South Africans at least would like to see in community radio. (In South Africa, Jeanne du Toit, [1996 ‑ forthcoming], has noticed a tendency for men to move more into community radio once it has started working, and displace women producers and health, etc. programming by inserting themselves as music DJs). 

The gender issue shows that community media ought not to treat its commitment to the disadvantaged as if the relations of power were purely operational in the dualism between them and the advantaged. Intra‑community differences have to be kept in focus (Huesca: 1995:105). 

Calabrese (1991:108) cites Raymond Williams (1983:76) about how "community" is always a "warmly persuasive word", which never seems to be used unfavourably. Thus Williams (1979) wrote: "It was when I suddenly realized that no one ever used 'community' in a hostile sense that I saw how dangerous it was." Says Calabrese in disgust: "(B)y assigning ... projects with the label 'community' we gut the term of anything resemblng its philosphical meaning, and we delude ourselves into thinking that what is being achieved ... resembles anything like a voluntary commitment to sustaining communal life. Whether by design or default, the term `community' now has little value besides as a public relations tool ... .The class, race, and gender divisions of labor and inequities of rural America do not disappear because planners glossed over them with what might be the most useful buzzword of the  information age: community." (ibid:123)

Finally, what the intra community differences issue also shows, is that it is not enough for community media to simply reflect communities in the media structures and contents. It is necessary to act as an agent with a relative autonomy, centered around the participating activists, that intervene in  community power relations (and media consumption patterns). These patterns go very deep. In another study, Huesca found that gender lines, age and status inhibited communication by people being interviewed for community radio. Political fear and shyness were also factors. "If procedures are left to chance, participation will inevitable reflect relations of power in societies, neighbourhoods and households. But if communication follows a design guided by democratic principles, responsive procedures can be developed to identify and amend inequalities." (1995:116).

This requires an agenda on the part of community media practioners: and one that is not purely democratic. Indeed, the agenda is also not even purely communication‑centric (eg. getting women's participation just to make the communication egalitarian: the idea, rather,  is to make the broader society egalitarian as well). A community media agenda should, thus, start from the point of view of liberation from dominant power structures, and where communication is a tool in a larger social praxis (Huesca, 1994:57). As Lai (1991), reminds us: "The fundamental issues of medical care in the Third World are not related to a lack of communication, but to a lack of clean drinking water, proper food, and of basic medical facilities. To cope with natural disasters is less a matter of information than a matter of basic infrastructure. These problems stem directly from poverty ‑ a question of land tenure, lack of credit, exploitation by landlords and middlemen, lack of irrigation facilities, and high cost of inputs. Most of these are structural and political questions.".

Conclusion:

According to Thomas (1994:58), the purpose of communication is to create a community. Participation is both the basis for and the milieu of a community. This is especially the case with community media, but the point of this paper is to say that this is a necessary, but insufficient, condition for community media. Community media, from the Misa point of view, needs to about communities in a process of liberation: i.e. developing human rights in the broadest sense. Community media which trades in development issues divorced from democratic concerns is not community media in the sense deserving attention from Misa. A community radio station that is community‑owned, non‑profit and acts as an advice office on air will reflect community concerns, help empower people, may even have participation.  All this is very valuable ‑ but on its own that is not enough for present purposes. For community media to count in Misa, it needs community journalism too ‑ and journalism with the particular liberatory and human rights ethic that goes with this. 

This is not a call for community media to represent only the "progressive" voices in a given community. Community media needs to recognise that people with "reactionary" views are also part of any community one wishes to define, and community media needs to reflect this diversity even while interrogating and critiquing such positions. My point is that community media, must be participative, but it also still needs to stand for something progressive and to treat this as its supreme guiding principle. 

In this light then, why after all should one seek out the differences between community and other media, rather than look for the overlaps, what there is in common? And what is in common are features that can be negative from the Misa point of view, neutral (as in the advice office example above), or positive. On the negative side, some independent media may share with some community media a non‑liberatory character no matter that they are independent. In the same way that not all self‑proclaimed community media should merit Misa's main focus, not all independent media in southern Africa ought to automatically attract Misa's attention. A farmers' magazine that neglects issues of justice and democracy, i.e. which lacks a liberatory ethic, is as much out of the Misa orbit as an NGO‑owned participative health‑oriented radio station which fails to stress people's rights to health and sidesteps the struggle against socio‑political factors depriving people of this right.

This is not to say that these media should not be cultivated and encouraged to come closer. It is also not to say that independent or community media should spend their time challenging authorities, gender relations, etc in a defiant, dangerous or unstrategic manner. But it is to assert that while some battles must be picked and others postponed, that Misa media ‑ whether community or independent ‑ needs to stand for something bigger. There needs to an ethic, a mission and a range of activities that express the right to communicate, but which also, crucially, defend this right, and promote the spread of this right ‑ and embody a commitment to the other rights belonging to human beings both collectively and individually. These other rights include rights to dignity, to language and culture, to adult sexual proclivity amongst other things. One needs to be wary of imposing a form of cultural imperialism here, but one also needs to be firm that human rights are universal rights. 

If Misa media is not part of a movement in favour of these rights, and against those who would deny them, then it is not being loyal to the founding principles of the association. If Misa media is not part of a movement aimed at liberating people from prejudice, fear, subservience, passivity and exploitation, then it is not fundamentally different from any other media. 

In the end, what is important is less the distinction between community and independent media for Misa purposes, than the commonalities that can be found in both. Which is to say that in terms of priority support, networking, funding and so on, it is not community media versus independent media ‑ but within each sector, where a liberatory journalist practice is to be found. 
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List of sources:

Ansah, P A V. 1988. The African Charter and its relationship with freedom of expression. Media Development, no. 4

Berger, G. 1994. The role of grassroots democratic movements in South Africa ‑ lessons for Africa? Communication for Democratic Change, conference held by the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism, Johannesburg, December/

Calabrese, A. 1991. The periphery in the center: the information age and the `good life' in rural America. Gazette, 48:105 ‑ 128.

Comtask. 1996. Commission of enquiry into government communications, appointed by office of Deputy President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki. 

Currie, W. 1996. submission to Comtask, Presentations and Submissions, Vol 4. 

Du Toit, J. 1996. untitled manuscript of article forthcoming in the journal Agenda. 

Gutuza, C. 1996. Establishing an enabling support mechanism for South African media, draft paper prepared for Community Media Network for Community Media 2000 conference. Contained in Comtask: Presentations vol II). 

Huesca, R. 1994. Theory and practice in Latin American alternative communication research. Journal of Communication, 44 (4) Autumn. 

Huesca, R. 1995. A procedural view of participatory communication: lessons from Bolivian tin miners' radio. Media, Culture and Society, Vol 17, 101‑119.

Huesca, R. 1996. Participation for development in radio: an ethnography of the Reporteros populares of Bolivia. Gazette, 00: 29‑52.

Kivikuru, U. 1993. Peripheral mass communication: rich in contradictions. In Nordenstreng and Schiller, 1993. 

Lai si Tsui. 1991. The use of new communication technologies in third world countries: a comparison of perspectives. Gazette:48 69‑93. 

NCMF. 1996. Strategy towards an enabling environment for community and independent media. Submission to Comtask, May. Contained in Presentations Vol 2.

Partridge, S. 1982. Not the BBC/IBA. The case for community radio. London: Comedia Publishing Group. 

Siemering, B. 1996. Many models of community radio. Rhodes Journalism Review, no.11.

Thomas, P. 1994. Participatory Development Communciation: Philosophical Premises. in White and Ascroft, 1994.

White, S A, Nair, K S, and Ascroft, J. (eds) 1994. Participatory Communication. Working for Change and Development. New Delhi: Sage.

Williams, R. 1979. Politics and letters. New York: Verso

Williams, R. 1983. Keywords. A vocabulary of culture and society (rev. ed). New York: Oxford
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What is community media?

Necessary features
Sufficient features
Fundamental features
What's distinct ‑ and what's in common

Misa brief:

What defines community media? 
"profits, 
participation, 
localisation, 
ownership, or 
communications policy?"

Should Media Development Fund 
distinguish between commercial & 
community media, and how? 

What is the role of community media in relation to pluralism and democracy?
Misa interest in the topic:
The Windhoek philosophy
The right to communicate

SA's experience:
State. Corporate. Independent. Community. Other (eg.religious).

Criteria:
1. Ownership & control
2. Non‑profit
3. Accessibility
4. Type of community
5. Political

6. Link to social movement: 
         UNITY in commUNITY
7. Ethical alignment & mission: 
        activist
8. Popular activities: 
    for aims beyond media 

What's fundamental?
Ownership & profits: no
Control & participation: no
  ‑ professionals?
  ‑ logistics
  ‑ quality for audience
  ‑ participationitis
  ‑ ebb & flow
  ‑ by whom

Ethics & activities: yes
  ‑ developmentalist agenda not CM
  ‑ interventionist, not instrumentalist
  ‑ a progressive agenda
  ‑ activist journalism:
    responsibility, solidarity, participatory, 
    mobilising, anti‑injustice, interdependent

Liberatory mission:
  Democracy is not liberation
  CM as a change agent in larger social praxis

Conclusion:
 "CM" not automatically progressive
 "Independent" media not auto progressive
  Look for:
    ‑ express, defend, advance
      the right to communicate
    ‑ commitment to other human rights
    ‑ part of a movement of liberation