Right to Communicate Gains Relevance at the World Social Forum in Venezuela, The

According to the article, the Coalition for the Right to Communicate in Latin America and the Caribbean launched a continental campaign during a panel held concurrently at the VI World Social Forum and the II Social Forum of the Americas in Caracas, Venezuela on January 26 2006. The campaign aims to strengthen the actions of independent and community media, communications networks, personalities and institutions working towards democratisation of messages and communication and reducing the concentration of media in the hands of a few internationally funded companies.

According to Carlos Rivadereyra, a member of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and AMARC (World Community Radio Association) representative, “The current situation of the global concentration of the largest and most powerful media leads to uniformity in the message, content, and culture...We want to democratise the communication as a fundamental right to human beings, in other words, for media to become a public service, with journalists who are the authors of an authentic message and committed to the people." In the article Roberto Savio, from Inter Press Service (IPS) explains that this concentration of media control often means that the reality of the general public is often not reflected.

The campaign will take various shapes according to the context of each country's needs to help support the growth of radios and community television that is responsive and reflective of the local population. The Coalition for the Right to Communicate in Latin America and the Caribbean aims at reaffirming the right to communicate as a fundamental human right and to understand communication and the media as a public goods, whose purpose goes beyond technological and commercial aspects.

According to the article, "the communicators that make up the coalition affirm that the fight for the right to communicate forces them to strengthen the popular, community, alternative and indigenous media that have been gradually put together with a great deal of effort. This involves various tasks, especially the articulation of the work between communicators, social movements, organisations, and networks among others."