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Human Rights and Their Role in Global Media and Communication Discourses
Introduction
From its emergence as an identifiable field of study, “global media and communication policy” has been intersected by debates about human rights, the implications of Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the controversy surrounding the “right to communicate,” and how and why such rights are contested from a variety of vantage points within Western and non-Western contexts. This chapter will critically examine how strongly human rights issues are – or are not – embedded in discussions of global media and communication policy.
The chapter will first provide a broad and historical account of the human rights regime and, second, will examine the presence of human rights within global media and communication policy discourses. Presuming that human rights are used quite differently in different arenas and by different actors, the chapter will examine the interface of human rights with media and communication policy in four different arenas which coexist and sometimes overlap: the nongovernmental organization (NGO)/civil society arena, the intergovernmental/institutional arena, the business arena, and the academic arena. The discussion will include some examples of recent policy controversies that have occurred when attempts have been made to combine communication policy with the human rights regime. Concluding the chapter, the reasons ...
