Is Poverty Invisible or is Media Blind?

In a factory in Kannapolis, North Carolina 4600 people lost their jobs. Not many people would have learned about it if not for the activities of Cheri Houkala from Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign. For making stories like the one in Kannapolis known to the world through campaigning on the rights of the poor, Cheri faces the possibility of 22 years imprisonment. “Why are stories like that not shown on CNN?” Cheri is asks during her speech at the World Forum on Communication Rights during the panel discussion “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”.

The message of the panellists is clear: Communication cannot be reduced to conventional media because in this way the facts about a homeless mother in a wealthy country, lack of necessities for life for many people, the fact that there are more abandoned houses than homeless people in the US are usually not communicated to the public. Even if they are, it is done in a disproportionate way. Hundreds of thousands of dollars can be spent on communications for a beauty contest but there are no stories about the suicide of farmers in India or about an exodus of people from the rural areas to the cities where there is no work for them anyway.

“Young people who have witnessed the suicides of farmers have started to write about it,” says Palanguni Sainath, a journalist who was the keynote speaker of the panel “Out of Sight, Out of Mind". “It is time to start guerrilla journalism,” he continues, “in order to save the media from the conventional journalists. The conventional media prefer to speak about issues that are of interest to the rich of the world and not about “uncomfortable subjects” that might speak against the "market fundamentalism".

The World Forum on Communication Rights tries to answer the questions on the ownership of information and knowledge and on the control of the media. It is important to find these answers in order to allow all of us to be able to use media and to use it for the benefit of those unprivileged in the world.