Legislating for a more participatory media system: Reform strategies in South America

South America has been an important site for media reform over the past decade. The reforms taking place across the continent center on making media more widely accessible to civil society via the promotion of community and alternative media. Examining two South American countries in particular, Argentina and Venezuela, it is possible to see that media reforms have aimed at redistributing media power to a much wider range of civil society actors. The key strategy that brought major support for the reforms in the case of Argentina was the joining of forces of a large number of groups to form the Coalition for Democratic Radio Broadcasting (La Coalición por una Radiodifusión Democrática). Following a wide range of debates, the coalition’s twenty-one action points for media reform, presented to the government for the first time in 2004, were incorporated into legislation in 2009. The most significant strategy used in these reforms has been the coalition’s call for citizen involvement in media processes and policies. In Venezuela, the strategies have revolved around reviewing and rethinking wider educational, informational and cultural frameworks and their role in redistributing media power and fostering the new approaches to community and alternative media.