Radical Media

Rebellious Communication and Social Movements

John D. H. Downing

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781452238241
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This is an entirely new edition of the author's 1984 study (originally published by South End Press) of radical media and movements. The first and second sections are original to this new edition. The first section explores social and cultural theory in order to argue that radical media should be a central part of our understanding of media in history. The second section weaves an historical and international tapestry of radical media to illustrate their centrality and diversity, from dance and graffiti to video and the internet and from satirical prints and street theatre to culture-jamming, subversive song, performance art and underground radio. The section also includes consideration of ultra-rightist media as a key contrast case. The book's third section provides detailed case studies of the anti-fascist media explosion of 1974-75 in Portugal, Italy's long-running radical media, radio and access video in the USA, and illegal media in the dissolution of the former Soviet bloc dictatorships.

III

Extended Case Studies

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18

The Portuguese Explosion: The Collapse of Dictatorship and Colonialism, 1974-1975

Portugal, population 9 million and still one of the less affluent European nations, hardly seems to hold a candle to the United States or the former Soviet empire, or even Italy, the other nations whose radical media we shall examine in this final section. Its affairs may seem, then, a matter of rather recondite curiosity. Not so four centuries ago, when Portugal’s dominions stretched from Brazil to Macao, and it held the very doubtful honor of having pioneered European colonialism in Africa, in what is now Morocco. But that was then, and this is now.

Yet, this view is misguided on three counts. One is general: the automatic equation of size with significance. The minimal size of the ship from which the Boston rebels hurled the tea chests had no bearing on the huge repercussions of that defiance.

The second is that when our radical media story begins in 1974,¹ Portugal, even having lost Brazil as a colony some 150 years previously, was still ostensibly master of Angola and Mozambique (along with some much smaller African domains). These two colonies, with discreet U.S. and British support (see Minter, 1972), were part of a bloc of racist white regimes that then still ran the whole of southern Africa with the exception of Zambia and Botswana, the others being Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe; South West Africa, mandated to the Republic of South Africa’s control in 1919, now Namibia; and in particular, apartheid-run South Africa itself.

A glance at the map will show the gigantic terrain entailed, although it will show neither the natural riches involved nor the scale of repression imposed by colonial rule. Thus, the reversal of colonial policy in little Portugal, supported 100% by the radical media that flourished in the overthrow of the fascist regime, had long-term implications for the African continent. In the months of this study (April 1974-November 1975), there were two major coup attempts to restore the previous regime, and radical media played an important role in developing a public opinion that effectively resisted these efforts to turn the clock back. At a stroke, the apartheid regime in South Africa and the white minority regime in Rhodesia lost two key supporting neighbor states. The writing was on the wall, and 20 years later, Nelson Mandela took office as South Africa’s president in the first free election in the country’s history.

Third, the experiments in self-managed media in Lisbon were of immense international interest at the time, with those in favor of media change watching with fascination how they developed, while conservative commentators and policy makers were using precisely these media as litmus tests for the direction of the Portuguese revolution. At one point, U.S. national security adviser Henry Kissinger became convinced that Portugal was lost to the West, a strange concept to say the least, but nonetheless one that gives some sense to the international reverberations of the Portuguese revolt. As mentioned already in the segment on radio in Part II, southern Europe as well as southern Africa had a totally different political complexion on April 25, 1974, the day the old regime was overthrown. Right next door in Spain, dictator Franco was still alive and had been in power since 1939; when he died in 1976, Portugal was no longer available as a reactionary neighbor. In Greece, a fascist military junta that had seized power in 1967 was still in control, collapsing later that year. In Italy, the conservative Christian Democrats were still in power after 26 years, and broadcast media were comprehensively responsive to their bidding: The huge free radio movement was still aborning.

Paradoxically, however, we shall see repeatedly that foreign perceptions and even the perceptions of Portuguese political leaders were way off in their interpretation of what these media activists saw themselves as doing.

We will focus mainly on two cases of self-managed radical media in the hectic months from April 1974 through November 1975, namely the newspaper República and the radio station Rádio Renascença.² Let us, however, preface our review of these media with some basic information about what happened in Portugal during that period.

BRIEF BACKGROUND

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As of April 25, 1974, in what was termed afterward the “revolution of the carnations” because of the flowers members of the public placed in the rifle barrels of the troops who overthrew the government, the fascist and colonialist regime in Portugal, which had been in place since 1926, was finally sent packing—but peacefully, hence the carnations—by the Armed Forces Movement, a coalition of modernizing and revolutionary army officers, many of them captains. The standard of living for most of Portugal’s population was not much different then from that in its African colonies, and it was clear to the revolution’s leaders not only that the colonies were an international embarrassment, but that paying the military costs of retaining them was a colossal drain on Portugal’s meager resources for its own development. Lisbon and the south were mostly ecstatic at the change; Porto and the north were more conservative and much more apprehensive.

The big question was where would this now lead. For some, it was enough to shed the burden of colonialism. For others, integration into capitalist Western Europe was the goal. For others, alliance with the Soviet bloc. For others, the aim was developing a radical democracy, ahead of both Western and Eastern Europe. And naturally for many, day-to-day survival and a somewhat better living standard were high on the agenda.

The survival of the revolution was fragile. In September 1974 and in March 1975, attempted military coups tried but failed to reverse all the leftward movement. In November 1975, there was a much more successful and sharp switch in government policy, rather unambiguous signals of which were the dynamiting of Rádio Renascença and, in January 1976, the forcible closure of República (all in the name of democracy, of course).

REPÚBLICA

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In April 1974, this newspaper was under Portuguese Socialist Party (PSP) management. In 1975, it made a major transition, examined below, to being a self-managed daily newspaper without party affiliation. Its career was an exceptionally stormy one, and there are bitterly contested accounts of what happened in those years. Its shift to self-management was publicly criticized by an interesting line-up: not only by Portuguese and foreign conservatives, but by the PSP, and also by the French and Italian communist parties. Along with Rádio Renascença, therefore, its internal organization was a long way from being purely an internal affair.

Before April 25, 1974, República was the only tolerated daily opposition paper in Portugal. Inevitably, however, its opposition had been a rather muted affair, given the state censor’’s office.³ For example, when República sent its journalists to the 1973 conference of the Portuguese Socialist Party, held by necessity outside Portugal in Grenoble, France, the newspaper was forbidden to print any of the proceedings, including even an interview with the PSP leader, Mário Soares. It lost the money spent and the interview. Soares, however, used to write regular articles for the newspaper from Paris, under the pseudonym Clain d’Estaigne, a play on words⁴ never picked up by the censors.

Only in the brief 2-week run-up to national elections (so-named), when an official period of grace permitted the press to be a little more candid than it was normally allowed to be, could República express any significant opposition to the regime. It was a symbol of resistance rather than resistance itself.

A Change of Owners

In 1971, the PSP acquired a majority holding in the paper and proceeded to put in its own editors, Raúl Rêgo and Vitor Direito. Some PSP members were also among the journalists and the printers. According to Rêgo, the printers were among the best paid in Lisbon because of the PSP’s commitment to the working class. In these years, according to one PCP (communist party) member, formerly a República journalist, relations inside the paper were very good, with a general sense of unity in opposition to the old regime. Everyone to whom I spoke agreed, however, that hostilities broke out between the management and the staff remarkably soon after April 25.

The view put forcefully—and very simplistically—to me by Rêgo was that Portugal in 1974 was akin to someone bedridden for 48 years(i.e., under fascism) who suddenly had to walk in a democracy. Rêgo argued that this was the only light in which the República events made any sense. The evidence, however, shows that República‘s career was determined by less atmospheric and rather more tangible processes and events than Rêgo claimed.

The struggles inside the paper in the first year of the revolution can only be understood against the background of socialist party and communist party rivalry for leadership of the revolt against fascism, as well as their shared assumption—shared, moreover, by all other major political parties—that control of the media meant control of the revolution itself. This is an important question. Much of what we have studied so far has implicitly identified state or commercial ownership as the primary sources of control over mainstream media, but in the Portuguese case, political party control and religious control (in the case of Rádio Renascença) were the dominant issues.

As the first 12 months proceeded, the PCP became the dominant force in mass information, controlling the Lisbon dailies, one of which was the quality newspaper, Diario de Noticias (Daily News). The PSP found itself with only República, because it was its majority shareholder. From the PSP point of view, to have one paper in this overall context was not asking too much, especially if it owned it financially.

Rêgo insisted to me that República was never simply a party newspaper. There is, despite his insistence, considerable evidence of actions that indicate PSP determination to use the paper that way; and in turn, these actions were at the root of the strife inside the paper. For example, Soares himself used to telephone the paper repeatedly, insisting it cover particular stories. On one occasion, another leading PSP figure was interviewed about a NATO visit to Portugal and then tried to insist on seeing the interview to OK it before publication. Editorial policy at certain points indicated the PSP affiliation with great clarity. An example was the relegation to the inside pages of reporting about a huge Intersindical (the PCP-dominated labor union federation) demonstration, whereas a tiny PSP picket was given front page coverage with a photograph. Another instance was the repeated hiring of new pro-PSP journalists. Those who balked at writing what seemed to be purely PSP communication projects were often refused any assignments at all by the editors. It has to be said that PCP-dominated newspapers were no better, O Século entirely disregarding, for instance, a giant PSP demonstration in July 1975 (Mesquita, 1994, p. 362).

The reaction of the PCP journalists on the República staff was to leave as a group, albeit accompanied by some others, in April 1975. They gravitated, predictably enough, to the four Lisbon dailies with a strong PCP presence. Many felt, beyond their frustrations, that some kind of explosion was likely within the paper after they left, but at the time, none would have predicted the actual course of events. Indeed, one PCP journalist said that in retrospect, he regretted they had all left because in his view, if the PCP group had stayed, it could have limited the conflict to the issue of editorial interference and so have forced the editors into resigning over censorship. As it was, he concluded, the PSP lost the battle for control of the newspaper but won the international propaganda war against the leftward trend of the Portuguese revolution by drawing to the attention of the NATO powers a supposedly growing encroachment on press freedom in Portugal—with the PSP cast in the role of embattled heroes. Indeed, the PSP actually gave this as their reason for walking out of the government coalition in July 1975. A great deal pivoted at that time on the chain of events in Portugal’s radical media.⁵

Thus, the newspaper became a case from which to squeeze political advantage rather than a mass medium valued for itself. For example, the paper’s format was shoddy, reflecting the antique machinery on which it was printed. Although the money to install new presses was available—as the later founding of A Luta demonstrated—the PSP never bothered to do so. The PSP used the smear of PCP control to its advantage in its own international circles, although in other circles, the smear had no impact: The French daily Libération, then self-managed, and the far Left Italian weekly Lotta Continua, neither known for sympathy with the communist party, both sent support messages to the República workers.

To underscore the point about the fiction of PCP control, when eventually the Council of the Revolution, then the supreme governing body of the country, handed back the keys of the press building to representatives of the management and workers in July, the workers’ representative was Luis Porto, a PSP activist. Finally, for all its public talk about media freedom, objectivity, and pluralism, the PSP approved the November 1975 dynamiting of Rádio Renascença’s transmitter and decreed the nationalization of another radical station, Rádio Clube Português. After November 25, 1975, the PSP moved, in conjunction with other parties in government, to begin to rein in dissonant voices in the media at large.

The Printers’ Strike

A major turning point came on May 2, 1975 (after the departure of the PCP journalists), when the newspaper’s printers went on strike. “It was as though my secretary here in Parliament refused to type my letters!” expostulated Rêgo to me in April 1980, his fury still unabated. His words conveyed the ideology of personal ownership very precisely. What had originally provoked his anger was this strike. He and the PSP consistently interpreted it as a PCP plot among the arrogant República printers to wrench control of the paper from the PSP. The PSP leadership insisted that the printers wanted to write the paper themselves, as though that too was inconceivable (although it was not, in fact, the printers’ demand): “the madness that took over República,” as Rêgo put it.

The strike lasted several days. The printers’ initial demand was for an internal reorganization and a ban on hiring new journalists unless this was negotiated and approved by the workers on the paper. This was clearly designed to choke off the packing of República with PSP nominees.

The strikers elected a Workers’ Coordinating Committee (CCT) from the Workers’ General Assembly. This committee was elected by occupational sections, with 1 representative per 15 workers in each section. The committee was mandated to negotiate a statute of independence for the paper’s political line. On May 6, the committee approved a working document that proposed dialogue with the management on the issues of how the different sections of the paper should be re-organized. It also demanded financial and political party independence—especially the latter—for the paper. It further urged regular reviews of the paper’s management structure. The continuing thread, however, was the demand for a nonsectarian paper of the Left: “All the progressive parties must be treated in the same manner,” said the May 6 document. It added, finally, that the arbiters of the paper’s nonsectarian policy were to be its workers, through their democratic institutions, such as the General Assembly and the CCT.

This demand for an open paper was certainly not a demand for the exclusion of the PSP perspective or for hegemony of the PCP perspective. Yet, it proved to be a demand that was quite impossible for República‘s management to contemplate. Like all the other major parties, the PSP was trapped in the manipulative—and deterministic—assumption that media control granted control of the revolution’s direction. On May 14, Belo Marques, finance director of the newspaper and a close ally of the PCP, submitted his resignation. The CCT asked him to remain but called for the resignation of the rest of the management. In an action that demonstrated the printers’ degree of determination, the CCT also organized a picket of the newspaper in case of a management attempt to seize the presses.

On May 19, most of the journalists refused to write for the paper anymore, taking as their pretext the CCT’s refusal to print management’s account of the paper’s internal crisis in a forthcoming issue of the paper. The CCT responded by suspending the management, with the support of 93 out of the 140 present at the assembly meeting (the paper’s full strength being about 190). It then brought the paper out for one day with Belo Marques’s name on the masthead. That day, the PSP mounted a demonstration outside the newspaper. Soares headed it and, in an exchange with the workers, told them they were “objectively playing the game of reaction.” One replied, “This is not the PSP headquarters. You and your colleague Cunhal must recognize the strength of the workers. You have to stop playing games with the people. Both of you, go back to where you used to live!” Lumping Soares together in the same sentence with PCP leader Alvaro Cunhal, and telling both to return to the places they lived while in political exile, is indicative of the true state of feelings on the paper’s staff at that time.

COPCON (an elite Army unit) promp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• I. Concepts: Radical Media Intersect Media Theory
• II. Radical Media Tapestry: Communicative Rebellion Historically and Globally
• III. Extended Case Studies
• References
• Index
• About the Authors