When the disenfranchised of the world see that they, too, can be bold and beautiful, a positive self-image is created.
Switch on cable television in Tansen, a small town in the hills of central Nepal, and what do you get? If you are watching on Saturday afternoons you might see the town´s weekly news bulletin, a comedy skit publicising diarrhoea treatment, or a programme on a recent Buddhist festival. You have tuned into Ratna Cable TV (RCTV), Nepal´s (and possibly the region´s) only community tv station.
In the face of the threat of media disenfranchisement many of the world´s people have come up with a simple solution: produce it yourself. The idea seems improbable merely because ´we´ (academics, journalists and politicians) have been brought up on models of a monolithic ´Media´ founded on the strictly regulated legal frameworks of the Western nation state and cannot believe the audacity of those who have tackled the media industry head-on. But once one begins to look, examples of what anthropologists may call ´indigenous media´ appear to be a near-universal phenomenon, rather than isolated examples of resistance to the hegemony of the state or transnational media.
There is space here to cite only a few examples. Yanomamo Indians in the Amazon produce videos to publicise environmental destruction by miners. Black trade unions in apartheid-era South Africa made audio cassettes of underground meetings to distribute to supporters. Australian Aborigines own and run satellite tv stations to broadcast programmes in their own languages. British football fans produce fanzines to celebrate their teams and pressure club owners to protect the interests of fans. In Nepal, RCTV makes news programmes that reflect the community´s own concerns and interests rather than that of the Kathmandu-based national media.