Congress Information

Interview with Cees Hamelink

Last Updated (Monday, 12 May 2008 10:10) Written by Paola Sartoretto Monday, 05 May 2008 17:17

Professor Cees Hamelink is Honorary President of IAMCR and will be speaking at the James Halloran Memorial lecture on the 24th of July. On his CV, Professor Hamelink has both practical experience as journalist and academic, not to mention his collaboration to the UN. Here he shares with us his thoughts about media, the IAMCR Congress and Stockholm.

As a former president of the IAMCR, do you think that academia; especially during events such as the IAMCR conference can influence media agenda?

Over the years I have never seen the media paying much attention to what we as academic research community are doing; we certainly haven’t substantially influenced the media agenda. This is only partly to blame on the media practitioners. We did not always investigate what might have been useful for them. There is a comparison with the medical field, where clinicians usually complain that the research community rarely deals with the pressing problems they face in their everyday practice. We may have had some influence though on the field of (inter) national policymakers in media, telecom and culture.

You have studied extensively the relationships between media and human rights. If you consider western-European media outlets today, how do you evaluate their contribution to the development of human rights?

Most media (in western-Europe or elsewhere) have made important contributions by reporting about human rights abuses. However, these reports were often politically one-sided: human rights violations in friendly states being conveniently ignored. Many events that should be seen as human rights violations are often framed in a non-human rights discourse, such as the reporting about poverty. A key problem is that most media have little or no expertise in the human rights field. Very few newspapers, for example, do have a human rights ‘beat’.

People often refer to media as the 4th power and if we think of some media companies today they are in fact huge transnational conglomerates with enormous economic power. However, do you think that this power is being used in the service of the society as a whole?

By and large media and their owners belong to the world’s power elites and do not exercise a permanent and substantial critical watch-dog function on the powers that be. The ‘power’ that media have (in terms of defining the world’s realities) is more often used for destructive purposes (through the formats of debate, polemics, inflammatory texts, moral panics) than for integrative, community-building purposes

And finally, have you been to Stockholm before? What are your tips to the participants of the congress?

Since 1968 I have visited Stockholm many times. My advice: do what you should do in any city you want to get familiar with: just walk through the city and just talk to its inhabitants; this way you discover your own city attractions. If you are -like me- a jazz afficionado, Stockholm is a great place with clubs like Faschings or Stampen. Visit, listen, enjoy and tell me about your experience!