Asia Media Summit 2006, held at the end of May in the Malaysian capital, brought together nearly 400 movers and shakers of the mainstream broadcast media in Asia – home to the world’s largest TV and radio audiences. Primarily an industry gathering, it also attracted development agencies trying to ‘hitch a ride’ on the airwaves to get across their public interest messages.

Asia Commons, in Bangkok in early June, was a gathering of media researchers and activists who share a vision of promoting open, unrestricted access to knowledge and culture. Frowning on corporate co-option of copyrights, they want to use modern digital communications tools to safeguard the public sphere.

If the first meeting attracted media tycoons, the second was definitely a place for media ‘typhoons’ – tech-savvy, liberal individuals determined to take on the corporate media that currently control much of the airwaves and growing portions of the Internet.

As one with a leg in both camps, I have found it challenging to straddle these two groups who are almost mutually exclusive. But we need our media tycoons and typhoons to come together now more than ever.

We need to mobilise the airwaves against poverty, under-development and corruption that continue to tug Asia down. We must use every media platform and outlet to counter fundamentalism and ultra-nationalism that threaten to tear our region apart.

Idealistic? Well, yes, but it did happen – if only briefly -- when the Asian Tsunami struck without warning 18 months ago. Political divides and corporate bottomlines were momentarily forgotten as the national, regional and global media covered the multiple scenes and impacts of the disaster. Especially the national and local media in affected countries went beyond mere reporting to help find missing persons and play good Samaritan to nations in deep shock and grief.

Media’s coverage inspired the largest volume of donations in response to a single calamity – over 13 billion US Dollars for relief, recovery and rebuilding. But as the tsunami’s memories receded and the disaster became yesterday’s news, most sections of the media returned to business as usual.

For sure, we need to bounce back from our worst calamities, and life must go on. But can media and society ignore the fact that every day, some 14,000 children in the Asia Pacific die needlessly from preventable diseases? That’s nearly 600 children every hour – or the equivalent of the Asian Tsunami’s cumulative death toll every three weeks.

Why isn’t this story hitting the headlines? The media frequently portray Asia as being on the move – rising middle classes, techie gizmos, more travel. All that’s true: since 1990, the fastest growing regional economy has helped 300 million people to move out of poverty.

But in their breathless cheerleading of the march of capital, the media often miss out the other face of Asia: we still have more people living in poverty than all other developing regions combined.

That reality attracts few champions. As Kim Hak-Su, the highest ranking UN official based in Asia and head of UN’s regional arm ESCAP, reminded the Asia Media Summit: “There is another kind of tsunami, the daily ‘tsunami’ of poverty, hunger, disease and death, and environmental degradation that unfolds silently, affecting millions more adults and children.”

We are now less than 3,500 days from the globally agreed targets of halving absolute poverty and hunger by 2015. These and other Millennium Development Goals will not be achieved simply by the UN convening inter-governmental meetings, or governments preparing national strategies and plans.

It takes the whole global village – including its media.

So it’s time for the broadcast industry to get into ‘tsunami mode’ again – and play a greater role in our collective struggle against poverty and suffering, in Asia and everywhere else. And this time, we have to stay with the stories all the way to 2015.

Here’s a good starting point: release all copyrights on TV, video and online content relating to poverty and development issues – at least until after 2015.

In other words, make poverty a copyrights free zone.

This can sound heretical for the broadcast industry so accustomed to reserving rights and exploiting commercial potential of material gathered from the real world. Harrowing images of Africa’s famines and Asia’s tsunami devastation continue to be traded at dozens of dollars a second. Hordes of camera crews and freelancers roam the world in search of footage that might yield income for decades.

Yet these very images – if allowed to be used freely by educators, civil society groups and development activists – can help combat poverty and fuel social change. Most of the time, alas, rights are simply not available –lawyers and accountants, not journalists or producers, now decide which footage is allowed to be used under what conditions.

If the audio-visual media are to play a meaningful role against poverty, HIV, corruption and other scourges of our time, they have to move beyond token gestures of staging occasional global concerts or carrying the latest video news releases from global charities. Broadcasters must allow open access to their vast archives – repositories of our planet’s visual memory.

Inconceivable? It has happened in other industries. Confronted with the global HIV pandemic and the very high cost of anti retroviral treatment, a few pharmaceutical companies in India, Brazil and South Africa started manufacturing generic versions of the same drugs but at much lower prices. Defiant of proprietary software selling at inflated prices, the free and open source software (FOSS) movement came up with cheaper alternative ‘juice’ to run personal computers.

Both moves were vehemently contested by established corporate giants, but the benefits accrued are beyond question. Who will become the first broadcast company to accept poverty as a copyrights free zone – breaking ranks if necessary?

Extraordinary situations demand extraordinary responses. The whole world is watching. And the clock is ticking away…

-- Nalaka Gunawardene is Director and CEO of TVE Asia Pacific, a regional non-profit foundation that promotes development coverage on television, video and new media. He can be reached at nalaka@tveap.org

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