Chile. The UNESCO Regional Office in Santiago held the discussion "Sustainability of community media in Chile: recent advances and future challenges", an instance that brought together representatives of the academic, governmental and regulatory world to reflect on the progress and challenges around the strengthening of community media in the country.
The meeting featured the main presentation by Chiara Sáez, author of the UNESCO report "Sustainability of Community Media in Chile", and comments by Daniela Campos, National Coordinator of Community Culture Points of the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage; Daniela López, director of the Observatory of Citizen Participation and Non-Discrimination of the General Secretariat of Government; and Mauricio Muñoz Gutiérrez, President of the National Television Council. The conversation was moderated by Gustavo Gómez, executive director of OBSERVACOM.
During his speech, the President of the CNTV highlighted the progress made in the formalization and recognition of community television channels, underlining the sustained growth of this sector in recent years. "Four years ago there was nothing. Today, progressively, the different community television channels have applied for and obtained a concession, entering through the door of formal dialogue with the State and accessing public resources. That is a significant advance," said Muñoz.
President Muñoz also highlighted the incorporation of community media in the CNTV's development policies, particularly through the CNTV Fund, which in its last call granted financing to projects from this sector. "This year, of the seventeen audiovisual projects that obtained resources from the CNTV Fund, four come from the community world. Two of them are channels that received support for scheduled programs, which demonstrates a concrete openness towards their sustainability and development," he said.
In a second intervention, Mauricio Muñoz called for strengthening inter-institutional coordination around the support and development of community media, highlighting the need to generate formal and stable mechanisms for joint work between public entities linked to this area.
"I cannot agree more with what has been said about the irrepressible need to strengthen inter-institutional coordination. I believe that the main difficulty in this is not that it has not existed, but that here, in terms of recent years, there have been comings and goings of inter-institutional coordination. I believe that we must try to use the momentum of that coordination," he said
The discussion made it possible to make visible the role played by community media in the promotion of diversity and citizen participation, as well as the challenges that persist for their sustainability and articulation in the national media ecosystem.
