The reporters, Roberto Savio of International Press Service (IPS), and Ignacio Ramonet of Le Monde Diplomatique of France, told more than a thousand delegates to World Social Forum (WSF) meeting on "democratization, communications and the media," that only a radical reform, most likely using the internet, would achieve the goals that the audience of more than a thousand cheered on.

Savio, a senior IPS reporter said, "After forty years of debating the reform of the press I have come to the conclusion that what we are debating is power itself."

"I am absolutely convinced, " he said, "that we have to create a new information order, a new phenomenon including a new definition of who produces journalism."

Savio said the new order probably would be based on the internet, or its replacement, because of its ability to reach billions, and because it is available to large numbers of contributors. Now, he said, "All media must sell to survive."

"The Associated Press and Reuters are major international agencies with efficient, extraordinary people, really excellent people. But the system has down-flowing values. The values cascade from the top, the values of globalization success, profit and ownership. Efficiency is another, and competition, another. These are all values, but when we (here in Porto Alegre) talk about values we think about solidarity, justice, equality and participation. This is the problem.. the values we have here, everyone here has, are not the values that we have to face in a professional life. We have to write material that sells well, and that's how we get career development.

Ramonet said he noticed in the latest list of the world's largest communications corporations that none were dedicated to information or news. News, he said, is considered "a commodity that follows the laws of the market." To sell that commodity, he said, "information must be, short, very short; very simple, simple and sympathetic, making people laugh or cry in a way that can distract people.

But, he said, since the information is largely free, on TV or radio or very inexpensive in newspapers, the real way media makes money is to sell citizens to the advertisers.

Therefore, he said, "we are the commodity, and so information becomes secondary to the main project which is to make money. They try to get the information at the lowest possible price. And that results in a massive degradation of the media, and reporters can't do what they are supposed to do.

Only by drastically changing the system, vastly expanding the media and increasing its depth, he said, could journalists "develop an ecology of information cleansed of ideology."

Jeff Cohen, of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting told the same group that, despite the increasing number of choices available on television, sources of information were narrowing. In the United States and most of the power was controlled by five companies, AOL, Viacom, Disney, News Corporation and General electric.

"The key isn't how may channels there but who controls them. These five companies are partners with each other as they expand around the world. (News Corporation president) Rupert Murdoch brags that his network can reach 75 percent of the world's population. That is too much power for any individual to have in his hands."

He said that 17 years ago no company could own more than 7 AM stations and 7 FM stations but now one company owns 1,200 and recently told station managers to avoid playing John Lennon's "Imagine" which calls for world peace.

In a separate WSF venue, the governor of Rio Grande do Sul, Olívio Dutra, whose Workers Party administration is paying for much of the conference, told a cheering audience that the forfeign debt of Brazil and other countries should not be paid. Condemning what he called high interest payments, he said, "This is a debt that has been paid already more than three times in some countries." He called foreign debt attacks "against the sovereignty and the dignity of the people." A workshop called "World Bank and Market Land Reform" endorsed a plan by nongovernmental agencies concerned with food distribution to launch an in depth, long-term study of the impact on food supply of the World Bank's agrarian reform policies.

Luciano Wolff, a member of one of the groups planning the 10-nation study, said he suspected in advance, that the land reform plan was "a manoeuver by international financial bodies to tie peasants to a debt they are not able to pay off, and. yet another attempt to weaken social movements that struggle for real land reform, one that really promotes distribution of land to those who work on it.

Representatives of some 600 delegates who attended an environmental meeting before the beginning of the WSF, published a final document Sunday in which they said, " Current models of urbanization and industrialization concentrate wealth and distribute poverty and environmental degradation. We defend the democratization of the access to water and land, in urban and rural areas, a renewable energy model and social control over its use. We defend a radical change in the production and consumption patterns and in the use of natural resources."

Redefining Progress, an NGO dedicated to advocating dropping the use of the gross national product as a measure of national growth and wealth, and replacing it with a system that measures each country's "ecological footprint" on the environment, said Sunday that the organizers of Earth Day on April 22 of this year had agreed to adopt and promote the system.

Jerome Sayre, deputy director of Redefining Progress, told the Earth Times, "the earth has already exceeded its ability to sustain itself by 35 per cent."

According to the group's latest figures, most countries tested showed a negative balance with Brazil and Argentina being among the few with positive sustainability.