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Reality On The ‘Freedom’ Of The Western Press By Ikemesit Effiong
This may sound like a queer title for an article and you may be wondering, what am I talking about? It became pertinent to write about this when I observed something very salient about the world’s main news broadcasters. It all happened the day I read reports on a story from six of the world’s foremost media giants, CNN, BBC, Aljazeera English, Sky News, FOX and Geo TV. It was the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto. As I listened to the story developing live on CNN International, followed the constant updates on the BBC website, checked on SKY News every 5 minutes or so, checked with Aljazeera English online and peeped on Geo TV for an insider view, I noticed a distinct approach to covering the story. I then decided to open the six news websites simultaneously and then confirmed my suspicion. While the Western media focused on the credentials and political achievements of the female icon, the fact that she was from an upper class political aristocracy and that she was an Oxford graduate who was acceptable to her Western political contemporaries, the Middle Eastern news agencies were more focused on the immediate and future impact of the outrageous event on Pakistani and indeed Middle Eastern and global politics.
Now, do not pick offence with this little illustration but frankly, this is the issue. It is not only about getting the news story but reporting it in an objective but emphatic manner, an impartial but human way. The typical analytical plot of a typical story in a typical European or American news network goes thus; you have the background if it is a special report, a quintessential example, a human story to illustrate, then it plunges into the analysis, and a cosmetic criticism of governments, especially if they are Western, big corporations, rich individuals or in some cases, the global economic setup but the funny thing is that, most of these news analysis are left open-ended. With the exception of very few cases, there are no proffered solutions. Therefore, landmark BBC documentaries usually end with a ‘cloud of an uncertain future’ and the typical CNN byline would be ‘let’s wait and see what the future holds’
In the end, the bane of modern Western media is the realization by an increasingly growing section of the public that the media is really just another extension of the political establishment; that all that talk about the West’s ‘freedom of expression’ and the ‘independence of the media’ is as much a propaganda as Fascism. I really found it amusing that in celebration of the 75 years existence of the BBC’s World Service, they dedicated a special section of their website to the celebration of ‘independent impartial and factual journalism’. Now, I do not have a problem with that, but what really tickled my funny bone was when a senior personnel at the broadcaster insinuated that the BBC was ‘editorially independent of the British Government’. What! A child claiming that his biological makeup is different from his father’s. Now, even brainwashed Cambodian Communists of the 1970s and Mormonists can’t buy that piece of c***p. Those claims in media circles can be appropriately titled as ‘unsubstantiated’. A few examples would suffice; The BBC’s coverage of Israel’s brief war with the Lebanese politico-para-military movement Hezbollah was definitely pro-Israeli so much that even a BBC news editor confessed to a measure of it on the World Service show, Over To You. The now celebrated coverage of the Falklands’ War with Argentina in 1982 was another high (or should I say, low) point. A correspondent in a news analysis on BBC Radio talked of ‘defeating them’. And journalists in media establishments the world over, will have us believe that time battered relic of Western imperialistic jargon that journalists ‘are’ impartial, that the newsroom is in John Pilger’s words, that exalted Nirvana(obviously referring to the Hindu state of enlightenment), where journalists are lifted above the mediocrity of everyday obscenities and sentimentalities.
The American news media does not fare much better. ABC News, that moribund news enterprise which was galvanized like the rest of the news establishment by the advent of Channel 23 Atlanta and later, the now mighty Cable News Network, CNN, both creations of that inventive workaholic, Ted Turner; was the main source of news that America turned to in the 60s and 70s (forget CBS News!), and how it failed. Sporadic news stories from abroad mixed with travel news and some pertinent but obscure local news made up the news bulletins of Cold War America till the 1980s. The main area ABC was found wanting was in the fact that it never really challenged and critically discussed the political dilemma of the day. It was locked up in portraying the American Dream when the world was going haywire with Watergate and the Civil Rights Movement. It was not that it totally shunned these political phenomena, which would have been institutional suicide, but that it failed woefully to take a proactive stance on issues. It in essence, fostered a dissuasion of public opinion. It was rumors peddled by ex-servicemen coming out of Vietnam coupled with the works of some maverick reporters, that forced it to bring to American homes, the true scale of the carnage going on in that South East Asian nation, and even such reporting was minuscule compared to the true story. As an illustration, look at what Al Jazeera is doing to Middle East public opinion. Now, it has come under the scrutiny and criticism of those perennially unprogressive western governments who are scared at ‘real’ journalism, and the possibility that their dirty underwear would be washed in the marketplace.
In the final analysis, like all other institutions of Western ideology, the media has descended into an unworthy crescendo, a milieu of lies, half truths and half baked, underestimated, unsubstantiated comments on our social reality. We all know how the CNN in 1998-2002 bombarded us with constant daily reminders of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction which were never found. It would have been tough but intelligent investigative journalism to dig out the real facts. After all, CNN did it with the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was simply more than pure professional laziness, it was ineptitude of the highest caliber, and in fact it smacks of a cover up, but let us not go too far. Investigative journalists like John Pilger and Mark Curtis have long decried the obedience and attitude of the Western Press, one of acquiescence. This is a far cry from the foundations of the modern Western media, the criticisms of Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw, and the famous Daily Mirror and if we go back further, the commentators of the early Renaissance when men first started to question the actions of their political sovereign authorities. Now, it is fashionable to criticize and analyse and even satirise the governments of other countries while our home governments are spared the brunt of our commentaries while we leave them to concentrate on imposing economic sanctions and perpetuating imperialistic globalization and neo-colonialism. The example of Denmark and the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad come to mind. Now, the media is the arena where all power politics is played and lobbyists buy off media personnel from doing the stories they should be doing.
Modern journalism as we know it has failed us in fulfilling its cardinal objective, its equivalent of the medical Hippocrates’ Oath; to inform objectively, impartially and accurately. This is not a problem of issuing recommendations like the American National Transport and Safety Board (NTSB) would issue recommendations concerning aircraft safety; this is about overhauling an entire system and the radical adoption of new value systems. It is about the West changing its orientation about the world and stop seeing its governments as liberators and arbiters of the world order and start seeing them for who they really are—fallible humans who make mistakes, sometimes ‘deliberate’ and whose form of political practice is not the only way to sure economic prosperity. This should be the Press’ new mandate for a unified and a more prosperous humanity. |