ON THE DAY Robert Maxwell died, an estimated 6,000 people were killed in a typhoon in the Philippines, most of them in one town. Maxwell’s death consumed the British media. It made an intriguing story, with few facts. Speculation and offerings by former retainers were unrelenting. His yacht was described in all its opulent detail; there was the great bed the man had slept in and the crystal he and potentates had drunk from. It was said he consumed £60,000 worth of caviar in a year. And there was the man himself: in shorts, in shades, in a turban, with Elton John on the sports pages.
The death of the Filipinos, the equivalent of the sudden extinction of a Welsh mining village, with many more children killed than at Aberfan, was mentioned in passing, if at all. On the BBC’s Nine O’Clock News Maxwell was the first item; the disaster in the Philippines was one of the last in a round-up of ‘fillers’.10
In one sense, the two events were connected. Although promoted as an ‘outsider’, Maxwell embodied the new age of imperialist wealth: of triumphant rapacity based on asset-stripping, ‘off-shore’ secrecies, government collusion and, above all, debt. The people who were swept to their deaths at Ormoc on the island of Leyte were also part of the new age. In an area with no previous experience of natural calamity, most of them died in flooding and mud slides that may well have been the result of deforestation. ‘It’s a man-made disaster abetted by nature,’ said Leyte’s governor.
With almost half their national budget committed to paying the interest on debt owed to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Western commercial banks, Filipinos are raping their beautiful country in order to export anything that brings in dollars and yen. Coral reefs are poisoned with cyanide to provide goldfish for the goldfish bowls of America. Forests are logged illegally to satisfy a Japan long ago stripped of trees.
This is not news, just as the deaths of the victims are, at most, ‘slow’ news. ‘Small earthquake: not many dead’ is not quite the joke it used to be. Natural disasters in the Third World are reported; it is the manner of the reporting, and the subtext, that helps to secure for the majority of humanity the marginal place allotted them by the world’s media managers.
A typhoon, an earthquake, a war: and they are news of a fleeting kind, from which they emerge solely as victims, accepting passively their predicament as a precondition for Western acknowledgement and charity. That is one reason why independence movements are treated so negatively in the Western media: they smash the beloved stereotype of dependence.
Consider the strictly controlled Western perspective of Africa. The fact that Africa’s recurring famines and extreme poverty – a poverty whose rapid increase is a feature of the ‘new age’ – have political causes rooted in the West is not regarded as news. How many of us were aware during 1985 – the year of the Ethiopian famine and of ‘Live Aid’ – that the hungriest countries in Africa gave twice as much money to us in the West as we gave to them: billions of dollars just in interest payments.11
We were shown terrible television pictures of children dying and we were not told of the part our financial institutions had played in their deaths. This also was not news. The camera was allowed to dictate a false neutrality, as is often the case, with the reporter playing the role of concerned innocent bystander and caption writer. Public attitudes flow from both perspectives and omissions. Unless prejudice is countered, it is reinforced. Unless misconceptions are corrected, they become received truth. This ‘neutrality’ is commonly known, with unintended irony, as ‘objectivity’. Indeed, it has been ordained a ‘rule’ and invested with a certain sanctity. There are many exceptions to this ‘rule’, especially when the pretence of ‘objectivity’ has to be suspended altogether. The Gulf War was a recent example.
Most of the British press is owned by oligarchies in the making: Murdoch, the Maxwells, Lord Stevens, Viscounts Rothermere and Blakenham, ‘Tiny’ Rowland. TV and radio news have been greatly influenced by Murdoch and now, increasingly, by the American Cable News Network (CNN). There are some excellent programmes on British television that challenge the partial, colonial view of the rest of the world – such as those made by Central Television and Channel 4’s South series – but the imbalance is growing.
All the media oligarchies collaborated with Thatcher’s media ‘strategy’, which was essential to her doctrine of a ‘free market/centralised state’. ‘News values’ complement this. Whatever used to be said about him personally, one Maxwell is worth more than 6,000 Filipinos. One captured RAF pilot is worth more than tens of thousands of Iraqis killed, including those buried alive in their trenches by American bulldozers. One British child is worth more than countless Iraqi children, embargoed, traumatised and dying for want of essential services, food and drugs. When a group of London schoolchildren was asked for their view of the Third World, several of them wrote ‘Hell’. None of them could provide a coherent picture of actual people.
The majority of humanity are not news, merely mute and incompetent stick figures that flit across the television screen. They do not argue or fight back. They are not brave. They do not have a vision. They do not conceive models of development that suit them. They do not form community and other grass-roots organisations that seek to surmount the obstacles to a better life.
‘Never’, wrote Jeremy Seabrook about the Western media, ‘is there a celebration of the survival, the resourcefulness and humanity of those who live in the city slums; nowhere is there mention of the generosity of the poorest, of the capacity for altruism of those who have nothing, of the wisdom, endurance and tenacity of people displaced from forests, hills or pastures by western-inspired patterns of development.’12
Ninety per cent of international news published by the world’s press comes from the ‘big four’ Western news agencies. They are United Press International (UPI), Associated Press (AP), Reuter and Agence France Presse (AFP). Two are American, one is British, one is French. Their output is supplemented by the transnational giants: from Murdoch to Times-Warner to CNN. Almost all of these are American. The largest news agency, UPI, gets 80 per cent of its funding from US newspapers. A survey in the mid 1980s found that UPI devoted 71 per cent of its coverage to the United States, 9.6 per cent to Europe, 5.9 per cent to Asia, 3.2 per cent to Latin America, 3 per cent to the Middle East and 1.8 per cent to Africa.13
‘These figures’, wrote the Grenadian writer Don Rojas in Third World Resurgence, ‘give a clear picture of the phenomenon called information imperialism. In the total volume of UPI’s information, news about the United States took up more space than that devoted to the whole African continent, where more than 50 countries are situated.’ Former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere once noted sarcastically, wrote Rojas, that ‘the inhabitants of developing countries should be allowed to take part in the presidential elections of the United States because they are bombarded with as much information about the candidates as are North American citizens’.14
In the same issue of Third World Resurgence, the Zimbabwean journalist Dingaan Mpondah wrote that ‘running against the fast current of this broad river of news from the West is a trickle of information from the Third World which barely manages to reach the doors of the readers in New York, London or Paris. The exchange of news between the West and Asia is typical of the imbalance. AP sends out from New York to Asia an average of 90,000 words a day. In return AP takes in 19,000 words . . .’15
Old empires live on with the ‘big four’. AFP is strongest in French-speaking Africa. AP and UPI are in the Americas and Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, which the United States dominated in the post-war period, and Reuter maintains its influence in the former Commonwealth. ‘No other single factor’, said Reuter chairman Roderick Jones in 1930, ‘has contributed so much to the maintenance of British prestige . . .’ These days Reuter makes huge profits from dispensing ‘market information’ to the world.16
The agencies produce much fine on-the-spot reporting, as well as critical analysis of events, individuals and policies. But these do not necessarily illuminate false assumptions and seldom challenge stereotypes. In the cataract of words that goes out every day, the jargon, euphemisms, acronyms and assorted inanities that comprise a deadening shorthand are rarely weeded out. Terrorism is almost never associated with the West, only with the Third World. It is not important that the US Government trains terrorist armies and its agents run death squads. The State of Israel is not described, like the Libyan regime, as a sponsor of terrorism: only Arabs are terrorists. As Dingaan Mpondah pointed out, ‘The names of many independent-minded nationalist leaders – like Mossadeq or Allende – are invariably prefixed by terms like “leftist” or “communist”. The effects of the constant use of terminology should not be underrated. Such a bias moulds public opinion to the point where Western military intervention in Vietnam or El Salvador is made quite acceptable.’17
During most of the Vietnam War the Vietcong, who were southern Vietnamese, were portrayed as ‘communist aggressors’. The Americans, to my knowledge, were never referred to in the mainstream media as invaders. They were merely ‘involved’. Thus the transition from news to Hollywood was smooth, with the emphasis on the angst of those ‘involved’, not the suffering and heroism of the defenders.18
Similarly, without a six-month media campaign that elevated Saddam Hussein to the status of a ‘new Hitler’, General Schwarzkopf might not have been able to conduct his ‘media war’, along with his slaughter of Iraqis, quite so expeditiously.
Yet even though the enemy had been thoroughly demonised and ‘made ready’, 75 per cent of the American public told pollsters they favoured negotiations, a ‘diplomatic solution’. (The figure was about 56 per cent in Britain.) When war finally broke out, most people were unaware that the Iraqi dictator had made numerous attempts, through credible intermediaries like the Saudis, to extricate himself from Kuwait. These were not reported by most of the British and American media until after the war, and ignored by Washington and London. Not surprisingly, when ‘our boys’ went into action against an ‘intransigent’ foe, a majority supported them.19
This was not how most of the world saw it, of course. During the war you had only to take a sample of Third World newspapers to glimpse a worldwide opposition to the disproportionate violence and its real aims, together with a recognition of Western, and Iraqi militarism, that was unbeknown to us in the West.
Reading Third World commentators, I am struck by their informed fear of post-Cold War recolonisation, especially that which deploys information technology. ‘The global news giants prescribe us information . . .’ wrote Shiraz Kissam. ‘Like the explorers who preceded them, they are mapping the world on a principle of perpetual extension. Hence, the globe is seen in terms of the West’s need for it.’ People see and learn about each other, she says, ‘only via this distorting mirror’.20
And yet there is awareness. In many Third World countries the seduction is not going well: many people know by their own experience that consumerism and democracy are not the same thing and that the so-called ‘free market’ is about the power of capital and not at all free. For example, the 1991 World Bank/IMF conference in Bangkok was reported very differently in many Third World countries from the way it was in the West. The World Bank was seen as responsible for, not a solver of, problems. The same was true of the meetings of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), in which the United States sought to include as ‘free trade’ the resources of ‘services, finance, tourism and intellectual property rights’ in the developing countries.
The media labours under many restrictions in the Third World; yet much of it is bold and many of its journalists see themselves as allied not with the establishment but with the people. This can be frustrating work. In Britain, the situation is very different; and it is ironic that, as media technology advances, it is not only the traditional methods of journalism that have become obsolete, but the honourable traditions. It will be a further, shaming irony if these traditions are upheld in the 1990s by the very people who never make news.
November 15, 1991