The media: Holding up a mirror to ourselves
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COMMENTS 
Is the media no more than a mouthpiece for those in power?
I wonder how many people in this country and elsewhere (especially in the US) know what the MDGs are. Or what exactly the acronym stands for. Given the tendency of the media to dumb down, development is almost a dirty word these days, and the Millennium Development Goals aren't something that will give the beautiful people who populate Page 3 and the interminable glossies too many sleepless nights. The worst part is that the government itself doesn't pay much heed to these all-important milestones for reducing world poverty, hunger and want by 2015.
Unknown to many in this country, Italy has several progressive regions -- Tuscany (with Florence at its hub) and Rome being prominent among them. They do not identify with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a media baron and businessman who straddles the infotainment and other industries in Italy. His vast empire spans newspapers, TV and radio, film, football, advertising, insurance, food and construction. His Mediaset television group had a revenue of over ⬠3 billion in 2003, and includes Canale 5, the most popular primetime channel. Its three networks command 45% of Italy's audience and rake in 60% of the TV ads.
Mediaset's vast holdings include the Radio Italia national commercial radio network, the Editoriale Sper advertising agency, the CNR syndication company and the AGR news agency. It also owns several pay-TV channels, the Spanish channel Telecinco and part of several other European media networks.
In Italy, the concept of 'Berlusconism', according to one commentator, "describes a way of life in which people live in houses built by Berlusconi, shop in supermarkets owned by Berlusconi, eat in restaurants controlled by Berlusconi, root for sports teams owned by Berlusconi and watch TV channels owned by Berlusconi. And now, those subject to Berlusconism are also ruled by Berlusconi". He has no pangs of guilt about controlling the flow of information to the public and thereby insulating his own regime from scrutiny. Apart from owning TV channels and newspapers, he has representatives on the state-owned TV channels. Big Brother, in Italy, is making sure that too many people aren't watching his own performance.
A recent meeting in Florence, organised by the Rome-based international development news agency, Inter Press Service, to analyse how Italy is helping countries meet their MDGs turned out to be as much an exposition on aid as it was on the role of the media. Apart from representatives of European governments, there were multilateral and national aid agencies, as well as a fair sprinkling of media representatives from around the world. The latter had the second day to make presentations, including little-known initiatives in Iraq, and by Al Jazeera.
It was perhaps inevitable that with such a mix, the topics discussed veered from aid to information. One Italian government representative even went to the extent of exclaiming: "Media is development!"
Much depends on how much aid developing countries receive to meet the MDGs -- though other speakers emphasised the need for such recipients to put their own houses in order and tighten up their governance (a euphemism for corruption). The Italian progressives cited how the country contributed only $ 37 of aid per capita per year, as against Sweden's $ 200. Years ago, the (Willy) Brandt Commission laid down the goal for industrial countries to contribute 0.7% of their GDP.
Outside the meeting, in the historic Palazzo Vecchio in the Piazza della Signoria, which is the seat of the Florence City Council, demonstrators distributed leaflets excoriating Italy for its poor record. They referred to how Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti "dips his hand into the pockets of the world's poorest people". As much as ⬠250 million had been lopped off the 2006 annual budget, and ⬠22 million from funds to NGOs for their projects in developing countries. They complained: "Italy is the country that gives the smallest percentage of GDP (0.15%) in the world, even less than the USA (0.16%), and well below the European average (0.36%). The new cuts will reduce Italy's contribution to just 0.12%."
With dripping sarcasm, they quote Berlusconi from three years ago: "The sight of a baby dying of hunger evokes a sense of defeat and guilt for us all. Italy is in the forefront of the fight against hunger and poverty and it is our intention to increase the country's grant to the less fortunate countries to 1% of GDP." At the EU Barcelona Summit that year, Italy committed to providing 0.33% of Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) by 2006, but the president of the Tuscany region told the Florence conference that, in fact, it had decreased its grants for health aid to poor countries by ⬠152 million.
A foreign ministry official tried to defend his country's role, pointing out that it was the sixth largest donor to the UN and had cancelled $ 2.7 billion in debts. Italy provided the largest number of peacekeeping troops to maintain order in different countries, with the second largest number of troops in Iraq. This has been a contentious issue within the country, as the placards held by demonstrators outside the meeting -- and, after some time, peacefully, at the meeting venue itself -- condemned. Like in other European cities, windows of many homes in Italy are draped with fading multi-coloured 'Pace' flags.
At the same time, warming to the theme of the conference, speakers admitted that there were "imbalances in the media discourse". As a rule, developing countries got into print or airtime only when there were disasters or terrorist attacks: 'conflict' rather than 'development' made the news. A comparison of the UK, US and German media revealed that coverage was directly related to the foreign policy interests of the country (incidentally, not many may be aware that the BBC World Service is funded by the British Foreign Office). There was a great deal of negativity, especially in relation to Africa, while the German media came off the best regarding development news.
India, which appears somewhat narcissistic when it comes to foreign policy (revelling in the fact that it is the biggest frog in the regional pool), seems oblivious to a new initiative called 'IBSA' which consists of India, Brazil and South Africa, three emerging economies that are also "vibrant democracies". A South African speaker referred to how Brazil and India enjoyed democratic access to information by community outreach, which his country wanted to emulate. In India this refers, presumably, to the 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments, granting autonomy to local representative bodies. He also reiterated the need for what, in the old days, used to be called "the new international information order". "The stories we tell about ourselves should be heard by industrial countries in the North as well," he added.
One such example was detailed by a Spanish consultant who has been promoting the growth of independent media in Afghanistan. "The US doesn't care about public information," he made it clear, stressing the need for Afghans to tell their own stories. There is a fledgling network of radio stations and an independent news agency, along with two weeklies. Issues like health, the environment, rule of law and gender were stressed. The entire role of the media in a vulnerable country has a different connotation: as the sixth poorest nation in the world and a 'risky place', it was debatable to what extent the media could make the government accountable. There were some 1,700 NGOs in the country, of which only 100 were reputable.
Professor C Anthony Giffard of the University of Washington in Seattle described a survey of five international news agencies -- AFP, AP, Panapress (based in Dakar, Senegal, and heavily tilted towards Francophone Africa), Xinhua and IPS -- and how the last came off by far the best in covering the MDGs in particular, and development in general. Latin Americans cited Telesur, the new satellite TV channel which will cover the continent and the Caribbean from a regional perspective. The very fact that it is based in Caracas -- the first picture in its brochure is President Chavez with Fidel Castro -- speaks for itself (www.telesurtv.net).
Roberto Bissio, the veteran Latin American progressive editor, mentioned how it was important to "see both banks of a river", implying two sides in any situation, the greys rather than black and white. "We have been selling public space (in the media) for 15 to 20 years," he complained, about the burgeoning privatisation of all channels. "We have been blind to ourselves. With Telesur, we will see our reality with our own eyes. Is it a black and white world? We have to re-invent ourselves."
Lamis Andoni, a young broadcaster from the Qatar-based Al Jazeera, continued this refrain. "We are looking at ourselves in the mirror and scrutinising ourselves," she noted. The satellite service, which is about to start an English service (it has hired the redoubtable British veteran, Sir David Frost), is banned in Kuwait, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, which speaks volumes for its secular and democratic credentials. It was also withdrawn from listing on the New York Stock Exchange. She had a chastening experience after covering the World Economic Summit in Davos where it was clear that "the media is the mouthpiece of those in power". At Davos, it was highly ironical that movie stars talked more about poverty than the assembly of politicians present, with the exception of Presidents Lula of Brazil and Chirac of France.
Bissio is involved with Media Watch, which monitors the media, along with partners like Le Monde Diplomatique and IPS. He recounted the old debate about the new world information order which kicked off exactly 30 years ago, with UNESCO as the champion. The protagonists wanted to correct the distortion on the part of international news agencies like AP and Reuters when it came to covering developing countries, and sought to foster government-backed outfits in the South. The US and other western powers protested vigorously that this was a recipe for doctored and suppressed news, which was certainly a danger. Not that the same western governments were unduly concerned about the free flow of information, especially within the South. Indeed, the US, UK and Singapore (a bastion of media freedom?) quit UNESCO over this highly emotive issue and the UN was denied US funds for several years afterwards; it has never got its due share of resources from the US since.
"There were 140 news agencies in those days," Bissio remembered, "now there are only 14. RAI (the Italian-government-funded TV network) has closed offices in Latin America and Africa. All this amounts to homogenisation. The per capita expenditure on advertising is higher in the US than that on education." He observed that IPS was created in 1964 and is now considered illegitimate in the current conservative orthodoxy, in many western countries.
Another significant intervention, which is little known in this country, is the publication of the monthly Le Monde Diplomatique. Its chief editor, Ignazio Ramonet, described how it has a novel ownership pattern -- different even from its parent, the daily liberal French newspaper, Le Monde. A quarter of the shares are owned by its employees, while readers own another fifth, ensuring its insulation from business or political interests. It is considered a 'red' magazine, with a staggering 25 foreign editions, several of which are electronic versions. It is published, among other languages, in English, Italian, French, Greek, German, Turkish, Norwegian and Spanish. It will shortly be published in South Korea.
Jo Weir of the Reuter's Foundation, which was established in 1982 to help journalists in developing countries gain skills, cited how it was helping to set up an independent news agency in Iraq, with funding from the UN Development Programme and the Spanish development cooperation agency. It has 40 journalists who put out 700 stories a month in Arabic and Kurdish; their independence is constitutionally guaranteed. The Americans do not appear interested in supporting such an effort and USAID has even approached the agency to enquire about setting up a duplicate service, which would no doubt be 'donor-driven', as the cliché goes. It was offering high salaries, which would jeopardise the Reuter initiative since it could not match these.
An editor from the well-known Italian daily Corriera della Sierra spoke of the "third revolution" -- from political to economic and, now, media empires. The paper was breaking the language barrier by publishing in Argentina, Europe and the US. The NYT was now read by more people on the net than with hard copies. As an alternative source of international news, he mentioned MISNA -- the international news agency supported by Italian Catholic missionaries. Its website (www.misna.org) is currently illustrated by a picture of anti-Iraq war demonstrators in the US, which gives a good idea of the progressive slant of this unconventional service.
While the Italian government official earlier eulogised the media for being synonymous with development, it would be relevant to ask which media one is referring to. If the Italian and Indian media share one thing in common, it is the trivialisation of news and views. Italy has, of course, gone several steps further. TV shows are notorious for depicting scantily-clad females participating in talk shows and the like. In the early hours each day, channels regularly 'bare' the truth, with the only news being nudes! Will readers and viewers eventually be turned off by such inane fare? Time will tell. And if the media is a mirror, this is quite an unflattering self-portrayal.
InfoChange News and Features, November 2005