From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: Information is Power
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: PACH
Date: Mon, 6 Apr 1992 03:31:44 GMT

/** media.issues: 200.0 **/
** Topic: information is power **
** Written  4:19 pm  Apr  4, 1992 by jbekken in cdp:media.issues **
Information is Power: Control of the world media keeps the poor
in their place.  by John Pilger

This is taken from the Jan-March 1992 LIWOLET, Newsletter of the
Library and Information Workers Organization (c/ Dept. of
Information Studies, Box 375, Pietermaritzburg 3200, South
Africa). It originally appeared in The New Statesman.

On the day Robert Maxwell died, an estimated 6000 people
were killed in a typhoon in the Philippines, most of them in one
town. Maxwell's death consumed the British media. It mae 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".

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 Band, the 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 death 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.

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.

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 both from 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.

Among the many exceptions to this "rule" are civil disturbances
and war: that is to say, whenever established forced deem
themselves threatened, not by an adversary but by truth. During
the Gulf War, the threat was so great that "objectivity" had to
be suspended altogether.

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 CNN. There are
occasional programmes that digress from the orthodoxy and which
probably provide legitimacy to the system. But when one of these
went "too far," as Thames did with Death on the Rock, serious
measures were taken. Thames is off the air from 1993.

The illusion is that we have access to a lot of information. The
reality is that we have access to a lot of media to which
unrestricted information is unwelcome, even a threat. If Maxwell
"saved the Mirror," as the paper's front page claimed the day
after his death, he saved it from this threat. All the media
oligarchies collaborated with Thatcher's media "strategy," which
was essential to her doctrine of a "free market/centralised
state." The new age that saw Murdoch and Maxwell climb up their
mountains of debt also saw enacted draconian legislation that not
only undermined personal and political freedoms, but gave the
police powers to confiscate news material and make criminals of
those journalists who expose official lies and venality.

"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
organizations that seek to surmount the obstacles to a better
life.

"Never," wrote Jeremy Seabrook of 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."

Ninety percent 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 percent of
its funding from US newspapers. A survey in the mid 1980s found
that UPI devoted 71 percent of its coverage to the United States,
9.6 percent to Europe, 5.9 percent to Asia, 3.2 percent to Latin
America, 3 percent to the Middle East and 1.8 percent to Africa.

"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."

In the same issue of Third World Resurgence (an excellent
analytical journal published in Malaysia), 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..."

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 US dominated
in the postwar 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.

The agencies produce much fine on-the-spot reporting, as well as
critical analysis of events, individuals and policies. But these
seldom illuminate false assumptions or challenge stereotypes. In
the cataract of words that go out every day, the jargon,
euphemisms, acronyms and assorted inanities that are deadening
the  shorthand of modern, establishment propaganda 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 terrorist organization: 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'... The effects of 
the constant use of terminology should not be underrated. Such
a bias mould public opinion to the point where western military
intervention in Vietnam or El Salvador is made quite acceptable."
Indeed, during most of the Vietnam war, the Vietcong, who were
southern Vietnamese, were portrayed as "communist aggressors."
They were guilty, in Adlai Stevenson's memorably doublespeak, of
"internal aggression." In truth, they were the resistance against
a foreign invasion of their country. 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.

Without the American media's concentration on the personality of
General Noriega--"old pineapple face," the classic Latino bad
guy--President Bush might not have entirely succeeded with an
invasion that had little to do with Noriega and everything to do
with reinforcing the US strategic position in Central America.
Without a six-month media campaign that elevated Saddam Hussein
to the status of a "new Hitler," General Schwartzkopf might not
have been able to conduct his "media war," along with his
slaughter of the Iraqis, quite as expeditiously. Journalists are
essential to these endeavors. The "new democracy," according to
Edward Bernays, the leading figure in 1980s corporate propaganda,
is the "engineering of consent." This can be a subtle process,
and many journalists may not be aware of it. I wasn't.

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."

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.

The recent 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 GATT meetings, in
which the US sought to include as "free trade" the resources of
"services, finance, tourism and intellectual property rights" in
the developing countries. During the Gulf War, you only had to
take a sample to third-world newspapers to glimpse a worldwide 
opposition to the war and a recognition of western, as well as
Iraqi, militarism that was unbeknown to us in the west.

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 and dangerous work. In Britain, the situation is
quite 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.

** End of text from cdp:media.issues **
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