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| Sunday, 30 March 2003 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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'A kindly imperial power' - Of minds and markets: the global media war Observations by LAKSHMAN GUNASEKERA "It is an unequal war. The US is the sole super power with a military capability that is incomparably greater than that of Iraq's," says a defence expert on a television international affairs discussion on the Gulf war. "We have a policy opposed to the war and we select news stories for publication according to that posture," says a journalist contributing to the discussion 'live' from his country. An anti-American propaganda broadcast from an Arab or Islamic state TV ? A rare programme on a major channel run by some maverick, radical anchor-man? Not at all. I was watching Channel News Asia, Asia's premier television news channel transmitting out of Singapore, a city state not known for its media freedom at all (major Western-owned newsmagazines have been expelled or threatened with expulsion by the Singaporean government for their reportage). And it was CNA's regular evening international politics discussion which now daily focuses on the US invasion of Iraq. The two experts in the studio were a scholar from a Singapore-based strategic studies institute and a professor of international affairs from a Singaporean university. The journalist contributing by satellite link was the managing editor of a major Jakarta-based English newspaper. And - hold your breath who owns this Singapore-based TV station with this seeming anti-American posture? Channel News Asia is ultimately owned by a conglomerate of American multi-national corporations led by the giant Dow Jones Corporation. audiences But why would a TV station ultimately owned by the United States business elite want to adopt any policy posture other than one which supports the Washington's current geo-politics? The answer is simple to all those who are either familiar with the dynamics of capitalist market economics or are intimate with the dynamics of the mass media: it is all a matter of market and audience. The combined factors of audience and market can be seen active in the whole host of investments in and operation of major broadcasting ventures in Asia, currently the third largest media market after North America and Europe and the fastest expanding market with the greatest potential. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is yet awaiting the full 'go ahead' from Beijing before it taps into and mobilise the world's largest single market for TV and radio. There is no question, whatsoever, of Channel News Asia playing host to any directly anti-US discourse. Nevertheless, if CNA is to further build and sustain its credibility in its market, then it has to cater to the interests of the audiences that comprise that market. media ventures Thus we have this world class daily international affairs discussion which is strikingly different in the language used not only by the anchor person and the studio participants, but also by the satellite linked participants from across the region from Beirut to Beijing. And CNA is refreshingly self-aware, unlike Western media ventures that must hide their hegemony with code words and euphemisms or, simply by ignoring issues wholesale. CNA last week focussed directly on the new non-Western global media ventures that are thriving on the Gulf war. Those readers who have never heard of Channel News Asia need to heave themselves out of their Euro-centric mental easy chairs and buy into cable TV packages that are not purely America-centric and are also cheaper to boot! Of course, they have all the right to remain hooked on Hollywood even as the tea rots in our warehouses thanks to the geo-political antics of the ultimate owners of Hollywood. As the (White American) CNA correspondent based in Amman told that nightly CNA talk show, the populations in the whole of West Asia, for example, have the benefit of both Western as well as West Asia-based TV stations for their news and views of the war in Iraq. West Asia audiences have a choice of not only the main American channels such as CNN and Fox and also European channels such as the BBC and French stations, but they have five of their own channels including the now famous Al-Jazeera and also Lebanon TV Corporation and other regional stations. Equally significant is that all of these West Asia stations are very close to the world standards of telecasting, production and management of news content. Commentators in the Western media have already acknowledged the competence of these stations. The only thing that the West Asian channels might lack is global reach in terms of news gathering from all over the world. But then, these channels are not so interested in obtaining the same depth of news from Latin America or Lesotho as they are in news gathering in their own region and those other regions important to West Asia such as Europe and America (and, perhaps, South Asia from where most of their housemaids come from). After all, it is a question of the market. If the content of the West Asian-based media reflects its market interests, so does the content of the Singapore-based CNA. The language used for example in describing the current events and developments and the actors involved in the Gulf war, is significantly different from that of the so-called 'global media' that sexy code word for the currently dominant American and British news media. Most of the participants as well as the anchor persons on the CNA news programmes label CNN and the BBC for what they are: "Western media". The phrase 'global media' is not used although that is the word that both CNN and the BBC and many other Western-based media ventures so deceptively call themselves. It is the crucial matter of audience perception, nothing more. It is not that those sleek, business suited anchor persons and experts and analysts and other participants on CNA actually are hostile to the West or that they want to ideologically isolate the West's influence via their television discourse. Not at all. It is simply that they are catering to the perceptions of their specific Asia audiences, those hundreds of millions of middle and upper class, urban and semi-urban and, westernised and semi-westernised social groups across Asia from the western, to the southern and north-eastern edges of the continental satellite footprint. Equally crucially, these TV actors can cater to their audiences in a convincing manner precisely because they too are drawn from these same social groups. The anchor person is Asia and the vast majority of contributors both in the studio as well as via satellite are Asia in ethnic origin. So they are aware of and generate the exact mix of idiom and terminology that will endear their programme to their audience. And when the managing editor of the Indonesian newspaper talked about the policy posture of his newspaper and simultaneously referred to the unrest in cities across the country in opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq, he was explicitly linking media policy to social interests. More excitingly, he, as well as other participants in CNA's talks shows, use a different language when talking about the media itself. guerrilla attacks The Western media yet insist on a public rhetoric of being 'objective' and providing 'the truth'. In fact, our own Anglophile media as well as many Anglophile journalism educators and policy makers too insist on this same discourse despite its discrediting after the Western media's behaviour during and since the guerrilla attacks on New York and Washington. Not so media policy makers in other parts of Asia, including India, which has a far higher standard of journalism than this country. Media managers, journalists as well as policy makers, in many Asian countries will echo that Indonesian managing editor when he quite deliberately speaks of a 'posture' that takes a particular geo-political side and, furthermore, quite seriously discusses the 'selection' of news in accordance with that posture. 'Selectivity' was first used seriously in theorising media behaviour by Stuart Hall and others who introduced the Cultural Studies school of media theory in distinct opposition to traditional Mass Communication theory. For long, this approach to the study of media behaviour has been restricted to academia (not only in the West) and to the more radical wings of mass media throughout the world. Today, the dictates of the market (via audience interests/perceptions) is seeing this perspective thriving within the mainstream of media discourse throughout the globe as centres of mass media blossom internationally outside the traditional centres in the West. And despite the linkages of capital investment that some of these non-Western media ventures have with Western capital (as in Channel News Asia), all these new media ventures, deriving their media discourse as they do from the politics and cultural ethos of their specific audience-markets, are now entering into a new international dynamic: a global contestation for markets and audiences. social elites With politics so much part of media discourse and with violent international geo-politics increasingly dominating the news, this contest is becoming a war for minds as well as markets. Of course, there is much that is yet hidden even in this new media discourse. After all, it is a discourse that largely caters to the social elites in many of these societies and, therefore, focuses on (i.e. 'selects') issues of direct concern to these social groups. The aspirations and struggle of the poor, the marginalised ethnic and sub-cultural groups and the problems that challenge the credibility of capitalism such as ecology and poverty are generally de-emphasised unless there are 'news events' that are significant to the stability of these societies as a whole, including the social hegemony of the media audiences. capitalist market Even here too, the capitalist market can yet play a constructive role: the national as well as international level contests over media markets will lead to the search for new audiences as well as for new issues that will cater to these audience interests. In some societies, the poorer and marginalised social sectors (such as the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka) are the principal major markets that remain to be tapped. Nevertheless, at a global level, the growth of non-Western media markets has seen this important break away, a 'secession' as it were, from the traditionally Western-led media discourse. While these non-Western media centres are quite explicit in their 'secession' from the Western-led media discourse, those traditional centres of world media power are today, also shifting in their ideological emphasis. Increasingly, what was hidden under euphemisms and code words (e.g. "non-communist" for 'capitalism') is becoming the legitimised terminology. Language that earlier was limited only to the more 'intellectual' commentary columns where explicit terms were softened by philosophy, is now being used in the news stories as well. 'Imperialism' in modern Western media discourse, especially the American discourse, was used to describe the European colonial past if at all. Increasingly, in recent years, many of the most 'respected' newspapers and magazines have begun using this term to refer to the political behaviour of their own countries on the world stage. At one time Western publications referred to the Soviet Union derogatively as 'empire' (to undermine its social democratic credentials). Today 'imperialism' is being used positively by everyone from the London Times to Der Spiegel to the Washington Post. The latest edition. America's Time magazine, for example, talks of the US as "a kindly imperial power" (in its latest issue, page 48). In fact it describes this vision of a "kindly" imperialism as a "starry eyed vision......that would bring an era of peace, order and good government to the Middle East" ('Middle East' refers to West Asia). Thus, to one of the august mouthpieces of 'modernity', 'democracy' and 'Western civilisation', a revered publication of a nation that was built on emancipation from the British Empire, imperialism can be 'kindly', and even a 'starry eyed vision'! Given this trend in Western media discourse, will the 'clash of civilisations' also soon become standard terminology in news columns and telecasts? |
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