Low nutrition news
Does
poor foreign reporting give viewers a distorted perception of the
developing world?
An earthquake in Iran leaves 40,000 dead. Two-hundred
people are trampled to death in Mecca. Cyclone Heta destroys the tiny
Pacific Island of Niue. December and January were just another couple
of months of death and disaster in the third world. Hardly seems out
of the ordinary. After all, it’s always bad news down there,
right?
Global news output has never been higher; international communication
has never been easier. So why is it that so many people have a distorted
impression of the developing world? Could it be that their main source
of this information – the TV news media – is failing in
its job?
All journalists, from the moment they enter their first class, to
the time they are convincing editors to run one of their stories,
have the criteria of newsworthiness firmly embedded in their frontal
lobes. Is the story big and exciting? Are the images powerful? Will
it grab viewers’ attention? Combine these criteria with commercial
pressures and the realities of short TV time-slots and you have a
situation where only the most sensational stories see the light of
day. In the case of foreign stories, where the connection to the viewing
public may seem tenuous at best, the effect is eve more pronounced.
Whole regions of the world disappear from public consciousness, unless,
of course, some spectacular disaster should befall them.
Professor Greg Philo of the Glasgow Media Group has been studying
international TV news reporting for years. He lays the blame for poor
public understanding of the developing world squarely at the feet
of journalists. Professor Philo’s research has found a widespread
belief among TV news editors that programming about the developing
world does not bring in the big audiences necessary to cover the costs
of production. Local interest attracts the viewers and the advertisers,
and it takes priority. The result is that total coverage of the developing
world on the UK’s terrestrial channels dropped by 50 per cent
in the nineties. Over a third of the remaining airtime was devoted
to war, terrorism and disaster, usually characterised by lots of striking
imagery and very little explanation or context.
Professor Philo argues that this poor coverage leads to further reduction
in public interest. “What puts people off is that nothing is
explained about the links between our country and theirs. They just
got fed up with disasters and wars all the time.”
Ron McCullagh, a documentary maker who has spent much of his career
breaking the mould on coverage of Africa, calls this type of reporting
“Mac News”. “It’s a low nutrition, high fat
diet,” he says. “It’s cheap, cheerful and has the
effect of growing an audience that is immature in a way of understanding
the world we live in.”
The end result is that world events become de-contextualised. Famines
become acts of god; terrorists and guerrillas become mindless fanatics;
bloody civil wars become expressions of tribal differences; most importantly,
the people who feature in these stories become nameless victims.
“If you constantly push the idea that Africa’s people
are victims and not protagonists in their own futures,” says
Ron, “you give a sense of dependency and hopelessness.”
Viewers see no solution to the world’s problems and become desensitized
to the flood of shocking and tragic imagery. They perceive the developing
world as a place where bad things always happen, where it is expected
for babies to starve and people to kill.
This may seem an inevitable outcome of worldwide reporting; it’s
big world, with only so much TV airtime. Are people really so interested
in foreign news anyway? In a different century, that argument may
have been valid. But as we are constantly reminded, the globe is shrinking.
The foreign is the local and seemingly distant events can affect our
daily lives. Equally, our actions and choices reach into the farthest
corners of the globe. Do you know if that diamond on your finger paid
for a landmine? Do you know how much the Indonesian worker who made
your shirt was paid?
If we wish to cover global issues in a more intelligent way, while
still satisfying television’s need of large ratings, Ron McCullagh
says the trick is to make the important interesting. “It’s
very easy to be a journalist when the story is obvious and big. What
we are trying to do is engage the audience in issues and stories that
they would otherwise not be interested in.”
To achieve this, some observers think a major overhaul of the concept
of foreign reporting is in order. Salam Pax, the Baghdad Blogger,
witnessed the flawed practices of Western media during the build-up
to the invasion of Iraq. “Journalists don’t talk about
the expensive restaurants they eat in, the nice hotels, the swimming
pools,” he says. “They basically live in a bubble; they
have a pack mentality. They interview the same people, go to the same
places and get a distorted picture.”
Ron McCullagh says, “the foreign correspondent should be foreign.
There are people just as capable of telling a story in Iraq as there
are in London. These people do not travel around in packs, other than
the pack of their own society. It would seem eminently sensible to
use this remarkable resource.”
Ron recently sent African journalist Sorius Samura to live in an Ethiopian
village for 4 ½ weeks. He could eat only what they were eating,
drink what they were drinking and suffer in the process. “The
key is to make a connection between the viewers and the subject,”
says Ron. Through Sorius’s pain and suffering we get, “recognition
of how 40 million people live in Africa today.”
Professor Philo’s research reinforces this view. He found that
once viewers realised their political and economic links to the developing
world, they expressed far more interest in its coverage. The sense
that “nothing can be done” disappeared.
The news media has a long way to go if it is to correct its shortcomings.
Radical changes are needed in both the format and reporting style
of television news. Fortunately, every day it becomes easier for journalists
to escape the constraints that have shaped foreign reporting in the
past. Satellite phones and compact digital video cameras allow individuals
to equal what a large crew would have been required to do a decade
ago. Cutting-edge reporters like Sorious Samura and James Brabazon
have proved that compelling reporting of important issues in the developing
world can be done on a shoestring budget, but can still reach a wide
audience and make a real difference. If other journalists want to
challenge people’s attitudes about the rest of the world, they
would do well to follow this example.
