balanced reporting on gaza?

The current war in Gaza raises a couple of tricky questions about "balanced" or "objective" coverage. It has been noted by many observers that the war is being reported differently by the media in different countries. And whereas some certainly have a pro-Palestinian bias, The Independent's Middle East expert Robert Fisk has accused almost the whole Western media of ignoring the real story - which, he argues, is "the dispossession of the Palestinian people". In an article on aljazeera.net, media analyst Habib Battah observes that the US mainstream media are "prioritising Israel's version of events while underplaying the views of Palestinian groups". He points out, for example, that US media tend to give equal coverage to Palestinian and Israeli victims although the Palestinian casualties outnumber the Israeli one by a hundred fold:

However, such comparisons were rare because the scripts read by American correspondents often excluded the overall Palestinian death count. By stripping the context, American viewers may have easily assumed a level playing field, rather than a case of disproportionate force... When number of deaths did appear - sometimes as a graphic at the bottom of the screen - it was identified as the number of "people killed" rather than being attributed specifically to Palestinians. No wonder the overwhelmingly asymmetrical bombardment of Gaza has been framed vaguely as "rising tensions in the Middle East" by news anchors.

The coverage appears "balanced" in a certain sense by giving equal coverage to victims on both sides of the conflict - but is it really balanced? Battah poses some simple questions:

If an Israeli woman had lost five daughters in a Palestinian attack, would The Washington Post run an equally sized photograph of a relatively unharmed Palestinian woman, who was merely distraught over Israeli missile fire?...would the paper have ever considered balancing a story about a massive attack on Israelis with an in-depth lead piece on the strategy of Palestinian militants?

Battah exempts CNN International from his criticism, and it might be mentioned that The Washington Post did run an article by former US President Jimmy Carter which was highly critical of Israel's war - but this doesn't invalidate the main points he is raising, nor the criticism by Robert Fisk. Does this mean, then, that one should give up the ideal of being "balanced"? Or rather be more careful about its meaning?
Another important issue related to balanced reporting is the ban on journalists who want to enter Gaza for coverage. As the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel has argued in a very interesting article, this is to some extent counterproductive, as it leaves Palestinian journalists with a monopoly on reporting from Gaza and influencing world opinion. But apparently, the reasoning in Israel was that it would be easy to dismiss such reports by Arabs as "biased", whereas critical coverage by media organizations with a reputation of being "balanced" would be difficult to handle. Which seems to indicate once again that being balanced is important...

a witch-hunt of indian muslims?

Five bombs exploded in the Indian capital Delhi on Saturday. The attackers targeted well-known markets where the well-off middle class citizens go for their weekend shopping and entertainment. No wonder, then, in a way, that the mainstream Indian media put pressure on the government to do more against terrorism. But on the other hand, there's a growing sense that the fear of terrorist attacks is being used to target the Muslim minority in India. Asghar Ali Engineer, a leading Muslim social scientist and activist from Mumbai, writes:

This is alienating the community besides allowing real culprits to escape and it has grave consequence in the sense that bomb explosions continue as real culprits are never nabbed.

As Yogi Sikand writes on the website The South Asian,

it appears that powerful elements within the state apparatus are deeply implicated, along with Hindu terrorist groups, in a witch-hunt of India's Muslim citizens.

Ajit Sahi, a journalist with Tehelka magazine, recently did a three-month investigation into SIMI, the "Students Islamic Movement of India", which has been routinely accused of masterminding terrorist attacks in India. But, writes Sahi:

The government had seven years to bring proof of its claims about SIMI, but it hasn’t yet done so and it appears doubtful it will bring some dramatic proof anytime soon.

Tehelka has published Sahi's findings about the "SIMI fictions" in great detail on their website. There are touching stories about youngsters such as a doctor, who have quite obviously been falsely implicated in terrorism cases, but continue to be stigmatized. But why don't the mainstream media talk about all this? In a recent interview, Ajit Sahi said:

I am just a simple journalist. Doing these investigations into the SIMI affair and exposing the heaps of lies of the police and the state about the blasts and the arrested persons has made me feel purposeful as never before. I am 42 now, and so far I have been chasing money and highly-paid jobs. But now, after going through all this in the course of the investigations I have been doing into charges against innocent Muslims, I have more clarity as to my purpose in life... Every decent journalist should ... investigate the truth. I have to speak out the truth and expose the lies that the government and its agents are so blatantly spreading.

Well said, and not only for India...

bbc presenter criticizes afghanistan coverage

Veteran BBC correspondent and presenter Lyse Doucet has criticized the coverage of the Afghan war on British TV. According to the Daily Mail, Doucet told the Edinburgh International Television Conference:

What's lacking in the coverage of the Afghans is the sense of the humanity of the Afghans... You knew that the bombs were dropping in that direction and the guns pointing in that direction but you never got a sense of how Afghans are as a people.

In what turned out to be a controversial statement, Doucet called on her colleagues to also show the "humanity" of the Taliban. You just need to read the "comments" column to find out that this proposal does not get down well with at least the Daily Mail readership... which doesn't change the fact that she has a point there, of course. Just consider that even in "Lions for Lambs" which was widely regarded as an anti-war movie, there was no attempt at all to understand the Afghans in the story. It was all about the US discussion about the war in Afghanistan, but without any Afghanistan actually shown...

musharraf resigns - second thoughts from pakistan

What I find most interesting about Pakistani media reactions the day after is how openly Musharraf is criticized for his policy on Afghanistan and the Taliban. The Daily Times writes that Musharraf derived legitimacy for his rule from serving both the interests of the army and the Americans...

...until a clash of legitimacies (army versus NATO-ISAF) made it difficult for him to pass off his double-dealing as political ambivalence. This began to happen after his policy of giving shelter to the Taliban leadership of
Afghanistan in Quetta could not be maintained without adverse reaction from Washington, and his strategy of retaining domination of Afghanistan resulted in cross-border Taliban raids into Afghanistan.

And Yousuf Nazar demands in DAWN that Musharraf "face an open trial":

His greatest crime was that he compromised Pakistan’s national interests to consolidate his power when he was an international pariah and brought Pakistan to the brink of Balkanisation by his dual track policy of covertly supporting the Afghan Taliban while allowing the Americans to conduct air strikes on Pakistan.

He elaborates:

A section of our English-speaking elite believe Musharraf was trying to save them from the Taliban. This makes you wonder how ignorant one can be. He secured the evacuation of more than 3,000 Taliban and militants between Nov 15 and 23, 2001 from Kunduz in Afghanistan, where they had been trapped, to Pakistan’s tribal areas from where they were to later organise and conduct terrorist attacks.

Musharraf used the intelligence agencies to rig the 2002 elections to enable the supporters of religious militants and Lal Masjid extremists, such as Chaudhry Shujaat and Ijazul Haq, to gain power in the centre and the religious elements to gain ground in the NWFP and Balochistan. The politics of fear and blackmail was practised, fully exploiting the apprehensions of Pakistanis and the West of religious extremists.

Many people have criticized the ISI's involvement in the making of the alliance of religious parties, the MMA on many occasions, but Musharraf's links to the Taliban have generally not been exposed in this way in the Pakistani media, I believe. Could be helpful for an honest debate.

And finally, a bold claim by political scientist Rasul Bakhsh Rais, also in the Daily Times - wonder if he's right here, specially in the second half:

The real credit for causing Musharraf’s fall goes to civil society and the media, both new actors on Pakistan’s social and political scene. In all new democracies, where the transition from military to civilian rule has taken place, these two actors have proved catalysts of political change, and the agenda-setters and messengers of political forces.

some comments on "Guardians of Power"

Dear David Edwards and David Cromwell,

I have read your book „Guardians of Power“ with great interest. As a working journalist myself for the last decade, I find it extremely thought-provoking and disturbing. It certainly deserves to be read and debated among journalists and media scholars. There can be no excuse for the serious mistakes which you expose, the obvious bias and the arrogance shown by senior representatives of the British media especially before the invasion of Iraq.

Nevertheless, I would like to raise a few questions and share my experience with how editorial teams in "mainstream media" work. And I think, while far from dismissing your criticism, I'd suggest you look more closely into the daily decision-making process in the media, because this is where the main problems are - and where we should look for solutions. Whereas more "citizen journalism" might help, what we really need - in my opinion - is more professionalism in the media, not less.

I am not entirely convinced about your analysis of the reasons for biased media coverage. You talk about the media doing „propaganda“ – mainly for big business and the establishment. You talk about the influence of the corporate sector over the media and claim it is responsible for suppressing stories. In certain cases, this may be true. There are large media conglomerates run by business tycoons in many countries, and they also follow certain editorial policies. But what is more surprising is that even supposedly independent institutions like public service broadcasters fail in their job.

And: How do you explain, for example, that German and French media never supported the war in Iraq? That they heavily criticized the practice of „embedded journalism“ and remain staunch critics of George W. Bush? Surely the major German and French companies don’t have so totally different interests from the British and Americans? Why does a widely read and respected critical newspaper such as „Le Monde diplomatique“ exist in France, but not in Britain? How do you explain that, in Pakistan, mainstream private commercial TV channels have over the last more than a year been extremely critical of the pro-American, pro-business President Musharraf? And instead upheld democratic ideals of an independent judiciary and human rights? That mainstream TV journalism helped force Musharraf to step down as army chief and hold free elections? It just doesn’t make sense at all according to your theoretical framework.

In my experience, this is more about political cultures, mindsets – and work routines. These days, most journalists are not very creative people. Journalists themselves are the biggest media consumers. A few news agencies define their news agenda for the day. It’s a well-established daily routine to follow the others, and not to be different.

This is true for single news stories, but even more for „angles“ or „frames“ for certain ongoing developments – such as the „war on terror“. Or for what, for want of better terminology, I’d like to call a „discourse“. There is an enormous power in established ways of seeing the world, and it requires enormous efforts (not just of journalists) to shift these paradigms – to question who are the good and who are the bad guys, for example.

Because we don’t have a global public sphere, these mindsets, frames and discourses can vary from country to country. There is a strong anti-Bush public discourse or even anti-American stereotype in countries such as France, Germany and Pakistan. Any number of influential multinational companies won’t prevent critical coverage of the Iraq war here. (Though we have other blind spots which we don’t recognize.)

If this is true, it makes changing the media much easier. Most journalists I have met are ambitious about their job. They want to be good, and there is a lot of journalistic training in different fields such as techniques of writing and presenting – though hardly in editorial independence and investigative journalism, for example. If all the talk about the media controlling the government and being the fourth pillar of the state were true, the first training should be how to fulfil this role. Just as a lawyer is trained to defend his client no matter what he himself thinks about the case, a journalist must learn to doubt the version of the Prime Minister’s spokesman. In my experience, this is easier for journalists who know they are working in an authoritarian country - such as Pakistan, and even China. But we tend to get complacent in democracies, where chances are high that a majority of us have voted for this government ourselves. On the other hand, if lawyers and judges could learn their job over the centuries, why can’t we?

I'd like to draw your attention to an article published more than 20 years ago by an anthropologist and journalist, James Lett. He writes:

To be recognized as a journalist, you simply have to work as a journalist--and that’s true in very few other professions. Lacking both a reliable methodology for gathering information and a sound theoretical basis for organizing knowledge, journalists have little choice but to practice a journalism that is both uninformed and unanalytical. From an anthropological point of view, journalism is exceedingly uncritical.

I am convinced these are the crucial issues: There is not enough reflection – in fact, most of the time, there is no reflection at all – among journalists about their role and their work. Instead, there is a strange obsession with "news" – though, as James Lett, whom I have quoted before, puts it:

Television news rarely makes people examine their world view or question their ethos. Instead, television news regularly re-affirms their preconceptions and reinforces their prejudices. There’s nothing new about the news.

Our media are full of stereotypes, full of boring repetitions every day. To avoid this, we need more critical minds, more serious professionals. We certainly don’t need less professional journalism, as you suggest. There is a role for „citizen journalists“ such as bloggers (as there is for juries in courts, for example), but don’t overestimate it! We need people who monitor the media, as you do it, and we need a broadly based public debate. But „netizens“ will also be prone to spread rumours and hate speech. They should inspire, correct and supplement broadcasters and newspapers, but cannot replace credible, critical mass media.

Thanks for an important book, and keep up your work!

Best regards,

Thomas Bärthlein

to begin with

Having watched Geert Wilders' film "Fitna" recently (online, of course), I was struck by how much attention it got. Why should anyone want to waste their time on something so badly argued, so badly produced? And yet, millions clicked on it and watched it (including me) - an audience he would never have had before the days of the world wide web. All the calls for banning the "movie" simply evaporated, as censorship has become technically impossible. If anything, the resistance only increased its appeal. Extreme viewpoints are everywhere on the web, just visit any discussion forum... And they seem to acquire a totally exaggerated importance, completely out of proportion with "real life". Even Al Qaida would be nowhere close to where they are without the internet. But wasn't the net supposed to connect us all, bridge all the gaps? We have the technology to connect people, but is it working? 

Apparently, the more traditional "global media" are also losing their capacity to integrate people across the globe. After the Muslim world started mistrusting CNN and BBC, the recent events in Tibet have shown that many Chinese, too, think the Western media are biased against them. Kai Hafez has claimed that media globalization is just a myth: More often than not, the media are only reinforcing our mutual prejudices. Satellites and broadband alone won't bring us closer to each other.

And yet, the world has become smaller in many ways. Dutch films do disturb people in Pakistan. We need to develop new ways of communicating with each other in this age of globalization, new levels of tolerance and respect - and eventually, new channels and forms for global democracy. Let's share ideas.