Western media, developmental journalism and objectivity

In his 2 May column “Behind the Headlines” in The Star, Bunn Nagara commented on some issues addressed at the Asia Media Summit of 2004. The thrust of his argument–as the title of his article “World Media Can Still Do Better” indicates–is that western mainstream media should come down from their high horse and stop thinking they practise the only acceptable form of journalism. However, his assumption of the cultural relativist position actually contributes to the problem he wanted to address.

In responding to Bunn’s article here, this essay is offered as a reflection on the state of the press to mark World Press Freedom Day on 3 May. We first apologise for its length, which is a result of many issues that are important to cover.

Bunn began by saying that the western notion of value-free news does not make sense because objectivity of the news is a myth. News is, instead, a subjective reflection of the perspectives of the various players responsible for putting it together and presenting it, and the bias is often not deliberate or conscious.

While he has a point that reportage is not (automatically) an objective reflection of events, he left out a crucial point, namely, it is important that members of the press should always strive for objectivity. Objectivity is about capturing an event not just accurately but also faithfully, and the best way to strive for it is to cover as many sides of the event as possible.

Bunn’s omission is thus troubling. It suggests that since objectivity of the news is a myth, there is really nothing to do about it. Western mainstream media are advised to accept the view instead of pushing their nonsense about objectivity or value-free news onto the media of developing countries.

What Bunn is prescribing is a cultural relativist position towards journalism, different strokes (approaches to news reporting) for different folks (countries/cultures). Perhaps a seductive position, it is a highly slippery one that is easily open to abuse and actually abdicates rationality and the search for truths through common experiences across cultures.

The danger of such a position can be quickly illustrated with this example. If your neighbour’s husband is known to beat his wife even though she is afraid to ask for help, you as a cultural relativist will refrain from taking action to stop the abuse because you believe it is not proper to meddle in the affairs of a different family. The action that you may feel comfortable taking will likely come too late, like after the wife has been beaten so badly that her life is at stake.

And so, going by Bunn’s argument but without emphasising the importance of striving for objectivity, news would more easily be abused, especially by the powers-that-be. The ruling party in government would say that the media in the country needs to be restricted for various reasons and that any criticisms of the restriction, from outside and inside the country, would be dismissed as irrelevant, even unpatriotic, for being insensitive to the context of that country.

Indeed, that has been the bane of development journalism. Bunn also mentioned this concept but only to chide western critics of it for, again, failing to understand the context for it or why developing countries that have adopted it need it.
What he did not bring up is there have been many cases where development journalism has been abused by the powers-that-be so that it ended up as government-say-so journalism.

The Philippines was the foremost among Southeast Asian countries to try out development journalism back in the 1960s. It was conceived by Filipino journalists and academics with the best of intentions. They were unhappy with the commercially driven sensationalistic Western media focusing on news that sells to pander to readers and not what is important for the country as well, like less seductive news about projects to help the rural poor.

However, before development journalism could get off the ground, the Marcos government started coopting it in the name of economic development and growth for the Philippines. Soon, it was abused by Marcos to help justify his dictatorial regime in the 1970s until the early 1980s, when the freer, “underground” press (which rejected development journalism) helped rally civil society (that was living very much in fear of Marcos) to rise up and overthrow him in 1986.

The Singapore government under the PAP also has argued for its own media approach–one very similar to development journalism. And it is all too well known by now how restrictive the PAP government has been towards the press as well as opposition parties. Equally well known was when Lee Kuan Yew as prime minister responded to criticism by resorting to cultural relativist arguments.

And lest we forget, it was pretty much the same here in Malaysia under Mahathir’s 22-year regime.

That said, it must be emphasised that the Western mainstream media are not without faults. For one, they could be just as ideological and unwittingly blinded by their cultural bias. They could also be influenced or pressured by political considerations. Even so, they are more complex than the depiction of them given by Bunn.

While there is no doubt that US mainstream media have been pressured by the Bush administration not to show pictures of body bags of US soldiers killed in Iraq, what about the complaint against the pressure by Ted Koppel on his TV news program on ABC? Bunn mentioned Koppel but did not clarify how his complaint squared with the political pressure on US media.

Another recent example (something that surfaced after Bunn’s article was published) was reports of some US and UK soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Again, there is no doubt that because of political pressure, US and UK mainstream media did not report on the abuses months earlier when human rights organisations brought them up. However, some of the recent revelations of the abuse did come from the mainstream media in the UK (Daily Mirror) and the US (60 Minutes II on CBS).

The two examples above show that Western mainstream media do have the freedom to report stories that challenge the authorities. As a result, they are potentially more capable of striving for objectivity. Such is hardly the case under development journalism in the Philippines (under Marcos), Singapore and even Malaysia. Not accounting for what the Western mainstream media can do now and then against their own government or political institutions undermines Bunn’s view of Western mainstream media as equally subservient to their own political masters or political context.

So, what then can we say is the real problem with Western mainstream media? Actually, the answers can be obtained from many in the West itself–people like Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Robert McChesney, Stuart Hall, etc. These western critics have by and large stated that the problem with the Western mainstream media is they are hypocritical or not practising what they preach. They have the constitutional rights to be as free and independent a media as they can be but they have used that primarily to make as large a profit as possible. Thus the sensationalistic bent and the inclination towards conservative politics (which, among other things, supports big business) have become hallmarks of Western mainstream media.

As Bunn mentioned Stuart Hall, let us consider his critique of British mainstream media back in the 1980s when Britain came under the rabidly pro-business, conservative Thatcher government. Hall was concerned with how news comes with bias, deliberate or not, when he debated Independent TV News editor Peter Sissons. But Bunn was overly simplistic to suggest that he was talking about the generic bias inherent in human beings.

Being influenced by Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism, Hall was actually critical of how people like Sissons were so much imbued with the capitalist ideology that they saw capitalism as a natural economic system instead of a socially constructed one.

And so, Sissons was unable to see capitalist dominance of the media that helped perpetuate the capitalist ideology and the hegemony of the capitalist class over the working class. Rather, he saw what he did in the news reporting as non-ideological or value free.

The outcome was how news selection and treatment by the British media were wittingly or unwittingly influenced by capitalist hegemony. This, in a way, would help explain the penchant of the mainstream media towards sensationalism in order to make large profits. The freedom of the press that the British media enjoyed was used to make more money instead of striving for as much objectivity in the news as possible to enlighten the public.

In this sense, the recent conflict between the BBC and the Tony Blair government over the US-UK’s attack of Iraq last year is revealing. The BBC is largely funded through radio-TV set licensing fees and so does not have to be enslaved to the commercial imperative of making huge profits (unlike the commercial media). On the other hand, one may think that it would come easily under the thumb of the government.

The confrontation between the Blair government and the BBC showed it is not necessarily so. And despite all the spin the Blair government was able to get out to the British public about their proper conduct leading to the attack on Iraq, polls indicated that most British citizens were on the side of the BBC, suggesting that they valued having a free press.

In short, Hall, Chomsky, Pilger and McChesney have been slamming their mainstream media for becoming much more interested in serving their own private needs of making money and gaining political mileage with the government at the expense of serving the public with news that is as objective as possible. The freedom of the press that the media have enjoyed has been bastardised. What is needed is for the Western media to emphasise freedom of the press as a way to strive for as much independence and objectivity as possible.

It is in this sense that Western media can still do better. Not the one Bunn suggested, which is acceptance of cultural relativity of media performance, because it would result in reinforcement of one’s prejudices in the name of false cultural pride rather than in enlightenment and critical reflection as a way to social progress.

But what about the media in other parts of the world like Malaysia? Bunn is silent on this. Malaysian media surely can do better as well.

Here, the larger problem now is with government restriction rather than commercialism and sensationalism. This is why many civil society groups and NGOs have been struggling for years to try and get rid of many of the restrictions–such as the Printing Presses and Publications Act, the Official Secrets Act and the Internal Security Act–so that our media can truly enjoy a free press to provide news more objectively in order to inform the public more adequately.

And we hope the recent statements coming from editors of some of the Malaysian media–e.g., theSun and The Star–calling for a repeal of or an amendment to the Printing Presses and Publications Act are just a first step in the struggle for a freer, more objective press in Malaysia.