Journal of the mental environment
When US Marine-turned-journalist John Rushing covered the Virginia Tech shootings for Al Jazeera, he lined up with a group of American television journalists as they prepared to file their live reports. At the top of the hour, the Americans all led off their newscasts with the story of how Seung-Hui Cho sent tapes of himself to NBC, but Rushing stood waiting for his cue.
After finishing their report, the journalists took off their microphones and walked away. Rushing continued to wait. While the Cho tapes was the top story across the United States, Al Jazeera led its newscast with a story about a series of car bombs in Baghdad that killed 225 people, and followed it with stories about the Nigerian presidential elections and the flare-up of fighting in Mogadishu. Virginia Tech was the fourth story.
“You have to realize, on a week when the news hardly mentions anything but Anna Nicole Smith, there are events happening around the world,” Rushing told The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart when explaining the difference between Al Jazeera and the American media’s priorities.
While CNN and BBC once dominated the world’s airwaves, an international audience frustrated by the Western media’s bias and banality can now turn on their own news channels. Along with Al Jazeera, stations like Latin America’s Telesur, France Monde, Russia Today and Iran’s Press TV have all emerged over the past decade as competitors to the Western media’s supremacy. In India, there are more than 20 all-news cable stations. In Southeast Asia, there is a flourishing network of blogs and news websites that bypass their countries’ censored press. No longer forced to view their world through a Western lens, a thriving international media is providing the world with a new awareness, and, with it, a new meaning.
The first Palestinian intifada was primarily covered by the American and European media, for a Western audience. But as Palestinian journalist In’am El Obeidi pointed out, the second intifada in 2000 was covered by an Arab media whose journalists “were formed of locals, as familiar with the history of the conflict as they were with people’s feelings and culture… For the first time, Palestinians felt that they were no longer subjects of an outside narrator. They felt that their story was being told and narrated by themselves.”
The rise of the international media is having a important effect in helping change the world’s balance and tone. Where once American and British voices drowned out all the others, the growth of the international 24-hour cable news channel is finally giving the rest of the world its own platform. Not only can Asia, Africa and South America now tell its side of the story, it can challenge Western claims and assumptions.
During the Gulf War, CNN and BBC were the only television stations with correspondents in Baghdad, which meant the entire world watched a war in the Middle East on two Western stations. But for the Iraq War, at a time when the Western media was banging the war drum the loudest, Al Jazeera provided the world with critical coverage of the American- and British-led invasion. Just when Western powers were trying to silence the Arab world, Al Jazeera gave it a voice.
“During the Iraq war, American media voices no longer held the world’s attention by default, and those who made the case for American policy encountered opposition that was loud, persistent, and far-reaching,” wrote Philip Seib in Hegemonic No More: Western Media, the Rise of Al-Jazeera and the Influence of Diverse Voices. The United States has had a difficult time coming to terms with the media shift. After 9/11 and during the Iraq War, the US government accused Al Jazeera of broadcasting propaganda and allegedly targeted its journalists. On the day Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez announced the launching of Telesur, US Congress approved a program to send radio and television broadcasts into Venezuela in order to counter the station’s supposed “anti-Americanism.”
But it seems the more the US pushes, the more the world resists. No longer content consuming Western views on Western channels, the world’s population is now turning on their own media and finding a new understanding, a new meaning and a new world.
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Comments
Talk of conspiracy is actually misleading. There is no conspiracy; by this point in time it's all quite overt. It's simply a matter of business.
I called my local newspaper and asked them what percentage of their revenues are generated by advertisers and what percentage from readership. I was not surprised to learn that advertising revenue substantially outweighed subscription and newsstand revenues. It's not a conspiracy when a newspaper, or any other media, or any privately owned commercial enterprise seeks to stay in business, be profitable and provide returns for shareholders. It's not a conspiracy that, at least as far as the mass media goes, you stay in business and profitable by being sensitive to the needs of advertisers. Look at the case with Adbusters. The mainstream broadcast media will not air the Media Foundation's television ads because there is not the slightest inkling of doubt that companies with very deep pockets will pull or threaten to pull advertising dollars.
Look at the demise of public education in New Orleans. After Hurricane Katrina the prominent (and now deceased) American economist Milton Friedman advocated (openly, in the Wall Street Journal, so again, no conspiracy) that the devastation should be exploited as an "opportunity to radically reform the educational system." Within a couple of years a large majority of the city's schools are privately run, for profit enterprises, subsidized with public money. The teachers union has had its contract dishonoured, leading to mass firings and lower wages for the teachers who took their place. This made New Orleans "the nation's preeminent laboratory for the widespread use of charter schools," in the New York Times estimation. All out in the open.
After watching the CBC's Rwanda: Autopsy of a Genocide in November of 1994, I called into their viewer response line with a rant along the lines of biased Western coverage serving the powers that be. That was the end of it in my mind, but within a week or so, I got a call from some producer in Toronto. Liked what I had to say, would I rewrite it, pare it down to approximately 25 seconds, go to my local CBC station, get in front of a camera out in the parking lot and tape it for broadcast on one of their "what regular folks on the street think" type of spots. Okay, sure. I focus and write a concise monologue exactly 25 seconds in length. The gist of the spiel is summed up in the concluding sentence, which is that the function of the media is, to paraphrase Dylan, to ensure that the executioner's face remains well hidden. I practice reciting it a few times, then head down and do it for the camera. Mr. Producer calls me back saying they can't use it, his research guy scoured his library and couldn't find the Dylan line. A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, I say. Oh, well, it's too short, he says. You told me 25 seconds and I honed it to exactly that, I say. Yeah, but I really was just expecting you to ramble on for a couple of minutes about how the media does a bad job, says Mr. Producer. I found this exchange quite instructive. The lesson I took from it was this: Vague, thoughtless raving about unspecified media inadequacies is okay because it serves to cast dissidence in an ignorant light. Articulate, rational argument pointing to media obfuscation and apologetics for preventable atrocities, however, is just the wrong story. No conspiracy, just editorial policy. Just business.
If you're talking about conspiracies you're off the mark. Either you're trying to make sense of our horrifying world and spread the word in hopes of effecting positive changes, or you are attempting to discredit those of us who are because you have gained your comforts from the status quo and live in fear of reduced circumstances. Whatever the case, pull your head out of the sand, open your eyes and your heart, be honest with yourself when confronted with uncomfortable revelations, and all the evidence, all the sound arguments we need to overcome the advocates and apologists who are working to broker the dawn of global corporate rule, will be right there in front you.
in solidarity,
sfr
I mistakenly posted this missive as a comment on the article when I should have posted it farther down as a reply to the comments regarding conspiracies.
sfr
Should read:
The international audience finds its own media, free from western bias.
interesting article
http://english.aljazeera.net/
@anonymous:
Oh please, why everyone nowadays seems to need a "New World Order conspiracy" which doesn't exist. All this stupid conspiracies are just blinding the people. What we need, is a strong materialistic, fact based analysis, and NOT conspiracy and playing with numeraries.
Which conspiracy is not true? There are dozens of different conspiracy theories. Is it the jews? The masons? Blood drinking space lizards? There are many interpretations of the factual evidence (often combined with fallacy).
I'm not saying I believe in any of them, I am saying, that the mainstream medias suppression of relevant factual information suggests conspiracy to me.
Maybe it's just a corporate conspiracy. I'm sure the editors of adbusters would approve.
Of course you can prove that it doesn't exist right!? Since proofs have been flooding the world that in fact such an organisation do exist you can obviously argue against all of those plus prove that no such thing would be possible... right? Or are you just an other one of those people that believe that if you can't see something then it can't exist!?
No, I am not one of "that" people. But there are more and less useful tools to explain the world. And all this conspiracies for my opinion are by far too often antisemitic shit. And I don't care if someone believes in, I don't know, elves and dwarfs or unicorns but I do care if the things people believe in are by trend dangerous. And I don't say that there is no single real or true point in some of this stories. But in reality there are also horses, but no unicorns.
Hey man, unicorns are totally out there.
The girl in the photo needs braces.
you need braces
This article isn't about braces, so let's not get distracted.
agreed.. but she doesn't need braces..
I find it weird that people who hang on such a site as adbusters.org can think that someone who doesn't have "perfect" teeth needs braces!?! It's sad really..
i think i would have to agree with you on that one dude. people are confused. fuckin americans man.
I'm on NPR's "Vox Politics" blog all day. They adopt a vaguely cynical tone. When they deign to cover third party political news, they always ridicule the politicians involved, and participants in third party politics. It's creepy.
What it leads me towards, is belief in the New World Order conspiracy.
The supremacy of the banal in the face of all the horror going on in the world.
We should revolt. We should seize back our media. We should do these things, but we will not. Americans don't have the will to act. We are rich and lethargic.
It leaves disgruntled American militias to wait for the day when our television stations will be taken over by a pissed off Mexican with an AK and an agenda.