Public should demand less 'Reality TV' and a lot more plain reality
Public should demand less 'Reality TV' and a lot more plain reality
George Monbiot, Guardian News Service, London
For the past nine months, priests and tribal leaders in West
Papua, the easternmost province of Indonesia, have been trying to
warn the world that an Islamic fundamentalist movement was using
their land as a training ground. Laskar Jihad, recently
dissolved, was commanded by a man trained by al-Qaeda in
Afghanistan. Some of its members have already been involved in
terrorism in the islands of Maluku and Sulawesi. Since January
they have established seven bases in West Papua. With the help of
the Indonesian police and army, they had been stockpiling arms,
recruiting Javanese immigrants and training them for combat.
Since the jihadis arrived, Neles Tebay, a Papuan journalist,
had been sending urgent messages to newspapers and broadcasters
around the world, desperate to attract attention to this
protected terrorist network. But even when eight Pakistani
mujahidin arrived, his warnings failed to generate any response
in the newsrooms of either Europe or North America. The Papuans,
ignored and abandoned by the rest of the world, have been reduced
to begging the Indonesian authorities to uphold the law and
disarm the jihadis before they attack.
The victims of the Bali bombing could be said to have
legitimate grounds for complaint not only against the
intelligence services (whose efforts have been diverted from
unpicking the terrorist networks into supporting two futile wars)
but also against the media. Both of them could and should have
warned westerners that Indonesia has become a dangerous place for
them to visit.
Scarcely a month goes by without a travel feature on the
country. One recent program, about the nightlife in Bali, even
featured the Sari club. But, before the bombing, there had been
no recent documentary which could have given viewers any
understanding of what was happening in the country.
On Sunday night, the BBC broadcast a fine Panorama program,
seeking to discover who might have planted the bomb, and why the
ample warnings the intelligence services received did not prevent
the attack. But one of the features of investigative journalism
is surely that it seeks to be wise before the event. There was,
as Neles Tebay pointed out, plenty of opportunity for prior
wisdom.
One of the great ironies of globalization is that the closer
we are brought together, the less we come to know about each
other. As our lives become entwined with those of people living
in the most distant places on earth, our broadcast media --
through which most people in rich countries receive most of their
information -- are treating the rest of the world as if it is no
more than a playground for people like ourselves.
Our understanding diminishes correspondingly, until all we
know of foreigners is that, for no reason that we can discern,
they suddenly attack us. This is a tragedy not only for the
people killed and injured in the Sari Club; but also for the
increasingly misunderstood, and therefore increasingly feared and
hated, people of the poor world.
Last year, according to the media pressure group 3WE, the
coverage of "hard" issues in the poor world on British television
fell to the lowest level it had recorded in 12 years of
monitoring. While the broadcast hours of international factual
programs rose slightly, nearly all of them were devoted to
travel, "reality" shows, docusoaps, sex, clubbing, surfing and
similar mind-numbing cack about Britons making idiots of
themselves in exotic places.
In the entire year, only four programs about the politics of
the poor world were broadcast on the five main channels, three of
them on BBC2.
"The international documentary," the report concludes "is
virtually dead." Even after Sept. 11 there was no discernible
improvement.
Much of what we do see of the rest of the world on television
could fairly be described as counter-informative. Such local
people as the travel programs permit us to watch appear to have
been put upon the earth only to entertain us. Many wildlife
documentaries treat the regions they cover as if they are
uninhabited. At the beginning of last year, BBC2 broadcast a
three-part series on the Congo, which won the Royal Television
Society's science and natural history prize.
The existence of human beings was briefly acknowledged, but
the series informed us that while the Congo was "once the heart
of darkness", it is now a place of "light": An odd description of
a region devastated by a civil war in which some three million
people have died. The war and its associated atrocities were not
mentioned.
Television executives claim that programs about the politics
of distant parts of the world attract small audiences. This is
true, if one compares them to such indispensable insights into
the human condition such as I'm a Celebrity.
But while several million viewers might sit uncomplainingly in
front of this pap, or at least leave the television on while they
do something more interesting, the smaller numbers who watch
serious foreign documentaries will engage with them passionately.
John Pilger's film about East Timor attracted three million
viewers, of whom an extraordinary half a million called the
switchboard afterwards, to register their shock and anger at what
they had seen. It would be fair to say that the program helped to
change the course of history.
But films like this are relatively expensive, and unpopular
with the advertisers. They can also cause trouble for the people
who run the networks. When Pilger's latest documentary for
Carlton TV, about the injustices suffered by the Palestinians,
was (predictably enough) attacked by an organized lobby called
HonestReporting, the channel's proprietor, Michael Green,
panicked and denounced it as a "tragedy for Israel so far as
accuracy is concerned". Encouragingly, he was publicly
contradicted by Carlton's director of factual programs.
But such bravery is rare among television executives. The
physical courage of the freelance camera people and journalists,
who risk their lives to film the world's forgotten atrocities, is
matched only by the moral cowardice of the managers who then
refuse even to talk to them, let alone to run their footage. Not
long ago, the investigative film-makers' principal constraints
were technical: the camera equipment was cumbersome, the film
stock was fragile, transporting it was hazardous. Those
constraints have now been overcome, just as the market for their
footage has disappeared.
Next month the government will publish its new communications
bill. 3WE has been lobbying for a legal requirement that
broadcasters make factual programs about international issues: a
proposal which was included in the white paper, but dropped from
the draft bill after the broadcasters complained. There's a good
chance that the pressure group will win, but the rules will be
meaningless unless they are applied enthusiastically by the
regulator.
The regulator, in turn, will act only if the public kicks up a
fuss. So perhaps it is time we became more interactive viewers,
and began demanding less "reality TV" and more plain reality.
Otherwise we can expect the world to continue to deliver
unpleasant surprises, as the needs and the responses of its
people become ever more opaque to us.