Hurricane Katrina and Media Moguls:  At Best a Short, Stormy Union

 

---Vasuki Nesiah

 

With images of the black, working class in the New Orleans superdome flooding into television sets in suburban living rooms the US media is finally said to have found its critical voice.  Of course, the first instincts of many media channels was to mobilize racist imagery about Katrinas victims; to vilify them as damned by their own criminality [1] .  However, reporters soon had to confront the ugly facts about America’s façade of wealth and power.  The underbelly of the superpower was revealed to be one fraught with racial injustice, not just as a legacy of slavery and civil rights deprivations yesterday, but as a deeply embedded aspect of how the US government is structured today.   Thus CNN reporters are applauded for grilling FEMA chief (now ex-FEMA chief) Michael Brown on its abandonment of the city’s poor to the ravages of the hurricane, in particular, to FEMA’s slow and inadequate response to the displaced, distraught and dead.  Newspaper heavy weights such as the New York Times and the Washington Post told a story about race and class in contemporary America in describing the racial and economic demographics of vulnerability to Katrina, as well as to the federal response to that disaster.  In a column recounting these critical impulses in mainstream media reporting of the US government response to Katrina, Eric Altman, columnist in the left leaning Nation magazine, is inspired by this coverage.  He reassures us that the so called “liberal media” (i.e. the code epithet in the US for anything left of the Republican party center) was finally “Found In the Flood” [2] .

 

In many parts of the globe this kind of coverage is hardly the kind of think that will have left magazines waxing euphoric.  However, it is understandable that this provides some comfort in a country whose media culture has become increasingly obsequies to power.   Over the period of the Bush presidency this been embodied most starkly by embedded journalists in US battalions in Iraq to Republican party plants in the White house press corp.  On top of all this we have also had the Patriot Act stifling dissent and curbing free expression.  A country that flaunts its claims to a free press has been faced with calls to free the press.  Against this backdrop, reporters questioning the PollyAnna-ish world view of the Bush team in the face of the Katrina catastrophe can only be lauded.

However, it maybe worth reminding Altman that the questions of bias in the US media is not merely a question of whether or not the current administration is treated with kid gloves.  The political economy of US media ownership provide much more alarming grounds of embedded bias than any instance of embedded journalists.  Just five media conglomerates (namely, “Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS)”) own the overwhelming majority of “newspapers, magazines, books, radio and TV stations, and movie studios of the United States.” [3]   In The New Media Monopoly, Ben Bagdikian, shows the enormous reach of these powerhouses in narrowing the terrain of the public sphere and democratic dialogue -  indeed, in paving the way for the political dominance of the far right and the economic dominance of a corporate agenda on issues that range from copyright law to tax policy.   Clearly ‘bias’ is not merely a problem of having weak kneed reporters, but a much more structural shaping of the realm of positions that are possible in this brave new world.

The alarming aspect of the media ownership map is that this is not merely an American story but a global story.  Just take TV news as one indicator - Time Warner owns CNN which dominate airwaves from New Orleans to Colombo,  Murdoch transmits news through Fox and Sky TV with similar reach … the list goes on.  I remember as a kid when TV first came to Sri Lanka we had just two TV news sources, Rupavahini and ITV.  Today there is an explosion of options – but, ironically, the plethora of channels does not correspond to an equivalent widening of meaningful choice in regard to the ideological spectrum of news reporting.   Moreover, these ‘news’ companies own and control much more than ‘news’ channels – for instance, the Time Warner empire extends beyond CNN to also include cable networks such as HBO, Cinemax, WIN (the Women’s Information Network), Court TV, Comedy Channel, the Cartoon Network and much more.  Moreover, this is not counting its ownership of other kinds of media portals such as the cyber powers AOL, Compuserve and Netscape; its magazine kingdom in Time, Life, People, Fortune etc.  All this under one company – an extraordinary concentration of power enabled and extended through its multiple faces in every corner of the media realm.

We do of course find some challengers to the dominance of the big 5 –  of the global media outlets, BBC is perhaps the most popular alternative source for English news in countries like Sri Lanka.  However, BBC, while leagues higher than any American counterpart, is inconsistent in its critical impulse; the coverage of Palestine is perhaps the most symptomatic of this.   In other parts of the world there are some interesting regional initiatives that are worth following – for instance, Al Jazeera has provided a troubled but often courageous and important counterpoint in West Asia.  In May of this year, the Venezuelan government launched Telesur – with some financial backing from the current left wing governments in Argentina, Uruguay and Cuba (and still courting the Brazilians).  Telesur is very consciously seeking to provide a Latin American perspective that is an ideological counterpoint to CNN.

Typically, of course the more politically interesting and courageous news initiatives are local community initiatives.  The big Sri Lankan media outlets, in print radio and TV, are beholden to their corporate owners, the government in power, party affiliations or in the case of the Tamil media, the LTTE.   However, Sri Lanka does also have an alternative tradition of many local community based initiatives – and in closing, it may be worth reminding ourselves of these different efforts inspired by and speaking to different configurations of ‘community’.  Many cite the role of the Saturday Review in the early 1980s as being an important alternative voice in a very troubled time in Jaffna – offering a space for a range of voices troubled with the direction of the ethnic conflict in ways that seem acutely prescient in retrospect.  Coming out in the 1990s, addressing a varied, regionally dispersed community of readers, many pieces in the shortlived magazine Counterpoint provided tough investigative journalism at its critical best – from the President down, nothing and no one was beyond accountabaility.  Not everyone will be sanguine with its last leg of life, but in its hey day Lanka Guardian was a vitally important forum for public dialogue about the key political and economic debates of the period.    Polity, as much as its predecessor Pravada has carried through with SSA’s longstanding tradition in creating a forum for feminist, pluralist and social justice issues through the writing of local and international scholars and activists.  Most recently, the Uva Community Radio Station was part of an important experiment in building a radio station shaped by local community needs and priorities, claiming (on the basis of the 13^th amendment) as much constitutional independence as it could from SLBC and the central government.

This is not a comprehensive list, but the efforts mentioned in the preceding paragraph, and many others, together provide an alternative history of a rich tradition of independent media in Sri Lanka; the challenge is to ensure that this kind of initiative is sustainable and gets a wider audience.   This is not a call for media nationalism – in fact, nationalist media has been amongst the worst enemies of media freedom.  I also do not think that all products of the global media conglomerates are regressive.  On the contrary there is  radical tradition in the heart of the empire – for instance, Hollywood was an important counterpoint to McArthyism, the WashingtonPost broke the Nixon presidency, and so on.  That said, it cannot but enhance media freedom to develop greater independence from both big money and big government; it cannot but enhance media freedom to expand the ideological spectrum represented in the media; it cannot but enhance media freedom to enable voices that have been historically denied media access.  As often, quoted in indymedia circles, the general philosophy being: ‘Don't hate the media. Be the media!’