A Global Standard for Reporting Conflict

Jake Lynch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136221897
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Periodismo

A Global Standard for Reporting Conflict constructs an argument from first principles to identify what constitutes good journalism. It explores and synthesises key concepts from political and communication theory to delineate the role of journalism in public spheres. And it shows how these concepts relate to ideas from peace research, in the form of Peace Journalism. Thinkers whose contributions are examined along the way include Michel Foucault, Johan Galtung, John Paul Lederach, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manuel Castells and Jurgen Habermas. The book argues for a critical realist approach, considering critiques of 'correspondence' theories of representation to propose an innovative conceptualisation of journalistic epistemology in which 'social truths' can be identified as the basis for the journalistic remit of factual reporting. If the world cannot be accessed as it is, then it can be assembled as agreed – so long as consensus on important meanings is kept under constant review. These propositions are tested by extensive fieldwork in four countries: Australia, the Philippines, South Africa and Mexico.

1
More about Good Journalism

Let us live as if the world really exists.

— Paris surrealists’ declaration¹

The call came early that winter morning. On the other end of the phone was the BBC’s overnight news editor: ‘I’m putting you on this job, Jake, because you’re very good at bullshitting’. The date was December 26, 2004, and the story was the ‘Boxing Day Tsunami’—the vast wave then wreaking havoc on the coastlines of south and southeast Asia, several time zones ahead. And the backhanded compliment? Well, the assignment entailed standing outside the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, in Whitehall, central London, and commentating on … what, exactly?

Even in this emergency, it was clear that staff would not be turning up for work, in a holiday period, until at least nine o’clock or so, whereas the demands of continuous media entailed providing updates, on location, from six o’clock. Several live ‘crosses’, filled with speculation about what civil servants might later be doing—and based on responses already reportedly underway by Britain’s embassies in the stricken countries—had passed by the time anything in the building itself actually happened.

The episode neatly encapsulates several interlocking aspects of the journalist’s predicament. Having to fill in gaps with secondhand reports and informed supposition and relying on residual accounts, stock frames and familiar sources, is not new. Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann’s classic text on the US media’s role in democracy, draws attention to this exigency: rare indeed, he remarks, is the opportunity for reporters to offer a firsthand account based on their own ‘raw material’. Instead, information is likely to reach them in ‘stylized’ form, thus affording opportunities for the intervention of others such as ‘the publicity man’ (1922: 214).

The latter observation anticipates a key aspect of subsequent debates over journalistic roles and responsibilities—which Lippmann’s writings helped to open—culminating in an official report, by the Hutchins Commission, in 1947. The free flow of information is not an end in itself, it pronounced: public policy toward the media should be geared towards ensuring that they serve a greater good. ‘More laws and government action’ would risk curtailing the right to freedom of information, guaranteed by the First Amendment to the US Constitution (Hutchins Commission, 1947: 80). But the provision of news, as an essential civic tool in democracy, could not be left to untrammelled commercial interests, embodied in Lippman’s ‘publicity man’. Hence, there should be a concerted effort—involving both journalists and their bosses, and institutions of journalism education—to instil ‘professional ideals and attitudes’ (Hutchins Commission, 1947: 77) and a culture of social responsibility.

The Asian tsunami was a classic news event—one that brought literality to some famous metaphors from accounts of newsworthiness. In Lippmann’s terms, it ‘obtruded itself’ from the general run of things into ‘a certain definable shape’, thereby ‘separat[ing] itself from the ocean of possible truth’ (1922: 215, emphasis added). It registered strongly against the criteria later set out by Johan Galtung—chief supplier of concepts to the then-emerging field of Peace Research—in his essay of 1965, co-authored with Mari Holmboe Ruge: The Structure of Foreign News. As well as being ‘rare and unexpected’, the giant wave sent a signal, across a substantial portion of the globe, of great ‘amplitude’ (Galtung and Ruge, 1965: 65). And it even happened in the traditionally ‘slow’ news days over Christmas, ‘in [a] period … where little else happens abroad [so] the limit defining newsworthiness may be drastically lowered’ (Galtung and Ruge, 1965: 82).

The story rapidly assumed the dimensions of what Simon Cottle calls a ‘global focusing event’ (2010: 474), enabling ‘an expanded array of views and voices’ to constitute a ‘global public sphere’ in which the effects and consequences could be gauged and reported. Such an event may, in turn, ‘prompt the re-imagining of the political’, Cottle argues, ‘within an increasingly interconnected, inter-dependent and crisis-ridden world’ (2010: 483).

Abundant reports in UK media, at least in the early phase of the story, dwelt on the involvement of ‘our’ victims—with ministrations provided, as best they could, by those British embassies, in Bangkok, Jakarta and the capitals of other affected countries. Such is the ‘stock news cast of dramatis personae’, Cottle remarks (2010: 482), and the Galtung–Ruge criterion of ‘consonance’ implies that where an event takes place in a country of ‘low international rank’ and considerable ‘cultural distance’, not only does it have to be highly unexpected and negative to be reported, but it should also ‘provide the reader with some kind of identification—it should refer to him [sic] or his nation’ (Galtung and Ruge, 1965: 84).

As news desks began to register the magnitude of the cataclysm and the devastation it had wrought, however, they commissioned what turned out to be some of the most celebrated dispatches, in which local people in the worst-hit areas emerged as characters in their own right. One of the BBC’s top correspondents, Ben Brown, won plaudits for his stories of survivors in the devastated Indonesian province of Aceh. He recalled meeting a newly bereaved mother, shortly after arriving in the territory:

We started off by filming Rohati on the beach, beginning with what we in the business call a ‘walking shot’, the reporter and interviewee strolling along together. But this was no ordinary interview, just as the tsunami is no ordinary news story. She was hysterical with grief, her body jerking and shaking. And as we walked side by side, she suddenly reached out to grab hold of my left arm. Then she pulled me closer and started to sob uncontrollably on my shoulder. (Brown, 2005)

Repeat exposure to that level of grief took its toll on the journalists themselves. Peter Lloyd, who was nominated for several Walkley awards for his reporting from Thailand for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, subsequently suffered ‘recurring nightmares, a private agony that took a huge toll and led to a personal disintegration’ (Lloyd, 2010: back cover), culminating in his arrest for drug possession on the streets of Singapore. The story prompted ‘pro-social and reparative’ affective responses among readers and audiences, who sought opportunities to participate in what Barry Richards calls ‘the emotional public sphere’ (2010: 302–303). Aid agencies in Australia were overwhelmed with cash donations from a concerned public, to the point where Prime Minister John Howard personally intervened to send aid and soft loans to assist the clean-up in Indonesia, on the explicit rationale of wishing to ‘match the generosity of the Australian people’ with government funds.

Here, then, appeared to be a virtuous circle, supporting a ‘social responsibility model’ of journalism. Ambitious location reporting had enabled its publics to enter into a sphere of influence that Lippmann (1922) regarded rather patronisingly as beyond their reach. It was unrealistic, he declared, to expect an ‘omnicompetent citizen’ to be able to make mature appraisals of every issue in public affairs. John Keane supplies a vivid summation of Lippmann’s view: ‘Citizens are muddled and fuddled creatures—as bewildered as a puppy trying to lick three bones at once’ (2009: 357). Lippmann believed ‘the responsible administrator is better equipped to act on their behalf’, Stuart Allan explains, in a thoughtful commentary on Lippmann’s ideas and their reception—‘making effective use of [an] intelligence system to assist representative government’ (2010: 64). But the implicit flow in this case was the other way about, and enabled by what Cottle calls the ‘world news ecology’ (2010: 474). Governments wanted to connect with public perceptions formed in response to journalism as it brought ‘an episode out of darkness into vision’ (Lippmann, 1922: 229).

Some of the journalism in question was, moreover, valorised by journalists themselves, empanelled to grant professional recognition in awards ceremonies. There were many examples, but the two picked out here are from public broadcasters. These are comparatively strong in the UK, Australia and many European countries, but very weak in the US. As James Curran has shown, the culture of social responsibility, embodied in professional ideals and attitudes and envisaged by the Hutchins Report (1947), has actually proved most robust when implanted in ‘media systems shaped by a conception of the public interest realised through the state’ (Curran, 2011: 44). In these systems, ‘institutional arrangements’ support public interest journalism and ‘legal obligations’ underpin it (Curran, 2011: 22). Leave the delivery of news predominantly to a lightly regulated commercial system and lofty aspirations cannot by themselves prevent ‘informed citizenship’ from being undermined, Curran finds (2011: 47).

So, coverage of the Boxing Day tsunami, despite its inauspicious beginning in London’s predawn light, was an example of good journalism—as valued by readers and audiences as it was admired by its peers. It prompted a metaphorical wave: one of global goodwill, which seemed to enable a reimagining of the political, at least temporarily. John Howard’s reputation, as a rather stonyhearted custodian of public finances, meant that his act of official philanthropy occasioned significant surprise. Some observers even attributed, to the arrival of helpful outsiders in Aceh under the gaze of the world’s TV cameras, a catalytic effect on the peace process there: shortly afterwards, European Union mediators were welcomed in to broker a political accommodation that ended several decades of fighting.

The story occupied a position of prominence on the world’s front pages for several weeks, with new headlines typically being provided by estimates of the total numbers killed as they were revised seemingly ever upwards. A month or so after the disaster struck, the figure settled at around 250,000. Coincidentally, towards the end of this period, the United Nations released a compendious report, running to some 3,000 pages, titled Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals (United Nations, 2005). It drew attention to worldwide mortality due to sheer deprivation: lack of food or clean drinking water and preventable disease. Among children alone, this was running at an annual 11 million, the report said, or some 30,000 per day. By the time it appeared, therefore, the death toll since the previous Boxing Day was nearly three quarters of a million, or three times that attributed to the tsunami over the same time span.

And yet the news resources and attention devoted to the UN initiative were comparatively tiny. The Factiva database, searching among thousands of newspapers worldwide, retrieves 102,770 stories during the month of January 2005 including the word tsunami, but just 126 containing the phrase investing in development. One of them, which appeared under the byline of Leonard Doyle—another of my former editors, when he was in charge of foreign news at the London Independent —carried an interview with the report’s author, Professor Jeffrey Sachs. In it, the Harvard economist bemoaned the relative lack of attention for the problems it addressed, let alone its proposed remedies (Doyle et al., 2005).

‘There’s a tremendous imbalance of focus on the issues of war and peace, and less on the dying and suffering of the poor who have no voice’, Sachs told the paper. ‘The overwhelming reality on our planet is that impoverished people get sick and die for lack of access to basic practical means that could help keep them alive’ (Doyle et al., 2005: n.p.). He went on to point out the contrast between ‘the tsunami of the Indian Ocean’, on which ‘the world’s eyes [were] focused’, and ‘the silent tsunamis of deaths from malaria which take, every month, the number of people that died in the Asian tragedy’, but were comparatively ‘overlook[ed]’ (Doyle et al., 2005: n.p.).

Elsewhere, Sachs had advocated writing off the borrowing of poor countries from Western banks, but, Doyle and colleagues noted, this proposal was omitted from his UN report ‘with the aim to achieve the widest possible backing for it’. At the time, the UK government had begun advocating the unconditional forgiveness of debt, so resources could be devoted to improving conditions for the world’s poor instead of meeting interest payments, as part of its preparations to host a landmark summit of the G8 later in the year. ‘Trade justice’—allowing for some protection of key industries by countries seeking to grow and diversify their productive capacity—was another key demand, put forward in partnership with a group of senior aid agencies. Among the chief opponents of such schemes was US president George W. Bush, along with John Howard—a stance regarded as much more typical of his character than his largesse over the plight of Aceh.

The Galtung and Ruge (1965) essay supplies a more rounded predictive framework, for the nature and content of journalism-as-usual, than does the Herman–Chomsky (2002) Propaganda Model, discussed earlier. It conceptualised a truism of news: something that happens is a story, whereas something that merely continues to happen is not. ‘Frequency’, they called it: an observable change that takes place to fit the media’s own production schedule, of putting out hourly bulletins or daily editions, is a key predictor of what makes news. The disparity of attention for the two calamities described earlier—one sudden, the other ongoing—is to be expected, given this almost universally observed convention.

The cumulative effect is a recognisable pattern, or structure, which feeds into deliberations in public spheres over how problems should be defined, and treatment recommendations formulated and implemented. This is a key characteristic of the discursive framework, into which competing accounts are inserted—the social space where power is decided. ‘It is axiomatic’, Galtung and Ruge posit, ‘that action is based on the actor’s image of reality, [so] international action will be based on the image of international reality’ (1965: 64). And, while the media are not the only influence on this process, their ‘regularity, ubiquity and perseverance … make them first-rate competitors for the number-one position as international image-former’ (Galtung and Ruge, 1965: 64).

Media conventions therefore shape opportunities for initiatives to prompt or incentivize international action. Those, like Jeffrey Sachs, seeking to draw attention to processes whose effects warrant further attention, have to contrive ways to package and present them as, or through, events, preferably dramatic ones, to fit with criteria of newsworthiness, such as threshold and frequency. The alliance formed by aid agencies, such as Oxfam and Save the Children, and the UK host government, proved both creative and energetic in doing just that through the months following the tsunami, leading up to the G8 meeting at Gleneagles, Scotland.

In this ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign, ‘Millions of people wore white bands, 444,000 people emailed the Prime Minister about poverty and 225,000 took to the streets of Edinburgh for the Make Poverty History march and rally’ (Make Poverty History, 2005). Day-long ‘Live 8’ rock concerts in public parks and stadia—one in each G8 country—brought the issues further into public consciousness. Journalists provided abundant opportunities, through exhaustive location reporting in the lead-up to the event, for readers and audiences to appreciate the consequences, the damage to lives and life chances among the world’s poor, of maintaining trade and financial systems that were stacked against them.

Television news, Michael Ignatieff remarks, has ‘brought us face-to-face with human misery that was once beyond our ken, and therefore beyond the ambit of those emotions—guilt, shame, outrage, remorse—that lead us to make other people’s trouble our business’ (1999: 90). Viewing publics are also well aware that ‘we can make a difference’ to the suffering thus witnessed, which has reduced the ‘plausible excuses for fatalism and inaction’ (Ignatieff, 1999: 90). In obtruding itself from the main stream of journalism-as-usual—dominated as it still is by nationalistic perspectives on matters of life and death—this was good journalism; journalism that opened up critical perspectives on familiar everyday assumptions about boundaries and borders of affect and responsibility.

Ignatieff’s ‘we’, the first-person plural, is significant. The capacity to deploy news resources, especially to faraway places, is a marker of privilege. Simon Cottle visualises an elegant model of the ‘world news ecology’ (2010: 476), showing multitudinous inputs from, and intersections between, communicative sources including—as in the examples I have discussed here— nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and social movements, as well as ‘Western corporate media’. But there is still a net news ‘flow’, whereby the preponderance of representational resources is in the hands of rich countries, which emanate out to the rest. There is an identifiable centre and a periphery: an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. If, as argued previously, journalism is itself a structure, and if some of its contours are mapped by Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) observations, then journalism-as-usual serves to reinscribe and reinforce power, in manifestations of advantage and disadvantage.

‘News’ will generally occur when real-world developments shape up in paradigmatic form. Worthy of note, and potential concern, is a departure from normality. Normality itself cannot appear as a cause for concern because it has been made the way it is, and sustained, by the workings of power, and journalism-as-usual allots a dominant position to accounts constructed to give effect to flows of power in social bodies. In contrast, good journalism, the insurgent form, enables power to be inspected and interrogated. For ongoing issues, such as systematic inequalities built into normal relations of trade and finance, to be brought into the ambit of news, entails reaching out for other accounts and devising creative ways to make them salient.

Media Commercial and Political Interests

The continuing predictive capacity of the Galtung–Ruge newsworthiness model was confirmed in a later study by Harcup and O’Neill (200...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 More about Good Journalism
• 2 Peace Journalism
• 3 Australia
• 4 The Philippines
• 5 South Africa
• 6 Mexico
• 7 A Global Standard and Prospects for Implementation
• References
• Index