Reporting conflict: Meeting the different expectations of activists and audiences

No Fly Zone

The fighters flew at Nones,

that hour

when the light of the world

makes the grass glisten

with a golf course gleam.

And no one in Kenosha or Plano

noticed

because CNN

had stopped seeing. No one, except

their wives and lovers

staring at the unmade bed;

their commanding officers

huddled at the ninth tee.

And then ... and then,

the shepherd children

already hurtled to their stunted place

in UNICEF’s lean

statistics

released at a sparsely attended news conference in Rome -

Hearing,

without seeing

the flight at 20,000 feet of these

complacently

angry angels

still living

by the arc of a drawn sword;

hearing

in the sound of summer thunder,

the concussive lightning,

the scream of sheep dying.

As I thought about subject of this conference, two images from the poem came to me: that when it comes to Iraq, CNN had stopped seeing; and the news conferences are indeed sparsely attended. Let’s see if we can put those images in context.

I may be straying somewhat far afield from the assigned topic and being more abstract and theoretical than does either activists or the children of Iraq any practical good. But it is sometimes worth examining or remembering those unexamined, taken for granted truths - the larger environment, so to speak, in which we are operating in order to understand what is going on.

As a reporter and editor, I am a member - no matter how reluctantly - of an elite, what might be dismissively called the chattering class. One of the clichés - and just because it’s a cliché doesn’t mean its untrue - of our class is that we are in the midst of a great economic, social and cultural and political transformation commonly called globalisation. Part and parcel of that transformation is the change from a product dominated economy to an information-based society.

One reason this is a cliché, of course, is that it is not new. It has been going on for some time. Indeed, I would place the beginning of the change at about the mid-I950s, at least in the United States. At that time, a series of technological and social changes came together to produce a new culture in America, a culture that is increasingly being marketed and shipped overseas, changing and in turn being changed by the cultures with which it interacts.

Cultural changes are always a double-edged sword. Technological innovation can bring what we call progress, but it is also disruptive of traditional cultures and their values. In the mid-1950s several things took place which changed not only the way we live, but also the way we think and act about the way we live. I would suggest that what was happening in the United States fifty years ago is happening in other places today. And perhaps less benignly.

In the United States, by the mid-1950s, the post-war economic boom was firmly in place, the explosive growth of suburbia was well underway and rural America was being emptied of its population. New technologies - television, above all - changed what might be called a family of folk or traditional cultures into what we now call a mediated mass or pop culture. Culturally, people became consumers rather than producers.

TV is perhaps the most important - but not the only - symbol of this change. It is important to remember that in 1950, less than 10% of the homes in America had television. In 1955, that had leaped to 64.5%. By the end of the decade, 86% of American homes had television. Today, more homes in the United States have television sets than have indoor plumbing. The penetration of TV into American life furthered a profound shift from time spent producing goods to time spent consuming them.

The 1950s were also the time when the culture industries first took hold and the ideological campaign to turn producers into consumers began with a vengeance. The Art Directors Club Annual -a trade publication - noted in 1955: ‘In the new impersonal mass selling era, the burden to manufacture customers will not be limited to ... the actual point where product is sold.’ American TV, the article said, could now ‘manufacture customers’ in their own living room.

In the decades since the I950s, the role of the culture industries in the national and transnational economies has only deepened and become more significant and according to one political economist, matters of cultural production are among the key factors in the expansion and consolidation of capitalism’s next phase and generating new avenues for consumption is now a global problem.

Consumption is tied to values and today, movies, television, popular music and advertising are the initiators of ideas regarding what is to valued - for what is considered innovative, for what is considered normal, for what is considered beautiful, erotic, or repulsive.

Advertising and marketing hold a central place in all of this. For example, the information media - newspapers, television, the popular magazines are almost wholly dependent on advertising. Newspapers depend on advertising for three-quarters of their revenue. Commercial radio and television are totally reliant on advertising revenue.

As media critic Herbert Schiller has noted, there is in the United States an almost total take-over of the domestic information system for the purpose of selling goods. We see this even in entertainment. I remember going to a game of what my wife calls the ‘Washington area football team’ and being puzzled by occasional stoppages of the game until I realised these were the so-called ‘television time-outs’, timeouts that had nothing to do with injuries or the strategy of the game but simply time-outs for the airing of commercials.

Form and content

We have created a cultural environment of symbolic saturation aimed at inducing us to buy that is enormous. Many of the figures, the indicators, are well-known: the estimate that people in the United States, for example, are exposed to 16,000 commercial messages, symbols and reminders every day. That today’s typical teenage, if he or she lives to 75, will have spent the equivalent of 13 years of his or her life watching television and that at least three of those years will be all ads. According to some studies, children who watch television see between two or three hours of ads a week - and some 40,000 ads over the course of a year.

Equally important, I think, is that the formal structure of television - the fragmentation of images, messages and sounds - for example, influences how we see the world apart from television. As one expert has noted, ‘Because we are used to receiving fragmented information and information in discontinuous form, we come to prefer that form. And information that requires sustained attention over a long period of time becomes more difficult because it is not habitually required in our culture.

In addition to the formal structures of television, its content also influences the way we see the world. Because of the commercial demand to keep as many viewers for as long as possible, television programming tends to focus on emotion - fear, excitement, passion, surprise, lust - and these days, greed. The result is that large parts of everyday life are left unportrayed, or undepicted by film and television ... and perhaps assumed to be a little more ‘unreal’ than those aspects that are shown and seen.

All of which is to say that in an image-saturated culture such as the one in which we live, any story that does not meet the needs of the logic of the structures of television has tough going finding a place. This is true whether it is the subversive story of Jesus’ proclamation of the gospel of the kingdom, which, after all, presents a radical alternative to the ‘reality’ of the CNN-Disney story, or the story of the impact of the sanctions on the civilian population of Iraq.

But what is important here is that this is something of the environment in which all of us work. It is like the water a fish swims in, however, determinative but taken for granted, or rather, generally unnoticed. While I believe this environment - its logic and the stories, the view of reality it presents - must be made visible and resisted, I don’t think it is necessarily a conspiracy or an intentional effort to suppress news.

Lest I sound too negative about this, let me hasten to add that I believe television, in particular, television news, can at times serve what we might call progressive as well as reactionary politics. Television and television pictures of real people in extreme situations were one of the most important factors in bringing the war in Vietnam into American living rooms, providing the images around which an opposition could form. So, too, and even before that, with the civil rights movement Who can forget the pictures of police dogs, fire hoses and billy clubs? The operative word here is ‘pictures’.

Pictures are news

In my work with the PBS programme ‘Religion and Ethics Newsweekly’ I learned the mantra ‘write to pictures’. The story, or rather the structure of the story, is determined by what pictures you have. And Iraq, for a variety of reasons, has not been a story - even during the Persian Gulf War and despite CNN - that lends itself to pictures. And because television is now the driving force behind what is determined to be news, that lack has an implicit, indirect but nevertheless real impact, on how other media regard the story.

Let me turn to some of the practical issues I face in trying to cover a story like Iraq. First as a reporter and now as an editor, Iraq - the ethical, moral dimensions and dilemmas of policy, including and perhaps especially, of the sanctions - has not proven to be an easy story to cover.

First, of course, is the matter of resources. Religious News Service (RNS) is a small operation with a small budget. My bosses, albeit profit-seeking capitalists, are indulgent to the extent that they don’t require that I make a lot of money for them... just that I don’t lose any, or at least not much. But that puts constraints on what I can cover and how I cover it.

I would love, for example, to send a reporter and a photographer - remember pictures, they’re important even in print journalism and getting more important - with a Voices in the Wilderness delegation into Iraq if that were politically and diplomatically feasible. But, when it comes to choosing between spending the resources to cover the pope going to the Holy Land or a meeting of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and another round of its interminable debate over gays, pope and presbyterians win, Iraq loses.

It loses not because I don’t think Iraq is an important story or that I am in cahoots with the national security establishment to keep the American people in the dark about the effects of the sanctions. It loses because I make the judgement that those I serve - my clients in the secular and religious media - expect, even demand, pope and presbyterians to be covered.

Interestingly, sometimes those secular and religious clients want very different things from us. We did an informal survey of them recently and I’m told that among other things, religious clients - perhaps some like you - wanted more coverage of international news and foreign affairs. Secular clients, while not exactly saying we had too much, suggested we needed to beef up our coverage of ‘spirituality’ stories over against political and policy issues. At the same time, the seculars like it when we - or the AP - cover the presbyterians because then they don’t have to, and they can use their limited resources on other stories.

How to prioritise conflict?

Some of you are no doubt familiar with Dafne Sabanes Plou’s little book, GlobalCommunications: Is There a Place for Human Dignity?, which drew on the WCC’s 1995 assembly. It is a stimulating and provocative essay that continues to challenge, comfort and sometimes even irritate me. But at one point in the book she notes that in 1993 there were something like 52 wars going on and civil strife in a number of other countries that was significant enough to qualify as a near war. How, one might ask, does an editor prioritise those conflicts and assign resources to their coverage? Where does Iraq fit into the list?

Iraq has not gone uncovered even as I am the first to admit it hasn’t been covered well by us. How does it get covered? It gets covered when the pope brings it up because we have a correspondent in Rome. It gets covered when the US bishops or the National Council of Churches speak out against the sanctions because they are part of someone’s beat. And, if the other wires - AP or Reuters - cover a sparsely attended news conference in Geneva or Rome by UNICEF on the impact of sanctions’, we will - and have - picked up and re-written those stories, principally for the religious clients who do not have access to the secular wires.

We have not, to my regret, done a really first-rate story on the moral and humanitarian dilemmas of sanctions that examines the debate not just in terms of Iraq but in their overall context and ramifications. I’m interested in that debate because I think its important and because as I reporter I covered the anti-apartheid movement in this country.

It is instructive, I think, to ask why, in the anti-apartheid movement, sanctions held the moral high ground - were presented as a non-violent alternative to a potential civil war - even as it was admitted they would have a debilitating effect on the civilian population. They have now - and not just in the case of Iraq - become morally questionable.

South Africa, however, presents an interesting touchstone, whether for good or ill, about coverage. In some respects it was an easier, simpler story to cover and tell: good guys and bad guys were easy to tell apart, thanks in large measure to Desmond Tutu. Indeed, Tutu helped make apartheid a story. Iraq does not have its Tutu. Apartheid was a cause - a consistent, highly visible and highly vocal cause - among the institutions of organised Christianity, from the World Council of Churches down. There was a steady drum-beat of activism - from the ICCR’s disinvestment campaign to the Programme to Combat Racism that consistently called religious and theological attention the issue.

Iraq is more complex. While virtually everyone agrees that Saddam may be the bad guy, nobody seems sure either who the good guys are or what policy outcome is to be desired.

For us at RNS, the fact that South Africa had strong and visible religious institutions in the forefront of opposition to apartheid - and as defenders of the system - made it much easier to cover. The lack of an institutional religious base – not necessarily Christian – to use as a peg for the story, or as sources, makes it more difficult. Interestingly, on Friday [5 July] a delegation of American Muslims who are just returning from Iraq are holding a news conference in Washington to report on their assessment of the sanctions’ impact. And we will be covering and writing about it.

David E. Anderson is editor of Religion News Service, the privately owned for-profit wire service that specialises in the coverage of religion, ethics, and social issues. It has some 125-150 secular clients, including many of the major newspapers in the US, and a similar number of religious clients.