John Maxwell, veteran journalist, centre, in conversation with with Elizabeth Solomon, left, human rights journalist and Toby Mendel of the United Kingdom at the opening of the Mona School of Business/CARIMAC Symposium on press freedom last Thursday.
Ian Boyne, Contributor
YESTERDAY WAS World Press Freedom Day and Jamaica was honoured to host UNESCO's Inter-national Conference to mark the occasion. Journalists and media-related persons from all over the world have come to discuss some critical issues, and while they are here this columnist would like to put some issues on the table.
For years the issue of the freedom of the press has been an extremely emotive and politically volatile issue, especially during the Cold War. Over the years an inordinate amount of time and attention has been paid to the state's threats to press freedom; Government control of the sources of information; repression of journalists and political dissent; and propaganda as a means of controlling people and stifling democracy. The owners of the media have usually defined the agenda of discussion on press freedom.
DEMOCRACY
Freedom of the press is integrally related to democracy. There can be no genuine democracy without free expression and the tolerance indeed promotion of dissent and a multiplicity of views. Press freedom is essential to a pluralistic society. The political left was misguided in its own one-sided and jaundiced view of press freedom. It rightly pointed out the hypocrisy and vulgar self-interest of many of the advocates of "freedom of the press", and focused correctly on the clever and not so subtle ways in which the masses did not have access to critical information sources and how the information they were fed was biased and skewed to certain commercial (read capitalist) interests.
But the attempt by the left to prove that the 'socialist democracies' which did not allow 'Western-style press freedom' were really acting in the interests of the masses failed abysmally. You don't appease my pain in losing my freedom by telling me that the other guy who claims to be a sympathiser with me is even worse. Both of you are despicable to take away my freedom.
Because Marxism is now dead, the Cold War is over and capitalism has triumphed and Western notions of press freedom taken for granted, it is necessary to point out some pitfalls in the assumptions and claims made for press freedom.
THREATS TO PRESS FREEDOM
It is a fact that especially in the Third World, governments have been a serious threat to press freedom. Ask the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) for example.
As evidenced by the agenda for this just-concluded UNESCO conference on 'Freedom of Expression: Early New Millennium Challenges', some of the old problems are still alive and well in the 21st century hence the sessions on 'Unpunished Crimes against Journalists, 'the Safety of Journalists' and 'Obstacles to the Full Enjoyment of Freedom of Expression in the Information Society'.
But there are some critical issues in this post-communist, post-September 11, unipolar world that should command the attention to the journalists and indeed peoples all over the world. One of these critical issues is the pervasive and often corrupting effect of commercial interests on the media. In other words, the obsession with the bottom-line and in ensuring that media entities are profit engines interfere significantly with the media's vaunted role as guardians of public trust.
Then there is the issue of the concentration of power in the hands of a few media elites which now have enormous power not only over individual countries but also, in the case of the cable news networks, over the world. Hence the issue of cultural imperialism.
In the March/April issue of the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), there is a fascinating article, 'Power Shift', which chronicles the story of the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC's) review of the rules governing who can own how much of the American media. On September 23 last year the FCC invited submissions on the issue and when they closed in February this year some 13,000 submissions had been received from various groups and individuals. Not a few people realise that the matter of ownership and control of the media is crucial to freedom of expression. In Jamaica this receives almost zero attention when press freedom is discussed. Only Government is perceived as posing a threat to press freedom, but this myopia is typical of the backwardness of most of our debates here.
Commenting on the submissions which the FCC had received, Chairman Michael Powell revealed, in the CJR that "Many of them argued that loosening the rules would cause a far greater concentration of media power in the hands of fewer and fewer huge companies and the withering away of competition and diversity of viewpoints." FCC rules now, for example, forbid a single company from owning a newspaper and a television station in the same community. If this is changed, some point out, then people would have less diversity of news sources. The Newspaper Association of America, whose member papers now control 90 per cent of the daily U.S. circulation, is not surprisingly campaigning to change that 27-year-old ban.
DECLINING VALUES
The concentration of power in the U. S. media is already high. Newspaper chains now account for 1,200 of the 1,500 daily newspapers in the United States. All the cable news networks are owned by just three conglomerates. The pressure that this can bring is enormous and sometimes the public interest and rigorous journalism are casualties. In a revealing article in the January/February 2002 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review the former President of NBC News, Lawrence Grossman, noted his difficulties with the General Electric (GE) boss Jack Welch who bought NBC in 1986. In Welch's autobiography, he complained that Grossman "operated under the theory that networks should lose money while covering the news in the name of journalistic integrity."
Comments Grossman: "Welch's priorities were entirely different. He made it clear that he would judge NBC no differently than any other GE division. News could be expected to make the same profit margins as they did. The news division, he said, had no greater obligation to provide public service than those GE lines that manufacture refrigerators, light bulbs or jet engines. For Welch the financial perspective was the only one that mattered."
If you believe that is an isolated attitude then you should get a copy of the eye-opening and damning book released last year by two senior Washington Post editors, Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert Kaiser, titled The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril.
HORROR STORY
The book tells a horror story of drastically declining journalistic standards across the American media, the tabloidisation of the most prestigious news organisations and newsmagazines (witness the domination of lifestyle/entertainment covers on Time and Newsweek) and the subordination of all values, including news values, to the making of profits.
"Too much of what has been offered as news in recent years has been untrustworthy, irresponsible, misleading or incomplete. The most alarming weaknesses of the news media have been systemic and they have seriously undermined good journalism. Too many of those who own and led the nation's news media have cynically underestimated or ignored America's need for good journalism and evaded their responsibility to provide it."
Serious reporting is being ignored for the superficial but commercially attractive. Foreign news especially had been drastically cut before September 11.
Interestingly, no less a person than the former CEO of AOL/Time Warner, Gerald Lewin, had said in November 2001 that media company executives need to "exercise their power in a way that recognises there's a public trust and a higher priority than delivering a return to shareholders."
There are serious ethical and philosophical issues regarding press freedom which are not usually discussed here. It is about time we start a really serious dialogue in Jamaica about press freedom. It is good to have a base of information with regard to the international, and particularly the American situation, in doing so.
The UNESCO conference here dealt with issues posed by the Information Society and the new technologies, but one hopes that it highlighted what was pointed out in the March/April issue of the Columbia Journalism Review: "Virtually all the major Internet sites that people use for news are owned by Big Media; the editorial content is indistinguishable from what those broadcasters and newspapers put out."
Many editors in newspapers and producers in the electronic media are pandering to the interests of the lowest common denominator to increase market share. This has been disastrous to quality journalism.
Wherever narrow commercial interests have dominated, a commitment to serious journalism suffers. What is the state of the Jamaican media? How much freedom of the press really exists here and is there greater freedom in the printed media than on the electronic media? These are some of the issues I want to explore in a full-blown and no-holds-barred discussion on the Jamaican media next week.
