Melville CookeBut if breeze blow up a woman dress
You can be sure you will read it in the foreign press
- Lord Laro
WHEN LORD Laro did Foreign Press in 1975, he was speaking about how his country is portrayed by foreign journalists and their penchant for highlighting the negative.
I fully understood his sentiment a couple decades later, in our latest go-round of the gas riots. Sure, it was bad, but when I looked Jamaica in the 'farin press' I saw JDF armoured vehicles patrolling a flame-filled street representing the entire country. Which it certainly did not.
Unfortunately both local dailies, The Observer and The Gleaner, give us daily doses of the 'farin press' every day, taken directly from the wire services (AP, AFP, Reuters) and slapped on the page. Said 'farin press' presents a view of the world that is representative of the biases of the reporters themselves, as well as their editors, as well as the entire society.
MINORITY RACES
This is at its worst when the subject is a Third World country, or on those who are erroneously called 'minority races'.
So, to deal with Babylon you need to have your filters on and I will be so arrogant as to attempt giving a crash course in how to filter the overseas news. I will not quote examples, but ask you to turn to the stories on yesterday's bombings in Iraq and Saudia Arabia which are sure to be in this newspaper.
'Debugging' is a skill which is so critical in these times of the attempt to colonise Iraq, the Israelis hell-bent on stealing Palestinian land and murdering people and George Bush attempting to be elected President of the United States for the first time.
And the preceding sentence was, actually, the first lesson. Terminology. The easiest way to get a lie accepted is to say it over and over and over again. It does not hurt to start the story in the middle, either.
The terminology does not stop with the broad strokes of the story brush, but is reinforced in detail, with one word often making the difference. So, for example, you will never see a story coming out of the U.S. about Cuba without the word 'communist' before it. Fair enough, but why do we not see each mention of the United Sates of America or Japan preceded with 'capitalist'?
The absence of definition or qualification simply means that 'capitalist' (the U.S.) is accepted as right - and, naturally, 'communist' (Cuba) must be wrong.
Then there is labelling. The 'farin press' likes to sling around terms like 'insurgents' and 'terrorists'. It has even reached the stage where the 'suspected' is no longer put in front of it. Terrorists were killed and that is that.
And now, class, we get to one of the two 'biggies' - the order of the story and discrediting sources. Read any story in which an American plus many Iraqis have been killed, or Israel has murdered a Palestinian. In the former case, the dead American or Americans take the first couple paragraphs and the Iraqis the bottom part of the story, no matter the numbers. One U.S. soldier is more important than say 20 Iraqis.
My advice? Start from the bottom up - read the last paragraph first and so on.
In the latter situation, the Palestinian target is mentioned upfront, then the reason the Israelis killed him - but never the reason why he took the action that made the Israelis want him dead.
In addition, if persons other than the intended target are killed, which is almost always so, they are rarely mentioned in the same sentence, much less paragraph.
And now class, sit up and pay attention. This one is definitely coming on the exam. Discrediting sources. That one is simple. 'According to'. That is hardly ever (in fact, I cannot remember reading one) put in front of the U.S. point of view. However, when reporting civilian casualties in Iraq, there is always the caveat 'according to'.
Or, even better, 'claims by'.
To which is usually attached a sentence including the phrase 'cannot be confirmed' or, the alternative, 'yet to be verified'.
So there you have it, the crash course in
'debulling' the 'farin press'. Go forth, read and apply.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
