Western media culture in general and American media in particular are predicated on the assumption that they are public watchdogs. As a corollary of this assumption is the belief, the media in the West are playing the role of a presumptive Forth Estate”; the three other centers of power being the executive the legislative and the judiciary branches of government. Wikipedia defines watchdog journalism in the following terms: “Watchdog journalism is a form of investigative journalism where journalists, authors or publishers of a news publication face check and interview political and public figures to increase accountability. Watchdog journalism usually takes on a form of beat reporting about specific aspects and issues” The media are not only expected to play the role of public watchdog.
Freedom of speech is the axis around which Western democracies rotate or function effectively. Western media culture is basically expected to live up to these assumptions. This was so indeed in the recent past as far as conventional media was concerned long before the advent of the phenomenon known as social media and its outlets. In the wake of more recent developments in communication technology the Internet, conventional journalism has given way to what is called “citizen journalism”. A concept as unclear as it is erroneous.
In this way, the role of watchdog journalism is nowadays taken over by invisible citizens or government pundits with an axe to grind. This has not only changed Western media culture but has also led to governments through their pundits and interest groups to defend themselves against attacks or criticisms by the public. This is regarded not only as a role reversal but also as the empowerment of government in the face of the public. The defunct Trump administration is a good example of the empowerment of the presidency as far as freedom of speech is concerned and the defensive posturing of the public against whom the attacks by former president Trump were directed. Trump was “the tweeter in chief” of the American administration and his emotional outbursts and misplaced statements as well as his poor judgments had earned him disrespect verging on contempt.
Another aspect of Western media culture that is increasingly assuming a dominant feature in Western administration is the growing symbiosis between media and government in their conduct of foreign policy. While American media culture requires domestic reporting to be objective and unbiased, foreign reporting has gone berserk as much reporting or news about Arica and the developing world in general is concerned. As there is no constitutional provision that could put a brake on foreign reporting, American media have free hands to report as they wish, mostly distorting facts, misrepresenting the truth and considering their version of events as the ultimate truth.
Until the middle of the 20th century and more specifically starting from the Cold War period, American media culture was generally vibrant, ethical, responsible and high quality. The emergence of the United States as a superpower and its struggle against the Soviet Union for global hegemony has revolutionized the nature, function and orientation of the media in foreign affairs. The end of colonialism and the emergence of independent African countries also deeply affected foreign reporting while it accelerated the media-government merger or symbiosis in foreign policy and diplomacy.
In America, government is supposed to be free from ownership of the media. Indeed, the US government does not own the media in the economic sense of the term. However, the unprecedented pace of growth in media activities, the emergence of powerful news organizations, grater economic clouts and stakes as well as developments in communication technologies, have widened the reach of the media and gave it power and privilege undreamt of in the past. The Cold War made the process all the more dangerous and exciting as the two superpowers vied for control of underdeveloped regions of the world both through their military and communication technologies.
The independence decade in Africa, as the 1960s are known, brought the role of Western media activities to greater visibility as they tried to subvert the underdeveloped periphery of the global center in every way possible. The hegemonic ambitions of West versus East tore apart the fragile newly independent states of Africa where the little there was in terms of media or news gathering, under the yoke of the neocolonial powers. The metropolitan media in the US and Western Europe directly or indirectly imposed their models on Africa and the developing world in general that could not start to develop their autonomous media cultures because of the poverty, lack of knowledge and technology played in favor of the big media houses in the West.
The end of the Cold War and the global triumph of democracy, to borrow the words of American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, led to temporary American triumphalism but in the long ran it proved illusory as the old East-West struggle for media hegemony in Africa only continued in new forms. Neither democracy has triumphed on a world scale nor has America emerged the single superpower as the bipolar world was quickly replaced with a new multipolar world. Meanwhile, the role of the media remained the same as the West continued to impose its media model on Africa and the developing world in general. This was roughly the beginning of the conversion of Western media from means of communication and fair exchange of information to a weapon in the arsenal of foreign policy conduct. Thus, the symbiosis between media moguls and administration bigwigs became complete.
However, Western media culture continued to be imposed on Africa not by violent means but through subtler manipulations, systematic influence and covert methods. During the Cold War, America invented the Peace Corps, Point Four, and the United States information Services (USIS), as instruments of soft and hard influence to borrow from the modern technology lexicon. These institutions were used to facilitate American cultural influence and control of Africa. The English language was spread in African countries were previously they relied only on their written language like in Ethiopia before the “Americanization of the educational system”.
Western education was promoted in Africa with a view to creating a new generation of Africans well-versed in Western media culture and American culture in general. This new generation was trained to produce future leaders of their respective countries where Western culture was supposed to influence their aspirations of the new African elites in all areas of endeavors including in the media and culture spheres. In the post-war post-Cold War periods African stories started to be told by the Western media. Western journalists were sent to Africa, to see the continent and witness events and shape African narratives by see them through the distorted and distorting prisms of Western media culture and practice. African journalists were trained in the West and sent back to Africa after they were brainwashed to do the job on behalf of Western media organizations.
In this way Western values subverted African traditions and African values of honesty, patriotism, trust, respect of the truth, human dignity and a belief system that put man above material and financial advantages. Personal gain replaced collectivity and spirituality. All African traditional values were considered by the Western media culture to be primitive, barbaric, backward, biased and what not. Indigenous values were ignored and dominated by Western media culture. If at all there was an attempt to shape a new African media culture, it was made to become a mirror of its Western counterparts. Powerful Western media organizations like CNN tried to shape news content that came out of Africa as they were reported and written by journalists hired by the same big media organizations. In the beginning, CNN had a reputation for broadcasting news in the making and events as they happened and this was a big technological and professional breakthrough.
Ted Turned, its founder, had the passion for reporting events as they happen. Yet, with time this passion for truth was largely subverted by the coalescence between administration officials and the journalists at the network whose reporting on Africa became not only biased but a recipe for misrepresentation, misinterpretation, distortion in the service of administration officials with axes to grind in foreign policy in particular. CNN however cannot lie in domestic reporting but can ignore, exaggerate or under report certain events that impact on American foreign policy.
The recent defeat of American army in Afghanistan and the withdrawal of troops after 20 years and trillion of dollars spent and tens of thousands of soldiers killed and injured, was a catastrophe more devastating than Vietnam or Iraq. Yet, the American media and CNN managed it in such a soft way that it looked like an ordinary event that could otherwise raise the fury of the American public. It was indeed a soft media landing so to say. On the contrary CNN’s reporting on the conflict in Ethiopia was overblown while it was reported in a way that Ethiopia is the only culprit while the TPLF is the victim. Such reporting reflects the shard interests between administration officials and the media in foreign affairs or in reporting news about Africa in general. In this way CNN has lost the respect that the international pubic poured over the network during its faithful reporting of American invasion of Iraq as it happened on the ground.
The other bias American media culture suffers from is it exclusive obsession on negative news to the detriment of and balanced reporting that is most appreciated by media pundits. This is so because American role in the world has shifted from a predominantly positive or balanced attitude to negative one. Reports from the Middle East, Russia, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict…etc. are the passions of most CNN reporters and commentators with a biased attitude regarding the relationship between vim and victimizer.
When it comes to Africa, US media culture remains unchanged as they are always fond of reporting on wars, tribal or ethnic genocides, coup d’états, assassinations and Africa’s quest for economic development and political freedom are given little attention if not ignored altogether. CNN reporting is not interested in peaceful elections, democratic experimentations or the quest in Arica for economic freedom. There is nothing as goods news as bad news, is an old journalistic adage that has outlived its time.
Ethical journalism should be the rule rather than the exception in this world of growing trivialization by the like of Facebook and the likes who mind about their profits more than human lives. Balanced reporting is buried under the heaps of Western media lies, fabrications and exaggerations. In fact, the Western media operations have spread the culture of making money by telling the untruth or by creating storms in teacup. By doing this, they are not only abusing their reputations but also teaching the so-called citizen journalists how to lie and make big money.
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD NOVEMBER 19/2021
