This is when there’s such a lack of news that writing stories about cucumbers (i.e. their harvest) comes very possible. Which is obviously a scary thought.

That’s not to say there aren’t things going on in the world which should make news, but as we’ve seen if there’s nothing ‘local’, with celebrity, then cucumbers are the closest thing to home.

But this does give some opportunity for other stories, such as that of the DRC crisis, and it has been good to see the Guardian recently report on what’s going on there (which for them is three stories in 2010, zero in 2009…)

Read “Fertile land the prize that could reignite ethnic conflict in DR Congo”

It’s quite a simple overview but does hone in on a specific tension, and in my humble opinion at least tries to delve deeper into the issue.

ADDITION: BBC today also leads with a Congo story: UN draft report calls DR Congo crimes genocide

(4m30s)

To my surprise, today there was a front page (on the internet at least) story on the Guardian website, titled “British firms linked to Congo’s illicit mineral trade”.  This isn’t really news to anyone who would spend 2 minutes reading about what’s going on in the DRC – where do you think coltan is heading to if not the Western or Chinese markets?

What this article instantly reveals is the bias towards the news’ own nation; if this was ‘Malaysian firms’, or perhaps even ‘American firms’, this would not be front page.  It wouldn’t be big enough news.  In fact, I get the feeling it must be a slow news day for this article to head the website.

The interesting thing is that economics really are the driving force behind this conflict.  And, by the same token, economics are restraining decent reporting of the conflict.  I’ll explain in more details in the coming days but I was recently told this by a reporter based in West Africa (I won’t reveal him):

I was told by the editors: if I have to choose between the latest inflation figures in the West, and a dozen deaths somewhere, I’d have to go with the inflation figures.

So hitting the economic theme of the conflict is probably the only way it’ll make the news. Sad but true.

“How can 900 people be massacred over the Christmas period in DR Congo and hardly a murmur comes out of the press?”

Obviously, at first one would instantly point a finger at the press.  They should have the role as watchdogs upon society, reporting anything that goes unjust.  If they do not, they fail society.  DR Congo is not in the limelight, so is not receiving the support it deserves.

Since that initial reaction, I began to consider why the press would behave this way, because journalists are part of that very society – are they any different to the audience themselves?  Of course, economic pressures and political pressures influence the journalist:

“The journalist is an uneasy awkward figure, capable of good as well as bad, who has to come to terms with the political and economic constraints that weigh on him, rendering his position unstable and uncomfortable.”
(Patrick Champagne)

But what are the ideological implications? What is that uneasy link between the audience and the journalist? This has led me to consider Bourdieu’s somewhat complex views on the field of journalism:

“To understand a product like L’Express and le Nouvel Observateur there is little point in studying the target readership…Ultimately the readers of L’Express may be to the readers of Le Nouvel Observateur what the journalists of Le Nouvel Observateur are to the journalists of L’Express.”
(Pierre Bourdieu)

It’s quite a study, but something that opens new avenues for consideration.  The journalist inhabits the same field as the reader.  The reader, in the position of the journalist, would behave in exactly the same manner.  For example, influences such as a current contract status could act as a kind of censorship.  As Bourdieu puts it, precarity of employment is a loss of liberty.  Economic constraints thus act as a form of censorship.  Most of us understand this feeling.

So the independence of the journalist is then, perhaps, the key.  If economic, political and social pressures are not present; the autonomous journalist can behave as our ideal journalist, defending the rights of those in places like the DR Congo.  Or would they?

This would mean the journalist, who once lived alongside the reader in the same field, now move away, becomes detached, and merely impose their own values on everyone else.  Not the values of the audience.  Professor Rodney Benson wonders if an autonomous journalist is a good thing:

‘‘This raises the possibility that the ‘news judgement’ of a corps of media professionals who are beyond the influence of state and market is not necessarily a prize one should want for the best interest of a democratic society.”

So, where does that leave us?  It’s a tough question for sure, and I must say it’s giving me some headaches.  What I think, and I believe Bourdieu would agree to some extent, is that it is up to mass-society as a whole to shift.  It means, as I said previously, that we must consume news and media differently, we must demand different standards from the media institutions.

“If journalism is sufficiently decentralized and varied in the viewpoints it presents; if journalists are recruited from different walks of life and promote different points of view; if journalism is institutionally self-critical in ways that guarantee variety and change in the news; if, in a word, journalism is a pluralistic institution, then journalistic autonomy may be good not only for journalists, who of course appreciate the freedom to write what they please, but good for a democratic society.”
(Rodney Benson)

How? I can only think we need to teach the youth to use the media in the correct fashion.  I saw only the other day some school children in the UK make Prime Minister candidate David Cameron tremor with fear with their inquisitive, open and insightful questions.  They know how media should behave, and we should make sure they don’t forget.

Because ultimately we, society as a whole, aren’t giving the DR Congo the support it deserves.

What do you think?

As much as I’d love to heap further blame on journalists, I have been offering a lot of consideration to what the position of the journalist actually is.  As Jack Fuller puts it, whose perception of reality is the journalist attempting to be objective about?’

“Journalism is not to be blamed for this, no more than a cow is to be blamed for not being a horse.”

News values are the basis by which a journalist selects an event and chooses to report it.  These values will be most durable if the audience support and uphold them – the old saying goes that the audience gets the news they deserve.

But by the same token, the reporters must make the news compelling enough for reader.   However, news is dominated, naturally, by bias.

As Fuller suggests, there’s a bias of immediacy: most reports need to be a recent event, and background to a story is often shunned, leaving the detail hollow. There is a bias of a matter of geography: the young girl kidnapped near your town will make more prominant news, more often than not, than the bus load of passengers murdered 2000 miles away.

The most telling bias is the favour of information the audience finds interesting.  Journalists want to give the audience what the audience knows they enjoy, often focusing on negativity.

The reference to the Western novel ‘Heart of Darkness’ acts as a carrier of certainty into an unknown field.  Without this, the story is likely to be ignored.  The audience’s blind spot therefore becomes a blind spot in the news.

(12 min)

In the News Divide, we turn our attention to a subject that has been eclipsed in recent weeks and months by the US presidential election and the global banking meltdown: the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Despite being branded as ‘Africa’s world war,’ a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ and the human exodus of refugees that it has precipitated, the headlines in the Western media have been slow to emerge. We look at the disproportionate amount of airtime that General Laurent Nkunda and his band of rebels are enjoying thanks to their comparatively sophisticated public relations machine and how the media are largely buying into their narrative.

Please read, and think about, his wise observations:

Like Simon, I’m a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam, and like Simon the issue of conflicts and how they are represented has always been of interest to me. However unlike Simon, I study principally theory at the University, leaving me the type of person you would go to extreme lengths to avoid at social gatherings, including exposing yourself to the natterings of inane creatures who believe that Next Top Model is of critical importance to the world.

However, keeping at the forefront of my mind the mantra: “I must not bore you”, I will try to contribute a little to the blog on the issue of the representation of conflict in the media.

There have been several academic articles which have sought to analyse how war has been represented in the media via images. The findings of one “Picturing the Gulf War: Constructing an Image of War in Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report”, highlights many of the concerns raised by others.

However for the point of this blog, we’ll stick with one issue raised: that the consequences of conflict are very rarely shown in the media, and if they are, they are sanitised to such a degree that the ethical and moral implications for the audience are lost.

To underline how insulated Western audiences are from the realities of atrocity, one need only look to the coverage of the bombings in Madrid.

This sanitisation of the consequences of violence is particularly dangerous, because it removes the moment of horror for the audience, in which the individual is left to reflect on the event, to ask questions. In the case above, the moment of being confronted with the bloodied limb of a passenger, which disturbs the viewer because it challenges his or her view of bodily integrity, creates a space, a moment, for critical thought.

However in the case of the Times, Telegraph and I would argue the Guardian such a moment is not provided by the image. This is a particular consequence the public should not see. Instead we are meant to believe from this image that only inanimate objects (the train in the background) are ripped apart in a bombing, animate objects remain whole, dead of course, but that doesn’t disturb us really, not like a limb ripped from a human being would. When that shock moment is lost, the image should be seen as worthless. It has failed in it primary task to show what the written word cannot convey – horror.

(I’m repeating my mantra at double-speed now, because I feel some theory is needed here to reiterate my point.)

When images of atrocity are managed/censored/selected, whatever word you may wish to use, the reality of the atrocity is lost, and the image cows down to the accompanying news report that creates the narrative of the event.

Cees Hamelink, who Simon has referred to before, noted in an interview in 2007, that the media are forever in ‘worship of certainty’. That is to say, that they will never stand before us and admit that they don’t know. Imagine a news reporter admitting “I don’t know who’s responsible for this” or even, “I don’t know why this happened”. They must be certain, because if they’re not, they create a situation in which we are left to ask ourselves the hard questions: Who is responsible for this?  And why did they do this? To create such an opening for reflection would undermine the position of the news media as all knowing, and I would suggest, make us more questioning of the possibility that we have some responsibility in the atrocity.

The censorship of images that sanitise (read depoliticise) the reality of atrocity, as well as the media’s fear of leaving an opening for critical space by admitting that they don’t know, leaves a public insulated from the consequences of atrocity and denies that they may be responsible in part.

I’ll finish on recalling the exact moment I lost faith in Barack Obama, because it encapsulates what I’m rambling on about in this piece. Obama said in his inauguration speech that “We will not apologize for our way of life nor will we waver in its defense”. Now, I have always believed that you have to be humble in the face of experience, that when you are confronted with an event that challenges your worldview, that perhaps even criticises your attitudes and beliefs, you should not try to remain the person you were before, to deny the event, but instead to commit to it, reflect upon it and ask questions.

When we are confronted with some little opening in the media’s narrative of how the world functions, as in the case above and the limb of some unfortunate passenger, we must not turn away from it. We cannot deny we saw it, and we should not avoid asking the questions that such an image raises.

When Obama writes that “We will not apologize for our way of life” he presupposes that we in fact understand the costs involved in our way of life. I would argue that we do not, that in fact we work hard, as a society, to avoid being confronted with the consequences of our “way of life”. We in fact should always be ready to apologise for our way of life when it is shown to bring misery to others, and we should never simply run to its defence without first thinking about what it is we are committing ourselves to.

Thank you Rob.

In my eyes, and the eyes of many, the media is too uncritical and offers too much space to governments and political leaders.  Media are a crucial institution in perpetuating this social constructs.

This, however, sounds as if I put blame completely on the shoulders of journalists, editors and media producers.  This is not the case.

It’s up to the citizen to demand change from the media.  For a majority of press, for instance, the bottom line is corporate value, dominated by commercial standards. Therefore, ultimately, the challenge is upon all of us.

The media audience must be mobilised as critical consumers of everything they are fed.  When this occurs, the commercial paradigm shifts to meet this new demand, and journalists are able to report the story.

Being critical is important, being mobilised is the key to social development.  When I read or write about the conflict in DR Congo, I often wonder what I can actually do to trigger a tangible change – it appears so overwhelmingly complex.

- 1,500 dead a day

- 5 million already dead

-conflict fought across multiple lines

-350,000 displaced

-1,000 rapes a month

When numbers are applied, it is difficult to truly connect with a story.  In fact, it makes it much easier to disconnect. So how can one humanise these numbers? I have begun to see positive applications of this.

For instance, MSF’s Condition Critical is a great example of humanising the individual victims of the rapes, and letting them tell their own individual story.  1,500 dead a day are 1,500 different, individual stories.

I read a charming blog today by Schooldad, ‘a father of three reports on homeschooling, working, and the joys and terrors of parenting’.  This is a normal, everyday person just like you and I; blogging about Harry Potter, the cat, and his kids.  But he has also found a way to mobilise himself for positive social change:

I loaned $25 to a man in the Congo

March 24th, 2009

A few months ago I loaned $25 to 5 women in the Dominican Republic thru an online micro-lending service called Kiva.  Kiva works with “field partners” around the world, organizations that actually oversee the administration and repayment of each loan.  It turned out that there was a problem (which the field partner in the Dominican Republic identified) which prevented the loan from going thru, so while Kiva and the field partner sorted things out, Kiva refunded my $25 which meant I could loan that money to someone else.

So I looked thru Kiva’s loan listings and selected a man in the Congo who wanted a loan to increase the profit he made in his biscuit-selling business by adding purified water.  And last week I got an email letting me know that he’d already posted his first loan payment of $1.56.  Woo-hoo!

Kiva’s a really neat organization.  If you’re looking for a way to help small (really small) business entrepreneurs in poor countries around the world, and you don’t have a lot of money to lend, this could be the site for you.

Instead of throwing $25 at a charity (which is not necessarily a bad thing), schooldad has found the means allowing him to connect with an individual in DR Congo and support their business, giving that person the ability to develop themselves.

Gordon Brown (I know…) recently quoted a highly successful Olympic coach, which sums this all up:

”The TeamGB cycling coach, Dave Brailsford, has done a great job. He says – maybe it’s true of Manchester United as well – that a big factor in success is what he calls the aggregation of minute differences . So you’ve got the handlebars better designed and he got the fitness improved and the uniform they wear … The aggregation of small improvements has put them at the top of the league.”

The aggregation of the many individual actions ultimately leads to success, you cannot rely on the few.  If more of us behaved like school dad, then things may really start moving.

As I searched Twitter yesterday, I came across David Mountain’s announcement that he was about to attend a lecture with Tim Butcher, author of Blood River.  I instantly lit up at the sight of this.

I read Blood River as I sat on a 2 day train journey between Beijing and Hanoi.  How different the world outside that cabin to the world inside the novel.  Butcher’s account of his journey ignited my interest, and outrage, in the story of DR Congo and set me on the path I currently tread. 

David Mountain was kind enough to send me an email outlining what he heard from Tim Butcher:

“Tim Butcher gave a great talk last night. The structure for his talk

came from his Blood River book and all of the images he used are

available on his website  (http://www.bloodriver.co.uk/). His aim was

to recreate the journey of Stanley down the length of the Congo 130

yrs ago. 50yrs ago under Belgian Colonialist rule this would have been

simple: Congo had extensive infrastructure – roads, rail, navigable

rivers – but this has now all been lost to war or the jungle. His

journey was undertaken on motorbikes thru unpaved jungle tracks and

downriver on pirogues (hollowed out tree trunks) and finally, a UN

boat. His journey took 4 years of planning, and 7 weeks to complete.

 

Some of the details of the conflict were fascinating. Everywhere he

went, he heard evidence of conflict. The various sides in this

conflict often lack any organisation or structure. Often the battles

were small armed militias attacking undefended villages. He made the

point that these killings lack any institutional memory: when shown

human remains (bones) he asked he was responsible for the attacks, and

the villager he was with was unsure when this has occurred, or who the

group was. They had suffered frequent attacks from many different

militias. A phrase he heard again and again from people was “we fled

to the bush”. The locals find it hard to invest in crops, livestock or

any form of industry since it makes them a target, and they are so

likely to have it taken from them forcefully.

 

Most of these deaths are going unreported. He estimates 1500 people

dying due to Conflict in DR Congo everyday but this is happening in

remote cutoff places, and few reports emerge. Even in the well

connected capital Kinsasha, when in 2004 hundreds were killed in

rioting, but it barely justified a paragraph in Western newspapers.

 

He gave some hope. He says it is a crime by a tiny minority.

Investment may help, but resources have been a curse for the Congolese

(Belgian colonial rule was brutal). Even the current round of Chinese

investment is focused on building infrastructure to get natural

resources out, rather than in schools or hospitals. Holding the

leaders of Congolese militia to account in the International Criminal

Court also shows some hope.

 

The war officially finished in 2003 but for the majority of Congolese,

nothing has changed.”

 

“Most of the infrastructure construction will be carried out by Chinese companies and labour with very little benefit to the Congolese workforce or to the wider economy.” Inteldaily.com

In all fairness, China has offered DR Congo an ambitious plan, and you cannot blame them for taking it as they still harbour $10 billion in debt sourced during Mobutu’s dictatorship.  But the plans to build infrastructure for a country the size of Eastern Europe appear limited. 

It has been highly documented that China’s rapid rise to power has been on part due to their short-termism.  I noted this as I walked around Beijing and looked at the scattered and messy sky line of mismatched office and apartment blocks. 

This deal appears to take any benefit that may have been had by DR Congo’s future generations out of their hands and into the hands of the wealthy elite.

“What is most troublesome in today’s rise of ethnic conflicts, is that most of these conflicts are characterized by the exercise of gross violence against civil populations. Contrary to classical warfare between armies, violence now increasingly targets civilians of the fighting parties.  At the dramatic core of ethnic conflicts is the grand scale perpetration of crimes against humanity.”

In the DR Congo, innocent women and children are on the receiving end of these crimes against humanity.  Children are regularly kidnapped and forced to become child soldiers, and women are raped; the weapon of war to subjugate the citizen population.

Hundred of thousands of women have been raped, tortured and humiliated in DR Congo, and this crime against humanity continues daily, hourly and by the minute.  It can’t be committed merely on a whim, it requires motivation and beliefs.

Where do these motivations come from? There must be an organised distribution of such information, but I struggle to find any relevant information on this.

How can one human being be persuaded into committing such acts? Hamelink suggests it is the de-humanisation of one group, so do we see the mass de-humanisation of women of the DR Congo? Surely, but I cannot tell where this stems from.

Thankfully I am beginning to see the media picking up on the mass rapes against the women of DR Congo, and NGOs now investing more effort into this issue.  A good example is Condition-Critical by MSF, which gives voice to these women and attempts to humanise their very individual, very personal, and very bewildering stories.

The media may be slowly picking up on this, and I hope the full horrors which the women are subjected to are reported accurately.  The stories and the photographs will be upsetting, but the Western world must see such images, in my opinion.  The horrors should not be ignored or forgotten.

“What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone, that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled, we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.”

Elie Wiesel, 1986

More on this another time.