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Journalism of Courage
ATLANTA, May 20: The Western media may not care about India but they care about other parts of the world even less. At least that’s what Jesse Jackson, former aide to Martin Luther King Jr and now President Bill Clinton’s point man in Africa, as well as Nobel Peace co-laureate for 1996, Jose Ramos-Horta, believe.
Jackson, who travelled with Clinton to Africa last month, said the senior American correspondents who came along made little effort to provide an understanding of African life. “The media sees Africa at best through a keyhole and not a door. There was no sense of Ghana and the slave trade which subsidised 200 years of American development. Instead, all that Americans saw was a 30-second clip showing Clinton shouting as he was surrounded by Africans. That was the Africa we saw on the evening news, a continent of savages.”
Jackson said there was no sense of what Nelson Mandela has called a “new morning in Africa”. But if he complained about “parachute coverage”, Ramos-Horta had a problem withno coverage at all for East Timor. “Just because Hollywood stars are not attached to the cause of freedom in East Timor and there is no camera there, the torture continues.” Ramos-Horta believes it is because news has become very commercial now. “There are 40 armed conflicts in the world and we in East Timor are competing for space.” Ramos-Horta noted that even Australian director John Pilger’s breakthrough documentary, Death of a Nation, which he shot posing as a tourist, has not been shown on any American network.
Both were speaking at the CNN World Report Contributors’ Conference last week. But CNN founder Ted Turner has another take on the lack of coverage for these areas. “It is our culture to turn inwards. It arises from what George Washington told Americans: that they should not be involved in the rest of the world.” He says the US has failed its legal responsibility, especially towards the United Nations. Ted was considered crazy because he wanted CNN to beam to Africa.
