🚀 go-pugleaf

This from the Usenet. I pick up Flanders's CounterSpin, a half-hour
commentary, on Radio McGill (CKUT, 90.3 MHz on FM band) Thursday
afternoons at 2:00.
                                              _
Dale Wharton   dale@dale.cam.org    M O N T R E A L    Te souviens-tu?

8<--------------------------- couper ici --------------------------->8

From:        Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting <fair@igc.apc.org>
Newsgroups:  alt.news-media
Date:        Fri, 08 Sep 1995 15:22:50 -0700 (PDT)

Remarks to the NGO Forum on Women, Beijing '95
Plenary Session on Strategies:

Media, Culture, and Communication.

By Laura Flanders

Thank you very much. As you heard, my name is Laura Flanders and
I'm speaking to you on behalf of the media watch group FAIR [for
info on FAIR online, send a blank email message to
fair-info@fair.org]. I'd like to start by thanking all the members
of the NGO Forum who have made this program possible. And I'd also
like to thank our hosts--the Chinese people.

I have the privilege of living in New York City--the media
capital of the world--so, of course, thanks to all the radio
stations, television networks, and newspapers I have access to, I
am lucky enough to know absolutely nothing about your ideas and your
way of life. And that's part of why I'm here.

I shouldn't have to travel halfway around the world to hear from
the Chinese people: The words of your government leaders and your
corporate lobbyists and tourist board officials--seem to get
through just fine.

Nor should any of us really have to make this expensive trip to hear
from the women at this forum. It's kind of ironic that so much of
the press coverage of this event has focused on the difficulties
that women are having getting heard and seen in Beijing: The
problems here are nothing in comparison to what most women face
every day getting taken seriously by the media in their hometowns.

This NGO Forum isn't just the largest gathering of women in
history, it's probably the largest gathering of marginalized
experts the world has ever seen.

Unlike some women's media watch groups, at FAIR, we don't believe
in women's issues. We're against the very idea that men and women
have mutually exclusive areas of concern. What we call for is
reporting that covers the world as it is--more than half
populated by women, with ideas and experiences and bodies that
matter--regardless of their race, their age, their sexual
orientation, political power, physical abilities, or class.

Consider any topic, whether it's the global economy, health care,
education, human relations, or how to avoid war: You are experts
because you, as people who are focused on women and the
marginalized, are paying attention to the majority of people on the
planet--the very people who are on the cutting edge of current
policy. In many cases, it's an edge that doesn't just cut, it kills.
And you'd think that would make your information good to share.

So here you are--20,000 or more of the world's most rarely-heard-
from experts--all gathered more or less conveniently in one
place. Being discussed here are some of those key issues, some of
them the very issues that the boring men in suits discuss on
television every night. The press are here, a lot of them, and
I'm glad; as a reporter myself my sympathies are with you. I wish
you well. But what do we get--stories about justice, equality, and
how women are moving an international agenda from the bottom up?
Hardly.

I turn on my TV in the hotel room and read a U.S. paper over lunch
and what do I find? The same U.S. media that remained tightlipped
when Ronald Reagan approved sales of police equipment to China's
internal security force, and praised Vice President Bush's visit
here in 1985, are now suddenly concerned about security levels and
whether Hillary Rodham Clinton is disrespecting human rights by
coming to a rights conference. People think the media's soundbites
are short: that's nothing in comparison to their memory. Has
anyone seen Time magazine this week refer to the fact that in 1985,
they selected Deng Xiao Ping as Time's "Man of the Year?"

Sure, there are traces of the discussion that's happening here, but
those traces are edged out by the same government and establishment
faces and the same rhetoric that always dominate the news. We call
what's happening here "wildlife reporting." People like yourselves,
who represent vast, popular movements, may get captured in a shot or
two, speaking at a demonstration or waving a fist into the air, but
you're not allowed to set the agenda. You're not invited into the
television studios, to sit on the comfortable chairs like the
Generals and the Bankers. They get to explain themselves in a number
of paragraphs. You get to shout a slogan in the street. And then,
having been exiled to the margins, you're called "marginal." It's a
cute trick. And it happens over and over again.

What has changed in 20 years? Well, women get into a few more
pictures. This weekend's Herald Tribune, for example, put two women
from this Forum on the cover (Sept. 2-3). But the women were gagged:
in the picture and in the paper. Look inside for the followup
story, having read the caption, and there's not a word from the two
protesting Tibetans. It was interesting over the past few days to
watch how the big cameras came into this hall when celebrities were
talking or when women were telling their personal stories, but left
when women were giving analysis of things like the global economy or
the rise of the right.

We want women seen but we also want them heard. And we want women's
expertise as well as their experience. We are not just bodies, but
minds--and some of you can argue the pants off some of the
establishment's stuffed shirts.

These days there are more women in the industry, but unfortunately,
as we've seen here, without other changes, adding female reporters
does not necessarily guarantee a sea change in the coverage. CNN,
for example, has a particularly high proportion of women
correspondents on staff. But according to a study by one of the
groups we work with--Women, Men, and Media--the network uses
particularly few women among the people they choose to interview.

A woman in front of the camera may be a good new role model, but
gender parity without a broadening of the political spectrum will
only help the individuals who scramble to the top, it doesn't
guarantee a change in the reporting.

We also have to be more subtle in our call for more women opinion-
givers. The same issue of the Herald Tribune this weekend published
an opinion piece by a woman--what a concept--but the author, Camille
Paglia, seems to believe that only Americans worry about
reproductive rights or homophobia. Paglia is not a women's rights
expert or an activist. She's an art critic who's made a name for
herself echoing old familiar arguments against the women's rights
movement. She once said that "feminism misses the bloodlust in rape,
the joy of violation and destruction." The call for women pundits
needs to be more sophisticated. We need to say which ones.

It is no academic question who gets to speak in mainstream media.
In the U.S., the people who frame the media debate are often
framing political policy and public opinion for years. Take crime
for example: The number of victims of violent crime decreased by
nine percent from 1981 to 1990, but in the same time, the number
of stories about street crime soared. The most common victims of
violent crime are black men, who are 50 percent more likely than
white men and two and half times more likely than white women to be
the victims of violent street crime--yet U.S. newspapers are full of
racially coded stories about "suburban victims" of "urban crime;"
the suburbs being a codeword for white, and the city the symbol of
people who are not. In opinion polls now, the public put "fear of
crime" close to the top of their list of worries--and politicians
get support to invest the public wealth into prisons--the criminal
industrial complex Mab Segrest talked about last week.

Meanwhile, corporate crime is doing the big-dollar damage: Banking
scandals, fraud, and stock-cheating swindle people out of millions
--but predominantly white, male corporate criminals don't feel the
heat, because crime in the suites doesn't get the same coverage as
crime in the streets, and as a result, there's little pressure to
put the corporate crooks in jail. A greater diversity of viewpoints
on the subject of crime could at least open up this debate, if not
get it back on the rails. So at FAIR we look at who gets to talk.

We monitor the media: We record the national news off the
television every night and watch as much of it as we can bear. We
read the newspapers and newsmagazines and produce data on who is
participating in the public opinion-shaping debate.

FAIR's first study was of a single influential program called
Nightline--it's a nightly news discussion show broadcast nationally
by ABC. We recorded 40 months of programs and compiled statistics
on who got to speak in the studio discussion. What we thought was
bad, we found out was even worse.

The most frequently featured guests on Nightline during that period
from 1985 to 1988 were Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Elliott
Abrams, and Jerry Falwell: one former warmonger now a corporate
consultant, a laid-off member of Ronald Reagan's cabinet, a sub-
cabinet member who was found guilty of lying to Congress, and an
evangelical minister who manipulates people's religious beliefs to
promote a rollback of feminism and civil rights. We also found that
89 percent of the guests were male, and 92 percent were white--not
a big surprise.

Faced with that data, the host of the program responded, "Ours is a
news program.... We go to people involved in making the news...."
And that spoke volumes about how the media defines news and power.
"Is it only what people in D.C. do?" we asked reporters--and the
project got attention around the country. We've done several similar
studies since, and the idea has also been taken up by other groups.

The goal of this sort of study is an expanded debate. FAIR isn't
interested in preventing the airing of viewpoints we disagree with;
we're working for the inclusion of more. A more pluralistic media
would be nice--it would certainly be more entertaining, but that's
not the point either. The slighting of public interest and minority
viewpoints is dangerous. This spring, for example, we watched in
horror while the mainstream media looked for Arab terrorists in
their effort to explain the bombing of the federal building in
Oklahoma City. The mainstream media were so convinced the terrorists
were foreign that when a white, Christian man was arrested in the
case, the New York Times ran headlines like "New Images of Terror...
A suspect, a white drifter, evokes new fear."

The sort of coverage that followed the Oklahoma City bombing showed
the price we pay for racism, homophobia, and sexism in mainstream
media. Right-wing terror is hardly surprising to those who've been
on the receiving end of it over the years. Nor would the pale image
of the suspect have been "new" to mainstream readers if the media
had been doing their job.

In the U.S. today, there are right-wing demagogues who provide easy
solutions to real problems by pandering to popular ignorance and
prejudice. In my hometown, New York City, the most popular host on
the most listened-to station routinely refers to African-Americans
as "savages." He once urged NYC cops to show up to the gay pride
parade with machine guns "and mow them down." A man who broadcasts
weekly to over 20 million people calls advocates of human rights for
women "feminazis." And the mainstream media's alternative to that?
Respectable "polite" debate about the intellectual inferiority of
black Americans and the threat that gay men and lesbians may pose
to the military and the family--as if we don't have families--and
"softly, softly" coverage of anti-abortion violence that long before
Oklahoma had already killed five health clinic workers and burnt or
bombed 169 clinics in 33 states in the U.S. When the New York Times
published a graph to illustrate "other bombings in America" the
chart spanned four decades, but none of the documented bombings of
women's health clinics made it into the list. None of the attacks on
civil rights offices or gay and lesbian homes. Not one.

As a lesbian, the fact of invisibility is painful, but to me and my
friends at FAIR--invisibility's not the only problem. I know what's
going on. It is the people who are in the dark that I worry about.
The price of homophobia in the press is ignorance--and ignorance
and hate can cost us all our lives.

Rather than damning reporters to hell as some right-wing critics
have done, we engage with journalists directly, and we begin, at
least, by appealing to their higher natures. We're not asking you
to do us any favors, we say, we're just asking you to do good
reporting--better reporting. And we come to them with ideas.

After a short study of several weeks of the media's coverage of
NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, we found that
working women were not being heard from. Female business owners
showed up a couple of times, and some U.S. women politicians, but
women workers weren't cited even once, although women workers are
the largest single group likely to feel the effects of the not-so-
free free trade pact. The majority of workers in the multinational
factories that were at that time likely to expand under NAFTA, and
the most vulnerable workers facing layoffs in the states if the jobs
relocated south, were women. Covering them wasn't doing us any
favors, we told journalists. It's just covering the news. We
suggested that perhaps they might want to take a break from quoting
representatives of the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund. Just to relieve the boredom if nothing else, why don't you
talk to the folks at a grassroots organization, like MADRE, a 12-
year-old women's group that works with women in Central America, or
the National Labor Committee, a labor group that works with unions
South of the U.S./Mexico border--and we offered names and numbers of
suggested guests--and a documented case that was hard to ignore.

Just recently, a number of stories have focused on the impact of
NAFTA on workers in Honduras. We don't know whether our work
helped, but it certainly didn't hurt.

We try to correct the record by writing opinion pieces and letters
to the press: to editors, publishers, even members of the company's
corporate board. And we help give people tools to do the same. But
even while we're doing all that, we know that media institutions
are not about to change. The industry is an industry and it is
serving its corporate interest just fine, thank you. The Wall Street
Journal is not about to see the light and say OK--you're right,
we're wrong.

In 1986, when we started FAIR, a few months after the Nairobi
Conference, media institutions were owned by a small--and shrinking
--number of powerful businesses. Now the number's even smaller. In
1986, 29 corporations dominated broadcasting, publishing, and cable.
By the end of 1993, the number was down to 20. Some have estimated
that before the end of the century, an oligopoly of about half a
dozen hugely profitable giant firms will have consolidated control
of the mass media worldwide.

Today newspapers can be published simultaneously on five continents
and a single satellite can beam information to half the globe. As
one speaker put it this week, now CNN brings you the world--and all
of it in 30 minutes--whether you want it or not. The way that CNN
covered the Gulf war affected not just Americans, but Europeans and
Australians, even people in whose neighborhoods the U.S. bombs were
being dropped.

Media companies are no longer businesses in your neighborhood,
vying with one another for your support: They're major political
players on the national and even international scene. For example,
if current merger plans go ahead, soon two out of three of the
world's richest television networks would be controlled by nuclear
power companies, both of which have the U.S. military as their most
important client. You can expect plenty of critical reporting on
the issue of military spending on NBC and CBS--I don't think.

Media moguls have become even more explicit about the fact that
they pursue corporate profits, not the public's interest. The head
of Tele-Communications International--the man who's currently
poised to have a virtual monopoly over the U.S. cable industry--
scoffs at the very notion of ever developing a media system that
would serve the public interest. Private corporations are not set
up to serve the public interest, he said. "One would be fired as
the CEO of a profitmaking company if he did that." So that's
settled.

And the corporate interest puts profits first. As the head of the
Disney corporation put it recently, after announcing his plan to
buy up ABC, which also owns the sports network, ESPN: "There are
many places in the world, like China, India, and other places, that
do not want to accept programming that has political content but
they don't have a problem with sports and...the Disney kind of
programming. The leverage of those two together in what used to be
Third World...or closed countries is enormous," he said. In other
words, you can make a lot of money downplaying reality.

The world as reported by multinational corporations like these is
certainly not a world where women and marginalized people get many
starring roles. So at the same time as we pursue what you might
call a policy of "constructive engagement" (and it's about as
effective as "constructive engagement" policies usually are), we
also produce our own independent media: a syndicated column, a
bimonthly magazine called EXTRA!, an activists' newsletter, and a
weekly syndicated radio program called CounterSpin, which is now
heard on about 100 college and community radio stations in the U.S.
and Canada and from Radio for Peace International on short wave.
We also have a Web page and exchange information with reporters and
others on line. And in all the work we do, we work hard to applaud
hardhitting independent journalism that cuts against the
conventional grain. Highminded reporters who do that sort of work
usually get pretty discouraged in the mainstream--so we think
it's our job to highlight work that challenges the establishment.

If anyone asks me what can they do about the problems we're facing,
I say--step one, support your local independent media: whether
it's a radio station or a newsletter or a flyer or a storyteller.

Unfortunately, the means of communication have become far too
expensive for freedom of the press to belong only to those who can
buy one. So we have more to do as well. We have to fight for our
right to communicate.

In the 1930s, it was determined that under U.S. law, the airwaves,
like the air and the water, belonged to the public. With the growth
of cable and telecommunications that principle, long unenforced, is
in danger of dying a quietly unreported death. Internationally, the
first UN General Assembly declared freedom of information the
"touchstone of all freedoms to which the UN is consecrated."  The
individual and collective right to communicate is "an evolving
principle in the democratization process," UNESCO declared in a
study in 1979.

But no enforcement mechanism has ever evolved to protect that
evolving principle. At present the power to communicate is resting
in the hands of a few corporations and states, who use it not for
conversation, but for control.

Looking to the future, I'll make a proposal. Since these
International Women's Conferences began, we have seen an
environmental movement grow up to protect and share the scarce
resource that is the planet; a women's and a human rights movement
being built to protect the invaluable resource of human potential
--all our people. What we need now is a global movement to assert
the public's right to the resource of information and communication.
We are entitled to exist in each other's lives, and not just once in
every 10 years. And we're entitled to feel that we're not alone--
because obviously we are not.

What's holding us back is access. But so what else is new? You and
your friends are used to long, seemingly impossible, uphill fights.
The right to communicate is like any right, and like any right, it
will not be given. Like any right, it must be won. ***

FAIR
130 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
http://www.fair.org/fair/
To subscribe to FAIR's magazine, EXTRA!, call 800-847-3993
(9 to 5 Eastern Time, USA).