People Like Us (27 page)

Authors: Joris Luyendijk

In retrospect, I wish I had had at my disposal at the time the one-sentence framework which I came up with only recently: This book is about factors that lie beyond the control of journalists, but that influence what those journalists cover, and how. The way forward, then, would be to no longer ignore, hide, or obscure those factors, but somehow to integrate them in one’s coverage, thereby helping unsuspecting viewers and readers to better understand what they see and read.

How? There seem at least five main problems with coverage as it is right now. First, the news media need to find ways to alert their audiences that this is what they are following: The news. Until 9/11 no one in the West, except for Western Muslims and a small circle of professional experts, knew much about Islam. Then Al-Qaida made Islam news—as we know, news is about problems and conflicts—and, as a result, Western audiences have been fed hundreds and hundreds of stories that put Islam and violence together in one frame. Small wonder, then, that many have come to the conclusion that Islam is inherently violent. It is not the journalists’ fault that they highlight mostly problems and conflicts,
because these are what news is usually about. But it is the responsibility of journalists to make sure that their audiences realize that what they see is the exception, and not the rule.

The same goes for so-called “background” information. The problem these days with the media is not that it is impossible to find good background stuff; witness publications such as the
Economist
, the BBC, and NPR documentaries, and longer pieces in the
New York Review of Books
and the
London Review of Books
. The problem is that hardly anyone reads these things, and that without this so-called background stuff, news in the foreground is incomprehensible. As a German reviewer pointed out, there is among journalists this cop-out mechanism that as long as readers and viewers can find the good stuff somewhere in the media landscape, it doesn’t really matter that the rest of it is full of below-par material.

A second avenue for change concerns coverage of non-democratic societies. A place like Syria is not a country with an army; it is an army with a country. This is obscured from view by the regime’s use of labels that are familiar to us: President, parliament, police, party ... But an altogether different system hides behind this facade. That is why journalism in a police state is impossible or, rather, a contradiction in terms; a dictatorship in which journalism as we know it is possible would cease to be a dictatorship.

Some colleagues and reviewers have countered that this is a matter of effort: You simply need to work harder and have better contacts. But if you do this, and manage to find an opposition member prepared to be quoted, and verify some facts, such “success” would be the biggest failure of all. By producing a news article that was in no way different from a news item about a democratic country, you would have
inadvertently hidden the most important thing of all: That the country you are covering is not a democracy at all, and everything that this entails.

Once you accept that the classical fit-to-print methods of journalism are suited only to the sort of political system they grew out of—democracies—a space opens up for non-conventional reporting. What that space might look like, I wish I knew.

Third, we need to incorporate in coverage the fact that while news represents the world, this representation then influences that same world. In particular, something needs to be done about the impunity with which PR firms and communications departments operate. They can do so because mainstream media continue to pretend they are not really there. If a reporter goes into a battle zone embedded with the army, this should not merely be pointed out—it should take center stage. The reporter should preface pretty much everything that he or she says with a sentence that goes something like: “Of course, I have no idea what they are keeping from me and I cannot talk to the other side, but what strikes me so far on this tour with the marines is ...” Naturally, this requires the sort of fundamental rethink of basic assumptions mentioned earlier. Much of the glamour and posturing that war correspondents revel in suddenly become pretty ridiculous when you enlarge the frame and reveal how they really operate.

This point ties in with another area for improvement: The news media are a countervailing power to politicians and corporations, and when media fail this can have serious consequences. Hence, when the media are caught exaggerating or lying (either by omission or commission), they should be treated by other media in the same way that cheating politicians and corporations are treated. When CNN tells a lie, the
impact may be much bigger than when my silly little Dutch government does. Yet in the latter case it is considered news; in the former case, it ends up somewhere on the “media page,” at best.

Two more suggestions. News media need to level with their audiences about the variousness of possible perspectives about a given subject. Readers and viewers need to be reminded that the only consensus is that there is no consensus. Even about this.

Websites seem ideally suited to deliver those perspectives. Have a foreign editor use “separation barrier,” or “Apartheid wall” or “fence” or whatever other term is available for that concrete thing on the West Bank. I mean in Judea and Samaria. In the Palestinian territories. In the occupied—oh no, disputed—territories. Or is it “liberated?”

As I have tried to demonstrate in this book, the issue goes further than vocabulary. It would be marvelous to read more than one interpretation of a news event, especially when that interpretation is tied to an explanation of the underlying worldview. Al-Qaida frames most of its actions in defensive terms. If we want to understand Al-Qaida’s appeal, we need to see how it presents itself—not only how the Western foreign-policy establishment views it.

Who knows what a wonderful narrative technique such explanations may prove to be. Foreign desks have a great deal of expertise and experience that help them decide why a story is news, or not, what the angle should be, etc. Why not experiment with a column, either in the paper or on the web, in which the foreign editor writes a daily update about the criteria behind that day’s journalistic choices? It could take you through the day’s news, pointing out the grey areas of doubt, the blank areas on the map, the stories they would
have liked to do but were prevented from running by factors beyond their control ...

Finally, there are the simplifications and nationalisms inherent in all market-based news media. Here, I am even more clueless. Somehow in the history of our democracies, it has been decided that news should be treated as a product rather than as a good. A product belongs on the market, where the most popular version prevails. A good belongs in civil society, together with, for example, the protection afforded by the police and the justice afforded by the justice system. (In Europe, health care is also seen as a good.)

It is very difficult to see how democracies can survive when the information on which voters base their ballot-box decisions reflects not what they need to hear, but what they like to hear. If you give people only the food they say they want, they become obese. If you give them only the information they want, they become ignorant and self-righteous. Yes, the United States elected Barack Obama, but its underlying information infrastructure is as defunct as ever. Unless this changes, sooner or later another ignorant, gung-ho populist will win the elections, plunging the U.S.—and the democratic West with it—into another disastrous military adventure.

A final paradox: The sort of people for whom I wrote this book and afterword are the least likely to read it. But maybe I’m just a pessimist from old Europe. I hope so.

PS: For reasons that should be clear by now, I have changed many names. As well, some of the articles I have quoted have been edited for brevity.

Notes

1
De Volkskrant,
21 November 1998

2
De Volkskrant,
7 August 1998

3
De Volkskrant,
14 August 1998

4
De Volkskrant,
7 December 1998

5
De Volkskrant,
8 October 1998

6
De Volkskrant,
6 October 1998

7
De Volkskrant,
8 February 1999

8
Al-Gumhuriya,
28 September 1999

9
NRC Handelsblad, 27 December 2001

10
NRC Handelsblad, 15 March 2001