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Sun, 17 Nov 2002
Something's bugging me. Since January 1st, 2000, the trans-Atlantic gap has gaped wide in our collective perception of the way the world works. You need look no further than the blogosphere for evidence of this, from warblogging Americans denouncing spineless European perfidy to Europeans expressing outrage and disgust at American warmongering. You can see it in the news every night, US diplomats and politicians snorting contempt at the EU and EU politicians calling George W. Bush Hitleresque. Or ... can you?
I'm not particularly well-travelled, but in the past year I've visited the United States, Eire, Holland and Belgium, as well as the UK. (And I've chewed the political fat with people from other EU countries.) The feeling I get from many people in all these places is that they think the other side is wrong -- that what they're saying is ludicrous propaganda aimed at us, and we are of course right. Huh? Can someone tell me what's going on here?
Some of the dissent seems to be subtly manufactured. I'm not a one-man media monitoring agency, so I can't quote chapter and verse, but I think the trans-Atlantic rift over Israel is one symptom of it. Palestinian atrocities against Israeli civilians tend to be underreported in Europe, with significantly more emphasis directed towards the Israeli army carrying out reprisals. Meanwhile, US TV news is full of atrocities that are cut short in the BBC coverage, whenever a suicide bomber wipes out a restaurant or a bus stop, but coverage of the suffering of the Palestinians is minimal. It's not overt censorship; we hear about both sides -- but one side gets more airtime than the other, more pans and zooms across the bloody carnage.
Another example is reporting on the EU itself. In the USA, and to some extent in England (but less so in Scotland and Northern Ireland), the EU has a reputation for being a huge, bloated bureaucratic nightmare of misrule. Stories of strange EU regulations are lovingly repeated; the committee to standardize the radius of curvature of the banana, or the perfidious attempt to destroy the Scottish fishing fleet by banning them from catching anything. But step outside the charmed circle of anti-EU reporting and some uncomfortable facts become clear. The EU employs fewer bureaucrats than the British government assigns to the Scottish Office in London. The banana committee is a myth. And the stories about the Scottish trawler fleet quota are entirely true but ommit the key detail that last year's total North Sea catch was down to 37,000 tons, from a peak of 250,000 tons in 1977 -- the ban on fishing is a desperate last-ditch attempt to save the North Sea from following the Grand Banks off Newfoundland into sterile extinction.
Meanwhile, stories about George W. Bush's legendary stupidity, insularity, and ignorance abound in the European media.
Do I have to draw you a diagram?
Something nasty is going on, something that seems to follow Noam Chomsky's doctrine of the manufacture of consent -- only in a different direction; it's the manufacture of an artificial dissent, a mutual contempt between the inhabitants of the fifteen richest, most developed nations on the planet. The key is the way issues are reported in privately owned news media in different countries. "Balance" is a fetish in news reportage circles -- the idea that both sides of a story must be equally described. In reality, it's a chimera -- one side always gets more airtime, or is otherwise favoured. You pick a moderate on one side, and an extremist on the other, assert that it's a balanced debate -- and you've just shifted the centre ground towards the second faction's territory.
At present, "balanced" reporting seems to be being used to drive a wedge between Europe and America, by building a climate in which concilliatory statements of solidarity are downplayed and the extremists are represented as the voices of the centre ground. I wish I knew why this was happening; not that I believe it's some kind of colossal top-down conspiracy. It may be an emergent property of the way news media work -- after all, bad news is good for audience ratings, and conclusive proof that the other guys hate us is bound to get more eyes focussed on the silver screen than yawn-worthy reports that they're on our side after all. Or then again, it may be a conspiracy -- a conspiracy of dunces, that is, of privately owned conglomerates pandering to the ideological prejudices of their owners. Rupert Murdoch reputedly hates the EU, and so does Conrad Black, after all: and the power to sack editors must exert a wonderful concentration upon their minds.
Whatever the cause, it's worrying to consider. Because we're going to have to live with the consequences of believing these lies for many years to come.
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posted at: 14:55 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entryspecials:
Is SF About to Go Blind? -- Popular Science article by Greg Mone
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