For all the incessant complaining about the tabloidisation of National news, there is a subtler shift going on in news coverage that is arguably more corrosive. News is no longer just selling itself with sensation, its selling the network’s other programming…becoming barely more than a hype machine.
Media is becoming more about posturing than informing. Its machinery has become focused on managing perceptions, not informing on the realities. This affair leaves us in a bewildering lukewarm world of entertainment values, somehow beyond the reach of anything tant.
The TV informativos with the largest audience is the one who is most adept at “sacrificing” the boring items in favor of the commercial peratives.
These practices have had a profound influence on the news programming. Many have been redesigned to give them a snappy “feel”an easily digestible, bitesize pieces of triviality. Is it any wonder then that the news about a singing penguin in a Moroccan zoo attracts a higher share de audiencia than the more relevant crisis on the
Today’s TV world of daily news we have been peering into is somehow beyond morality. It is a world of sententality, sensationalism and drama expressed as “good” or “bad.”
The producers of these programs want as performers “journalists” who bring them a brandname cachet that you can translate into institutional respectability.
What is so striking about most of them, however, is that it combines rare moments of intelligent commentary with idealess babble and buffoonery. However, there are costs involved in all this.
The danger of “celebrity” journalists is that the very premise undermines our democracy. The best known and best paid people now set an example that erodes the quality of the news we receive and threatens journalism’s cla on public respect. The issues they cover are narrow, centrist and bland. Far worse than their complete detachment from the news they present is that the anchors themselves show remarkably little conviction in their “reting” on the horrendous events—from genocide in Rwanda, to acts of terrorism in Indonesia, the Philippines or the middle East.
Years ago Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker magazine coined a term for those who pretend to views they do not really share. He called them “closet tolerants.” Most of today’s TV journalists tend to clothe their ideological nakedness with a lot of talk about sensitive topics. However, intellectual dishonesty is a pretty recherché complaint.
Giving meaning to the news and placing it in perspective was once the essence of journalism. But because of the perpetual race for ratings, anchors have become a cheap cabaret acta noisy backdrop to a Spanish family’s “quality” te together.
And while the fierce competition for viewership, sponsorship money and endofyear awards (where cheap silver coated trinkets are passed off as a wellead symbols of recognition and are subsequently translated into “respectful admiration” for the easily deceived masses of España profunda), remaining ahead of the competition has become synonymous with reting on things that have not happened yet.
In effect reters have become what palm and tarot card readers always have been: predictors. And since predictions are most often incorrect or at best play the odds, news journalists are now suffering the same fate as their flflam colleagues: They are losing credibility. Since journalists have no tools that can accurately foresee the events, the least credible person on TV is often the person reting the lead story.
Today with the news headlines a ubiquitous presence through the Intet and 24hour TV channels, we get stories on what is going to happen the next day: what Presidente de Gobierno will do tomorrow, how the IBEX 35 will perform, what law abiding dissident George W. Bush will have for breakfast….
Beside the fact that predictive news is often wrong, what is corrosive about this trend is that it introduces a filter of superiority into news coverage that turns off the few wellinformed viewers and readers who bother to pay attention to the content.
The circus act of a clown and his unsuspecting sidekick struggling to hold upright a “trick” newspaper page used to draw howls of laughter from the audience in
The rigors of (this once noble) profession have been abandoned for the copy and paste technique at our fingertips as a result of a proliferation of a globalised, synchronised and cohesive coverage of the events.
As one well informed insider recently told me, “It is quite an experience to walk around a newsroom and see half the staff watching CNN News.”
Are these the new role models for journalists? Are they not degrading themselves and the profession?
If reters feel that the who, what, when and where of most stories have already been covered by the te they file their rets, then the way to attract audience and respect is to speculate less on the whatnots of the future and focus more on the hows and the whys of the moment.
Changing the media world requires understanding the shifting sands of the media landscape. We need to know—and then to act. Otherwise, like old generals, we will be constantly refighting old wars.
I, for one, prefer Gramsci´s axiom: Pessism of the intelligence and optism of the will. Optism is a higher value, and criticism one tool for encouraging a popular movement for media change.
“Coersive Diplomacy” is not a new concept. It is a new expression for an ancient strategy. Diplomacy devoid of sanction, economic or military is ineffective; force unrelated to diplomacy is sterile and destructive. Nexus between force and diplomacy is inescapable. Dean Archeson´s famous words “negotiate from strength” plied recognition of this truth. Coersive Diplomacy does indeed offer an alternative to reliance on military force. It seeks to persuade an opponent to cease his aggretion rather than be bludgeoned into doing it.
Common myth of empire is the famous domino theory. According to this conception, small setbacks at the periphery of the empire will tend to snowball into unstoppable chain of defeats that will ultately threaten the emperial core. Such reasoning has been nearly universal among overstretched empires. In 1898 both the British and the French believed that if a French scouting party could cla a tributary on the Upper Nile at Fashoda, France could build a dam there, block the flow of the Nile, trigger chaos in Egypt that would force Britain out of Suez Canal, cut Britain´s strategic lifeline to India, and thus topple the empire that depended on India´s wealth and manpower.
When one draws a straight line from Cape Town to Cairo, and one from Dakar to the Horn of Africa, these two lines intersect somewhere in eastern Sudan near a town of Fashoda. Fashoda, an obscure dot on the dusty plains of Sudanese Egypt was built on a fiat peninsula connected by a narrow strip of land with the ridge which runs parallel to the water. The surrounding country is mostly deep swamp; mosquitos are present in the millions. The clate is always damp and the temperature rarely below 35 in the shade.
The name and the place have since disappeared into the mists of history but in September 1898, Britain and France seemed on the verge of war, the closest the two countries have been at armed confrontation since the battle of Waterloo in 1815, because at Fashoda, half a world away, French officers leading African troops confronted British officers leading African troops, each commander claing sovereignity and demading the withdrawal of the other.
With British and French colonies dominating the map of Africa, both countries wanted to link their respective spheres of influence with a system of railroads. Great Britain wanted to link Uganda to Egypt; France, to extend their empire through Central Africa and Sudan, an overland route from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, by pushing eastward from the west coast. It came to pass that the French thrust into the African interior was mainly from West Africa (modern day Senegal) eastward through the Sahel ( a savanna that runs from the Atlantic Ocean to the Horn of Africa). Their ultate a was to have an uninterrupted link between the Niger river and the Nile.
Fashoda was an obvious target for the French because it controlled the junction with a major tributary flowing in from the Ethiopian highlands the Sobat. At the back of French minds was the prospect of persuading the antiBritish emperor Menelik of Ethiopia to supt from the east French Nile expedition from the west. Menelik, in fact, had his own ambitions regarding the Upper Nile, ambitions fuelled by his defeat of the Italians at Adowa in 1895.
In 1896, a secret French expedition under the commander of a thirtyone year old Captain JeanBaptiste Marchand, a veteran of colonial wars in West Africa, comprised of 120 Senegalese colonial troops led by seven French officers had set out from the western coast of Africa to reach Ubandi, a tributary of the Congo and to reach the Upper Nile in order to cla it for France.
The Upper Nile, was at the te under the nominal control of the Mahdists, who had overthrown Egyptian rule a decade earlier to set up a fiercely Musl state of their own led by Muhammad Ahmad, known to his followers as Madhi. Egypt under British tutelage was planning a reconquest of Sudan under a command of General Herbert Kitchener, as famous for his love of young men as he was for his 1915 “Your Country Needs You !” recruiting poster.
Captain Marchand with a small detachment reached the Nile at Fashoda, a deserted fort in July 1898. Communications were a vital aspect of the story to the French cla of the Upper Nile basin and the determination of the British to oust them from the focus at Fashoda, both governments being motivated by the British occupation of Egypt in 1882 in which the French had refused to participate. Until the Mahdist revolt of the 1880s, the Upper Nile basin had been part of the Egyptian empire extended into Sudan first by Muhammad Ali and later by Khedive Ismail.
In early September, General Kitchener, who was briefly Egypt’s ConsulGeneral, destroyed the Mahdist army at the battle of Omdurman—whose site lies just across the Nile from northern Khartoum, site of the 1998 U.S. missile attack on a pharmaceutical plant. Then, as now, the leading world power was in conflict with a radical Islamic movement that had captured Khartoum in 1885, killing Britain´s Christian hero, General Gordon, who had helped crush the Taiping rebellion against China´s Ching dynasty and had been sent to save Sudan from the Mahdists.
Hard facts apart, Omdurman had its own historical asides. Winston Chirchill was there, doubling as a correspondent and a freelance cavalryman. From Omdurman, General Kitchener quickly moved to Fashoda, a 1,000 kilometers up the Nile to confront Marchand with his vastly superior forces and Egypt´s historical clas to the Upper Nile.
France, divided by the Dreyfus affair had no stomach for a protracted war with a determined foe in a hostile terrain. London and Paris recognised the absurdity of an armed conflict over a dusty point on the map of Africa. Quietly, an agreement was reached. France would recognise the British presence in Egypt and Sudan and the British would recognise France´s presence in Morocco. On 11th of December, France backed down and Captain Marchand made a dignified exit via Sobat, Abyssinia and the French colony of Djibouti.
On March 21, 1899, the French and British governments agreed that the watershed of the Nile and the Congo, respectively, should mark the boundaries between their spheres of influence.
History teaches by analogy, not identity. The historical experience is not one of staying in the present and looking back. Rather it is one of going back into the past and returning to the present with a wider and more intense consciousness of the restrictions of our former outlook. In retrospect, Fashoda was a clactic moment in the European obsession with the African continent which begun in the 1670s and lasted until 1895 with the partition of the entire continent. It ensured Sudanese ownership of most of the upper Nile but left that country divided as much now as then, between a Musl Arab north and a nonMusl, black African south. Their war is now more than a century old. It ensured that French influence remained confined to the west of the NileCongo divide, as well as helped shape the boundaries of the (Belgian) Congo, Rwanda and Burundi.
Fashoda, a dot on the map of the enormous continent is almost forgotten. But the significance that led to the drawing of much of the map of modern Africa, like the Dreyfus affair lives on.
