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J. O'Sullivan: The Media Must Scrutinize Global Changes
Written by John O’Sullivan, Former Editor-in-Chief, United Press International
Monday, February 18, 2002
Delivered at Assembly 2002, “Establishing a Culture of Peace: Worldviews, Institutions, Leadership, and Practice; The Search for Solutions to Critical Problems,” February 18, 2002
How can the media contribute to a culture of peace and understanding? This is a question usually asked by people who believe that until now the media has contributed to a climate of war and misunderstanding. The argument holds that wars occur because the media feed their various national publics with a diet of jingoistic sentiments about their own country and aggressive propaganda against other ones. These create a climate of mutual fear and hostility and eventually this erupts in actual hostilities as a result of some border incident or assassination.
But the relationships between the media, war and understanding are much more complex than that simple model might suggest. In the first place, there are so many competitive sources of information in this world: newspapers, television news, the Internet, media watchdogs and so on. So a newspaper could simply not get away with inventing a war. Other newspapers would rush to deconstruct their competitors’ reports and to detect the invention. The main effect of such action would be the collapse of that paper’s reputation and the spread of media seminars on newspaper ethics.
A more profound objection however is that war is not necessarily the result of misunderstanding between nations. It may be the result of their correctly understanding each other. In the short term at least, war might be promoted by more accurate reporting and the genuine understanding that flows from it, and peace might rest on lies and misunderstanding.
The classic example of this was how the Times of London, a paper that had unique authority at the time, reported from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Jeffrey Dawson, its editor, said later that he had labored night and day to prevent any news appearing in the Times that might obstruct good relations between Britain and Germany. In effect he censored the reports of his own reporters to give a sanitized version of what Hitler was doing and preparing. This was obviously a betrayal of his readers. But it was a service to the British government of the day, which had embarked upon a policy of appeasing Germany and it undoubtedly had the effect of prolonging that policy.
But a peace based upon misunderstanding is bound to be a fragile one. Eventually the truth about Hitler and Nazism battered itself into the minds of even the most blinkered appeasers and the war took place, a terrible war that cost the lives of millions. Now almost certainly that war would have taken place whatever the newspapers and newsreels had revealed or concealed about Germany. It was rooted not in media misunderstandings but in historical realities such as the race ideology of Nazism, the class ideology of communism and the antiwar sentiments of the democracies after the First World War. We have to consider the possibility however, that if the newspapers had reported more accurately from Germany then the democracies might have rearmed more rapidly, that the war might have come sooner but that the democracies might have prevailed in that war at less cost in lives and treasure.
In the long run, the media contribute to peace by telling the truth. If conflict exists, if injustice is perpetrated, it does no one any good to paper over the facts. These conflicts and injustices will push their way into the public mind eventually and perhaps more violently as a result of being ignored for years. Some journalist will make his name by drawing attention to them. But the competitive nature of journalism also ensures that if a newspaper is aggravating conflict by lies or inventions, their competitors will have an incentive to reveal the fact. If by chance a general bias suffuses all of the media as some critics have alleged is true of the American media, then eventually competitors will enter the market to take advantage of public discontent. The success of the Washington Times and the rise of the Fox News Channel in the United States are both examples of this corrective tendency.
Let me now apply this truth about the media to the concept of a culture of peace. First, what precisely do we mean by that phase? I suggest it has four components. One, the increasing power and influence of international and supranational institutions, such as the United Nations, UNESCO, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the European Union and so on. In addition to their current roles, they seek to raise tax and regulation from the national level to the international one.
Second, the growing influence of nongovernmental organizations, the so-called NGO revolution, from Amnesty International to Green Peace, which demand to participate in the decisions of intergovernmental bodies.
Three, the increasing scope and reach of international law and lawyers regulating relations between states, but also claiming universal jurisdiction over certain crimes, and those who commit them, even when they are heads of state or former heads of state.
Four, the ideas and attitudes underlying these developments which includes such beliefs as that nationalism and national sovereignty are outdated concepts and that they will in future be replaced by less rigid and more cooperative structures under the general rubric of world governments.
Taken together, these developments, this culture of peace, represent a massive qualitative change in international relationships. They represent a major shift of power and perhaps in time of wealth, from nation states to supranational bodies. And they promise to revolutionize the legitimacy of existing states and global bodies. NGOs are sometimes said by Koffi Annan among others, to constitute an international civil society, a kind of world electorate to which the UN, the WTO, UNESCO and the rest must be accountable. Hence the presence of NGOs on such occasions as the Rio Conference on the Environment, and the Durban Conference on Race and Racism, where the declarations and communiqués are given almost equal rating with those of intergovernmental bodies.
Now these are momentous developments. I do not think that I exaggerate when I say that most people in this room support all four of them and believe that the media has a positive duty to promote them as steps towards a better world. I beg to differ. The media has a duty to scrutinize these concepts with the greatest criticism and let me briefly suggest why in a few points.
To begin with some of the proposals for greater powers of tax regulation and criminal arrest by international bodies, the Tobin Tax, need to be examined closely. The proposed Tobin Tax on international exchange transactions, for instance, would transfer billions of dollars from private individuals and corporations to governments and world bodies. That kind of transfer would be highly controversial in a domestic, political context. Why should it be regarded as transparently virtuous in an international one? What is true of the Tobin Tax is true of Kyoto, the International Criminal Court and foreign aid. The press would be failing in its duty if it did not ask critical questions on these points.
A second point, what are the democratic credentials of supranational bodies today? In the past the democratic case was very simple. Voters elected governments, governments negotiated treaties, and that meant the voters had in effect, negotiated the treaties through the parliamentary agents. But that was when treaties were narrow, specific and subject to abrogation and when the powers of the treaty organization were correspondingly limited. That does not apply to the European Union, which may issue all kinds of binding regulations on all kinds of matters that no one ever predicted. Nor does it apply to the proposed Kyoto Treaty, which includes a body that will regulate carbon emissions throughout the world as it sees fit. If the Tobin Tax ever were to become international law, how could voters in any one country get it repealed or amended? Once national sovereignty ceases to be the building block of the international system, democracy tends to disappear along with it.
Thirdly, NGOs are no answer to this democratic deficit. Although they like to present themselves at being better and speaking for the people than mere governments, they represent only themselves and their particular constituency of activists. No one elects them and they are accountable to no one. There is no reason other than luck to suppose that they speak for their wider national constituencies. They get a free pass on this because their mission is generally humanitarian, and their intentions, good. But humanitarianism is often combined with authoritarianism, think of the medical profession, and good intentions are no guarantee of good results. And though NGOs can be acquitted of having material vested interests, they often have ideological vested interests.
Finally what makes the NGOs thoroughly unsuitable as any kind of international civil society or electorate is that they are largely selected and sometimes financed by the very international bodies they are supposed to hold to account. At this very moment the Chinese government is seeking to exclude Freedom House, one of the most respected human rights organizations from the United Nations’ list of NGOs because it has been a persistent critic of China’s human rights record. It may or it may not succeed. But the NGOs on that list have all been vetted. They include some very peculiar groups and they are there either because a government or a global body wants them to be there. Whenever I hear the phrase “international civil society” I recall Bertel Breck’s remark on the 1953 German worker’s uprising, “The people have lost the confidence of the government, so the government has decided to dissolve the people and elect a new one.”
The new class of international lawyers and bureaucrats dislikes being accountable to national governments and electorates because these nations often reject their favorite panaceas. So they have decided to elect a new one in the form of their favorite NGOs. Whatever we think of these developments, and some are obviously virtuous, I think that activities and hidden interests like that deserve the attention and scrutiny of the media. I think particularly that the lack of sufficient democratic input into the culture of peace needs to be critically examined. I suggest to you that the people need to be brought into these debates via the mass media. For even if you think that I am entirely mistaken, and I am sure many of you here do, you should nonetheless reflect on this final point.
If these major changes in international life: United Nations reform, Tobin Tax, Kyoto, the International Criminal Court, slavery reparations, trade regulations, the end of national sovereignty, if these international changes take place in the stratosphere of conferences like this, and in the halls of power in Geneva, Brussels, Turtle Bay and Durbin, they may continue for a while as the public sleeps. But like the peace of the appeasers, they will be fragile achievements. Then when some unexpected crisis occurs, and the public wakes up to discover that the government has lost control of some national interest, they will see what has happened, not as a culture of peace but as a power grab by new international elite.
How can the media contribute to a culture of peace? Very simply by ensuring the people and the voters are informed about every aspect of it. so that it is shaped only with their knowledge and with their consent. Otherwise it will be a mirage of peace, wonderfully impressive to the eye but liable to disintegrate instantly at the first touch of reality