TRANSCRIPT (4,411 words, slightly
edited for clarity):
O'CALLAGHAN: Why doesn't the world
understand the concept of sustainability? Why are we still going
for the neo-liberal business model?
SCHECHTER: Well you know, we're ten years on from Rio,
and in those ten years if you track environmental media coverage,
you'll find that there's been quite a bit of it, but usually it's
fragmented. People don't have a sense of the big picture, a sense
of how policy connects to environmental problems. They're not really
exposed to the debates that are really at the heart of this whole
process here in Johannesburg, and at the heart of the activism of
many of the conservation and environmental groups.
The reason for that is that environment as an issue doesn't
really sell very well in the media, even though large numbers of
people when asked, the overwhelming majority would consider themselves
either supportive of environmental goals, or environmentalists.
It's an issue that people care about but it's not an issue the media
cares about, because its an issue that raises deeper questions,
really, about ownership, control, power, all kinds of questions
that media companies are uncomfortable raising. And that's because
media companies are themselves corporations, with their own vested
interests and ways of identifying with certain players in this game.
And the players they don't usually identify with are the environmental
activists – who do get some coverage when they do spectacular
things. I mean Greenpeace has shown that it can seize a nuclear
plant or take some dramatic action and get its picture in the paper.
But its real analysis of what the problem is that they're fighting
about, the questions that they're trying to raise, often is missing
in the press account which focuses on the incident but not on the
deeper problem. And so as a consequence, many people are not very
well informed about these issues, or about any issues for that matter!
I think the media, in a sense, is standing in the way
of that understanding, even though here in Johannesburg we have,
you know, three thousand media people here. But I'll ask you to
evaluate afterwards if the media coverage has really moved public
opinion or forced more of a responsiveness by governments. I don't
think it will, in part because of the way media covers events, and
also by the lack of on-going, continuing coverage of these issues.
Some years back newspapers and magazines added environmental editors
and reporters and programming. A lot of that got whittled away over
the years and there wasn't sustained attention to the problem. Even
CNN, which is run by Ted Turner – a big environmental funder,
didn't really cover the issue very well. Episodically, from time
to time, if there was an event,. but not on an on-going basis in
a way that gives people the information, the tools they need to
get involved.
O'CALLAGHAN: The US government has
become very unilateral in withdrawing from global concerns, but
what about the American people?
SCHECHTER: Well I think when asked about these issues,
when given a chance to to express themselves, the American public
is concerned about the rest of the world, is concerned about environmental
issues, about saving the planet. I mean this has shown up consistently
in every poll. The American people, by a 67% majority according
to one survey, support a stronger UN. The problem is that those
sentiments don't have really strong advocates in government advancing
them and lobbying for them. And when you have an Administration
that is as hostile to environmental goals and issues, that takes
conferences like this not very seriously, it's not surprising that
the media doesn't take it very seriously, because they often march
in lock-step with the government, except when there's a good controversy.
There was an outrage all over Europe and around the world about
the Kyoto Protocol, the US government's refusal to sign it. But
in the United States it got very little attention and very little
coverage because it was an issue identified with Al Gore, you know,
and he lost, and therefore the issue lost! I think the American
public is not being very well informed. There's been over the last
ten or fifteen years an 80% cutback in coverage of the world. Last
week Dan Rather, who is one of the news anchors in American television,
one of the most notable people, you know, said that if you lead
with a foreign story on a newscast, you die! In other words, that
your ratings will be down. Well your ratings will be down, in part,
because the stories are not covered in an interesting way. The connections
are not drawn between what American policy makers do and what's
happening in the rest of the world. So it's hard to get a sense
of how things relate to each other. This is a deeper problem in
media presentation and news, but it's particularly true when it
comes to news about the rest of the world.
Now after 9/11 in the United States a lot of people said
"my God, we've been living in a bubble, we haven't known about all
this." In fact, before 9/11 we had a situation where major reports
warning about an imminent terrorist attack were not being covered,
because the American media was covering shark attacks and the Gary
Condits sex scandal in Washington! So people didn't really even
know about all this. When the events happened on 9/11, there was
a sort of a shock to the system. "Oh my God, we don't know what's
going on!" The news makers were saying "look, the world has changed
forever" but the news media didn't change for ever, as I documented
in a new book I've done called Media Wars, which tracks the coverage
after 9/11. And in it are several reports which show how initially
there was a lot of interest, there were stories about why does the
rest of the world hate us, what's wrong with American policy, but
those stories quickly vanished to be replaced by stories about Our
Boys in Afghanistan, about the War on Terror, about the danger of
Iraq, about a whole lot of issues that were really ideologically
constructed in a way to avoid dealing with the deeper issues that
folks like the folks here in Johannesburg want to raise.
So the American people are not stupid, they are not just
exposed on an on-going basis to information. I mean there have been
surveys in the United States showing that 80% of our high school
seniors can't find Japan on a map. 50% couldn't identify, years
ago, South Africa as being the country that practised Apartheid.
20% didn't find the United States in relationship to other countries.
So this is a giant problem of illiteracy, political and cultural
illiteracy. And it can be blamed in part on the news media, but
also on our educational system, and our culture which is so organised
and structured around the market, around consumption. You know,
the dominant message to most Americans is "Shut up, and shop! Buy
things, consume things, don't really get involved in political matters."
And, you know, we have a situation where only half the population
actually voted in the presidential election...
My point is, there's a problem here with our media institutions.
There's been a merger between show business and news business in
the United States and in other parts of the world. An NGO in Britain
recently did a survey to ask how did people in England understand
the world around them, because there's been a shrinking number of
informational educational documentary programmes about the rest
of the world. And this is true not only in England but across the
board, around the world, as many broadcasters imitate or clone the
American model of broadcasting.
Now the problem with this problem, in my opinion, is
that the people who are concerned about the problems of the world
don't see it! They are so absorbed in the intricacies of every issue
that they're involved with, they don't really think about how to
inform the American people or the world's people. They're much more
comfortable writing long reports with detailed footnotes or high
polemical rhetoric. They don't really get into the problem of how
do you market an issue? How do you get people interested? How do
you educate people? And what is the role of the media? And the media
are some of the most powerful corporations in the world. But when
you look at a list of the top ten companies that are, in a sense,
a menace to the planet, media companies are not even on the list.
We have activists in America who are upset because the Disney company
is paying workers in Haiti ten cents an hour to make T-shirts in
Port-au-Prince, exploiting workers. Well that's a serious issue.
But what about the children of America who are being fed twenty
four hours a day with programming that trivialises every issue in
the world, that doesn't inform them? That is not on the agenda of
most environmental groups!. So we have a disconnect here, between
how people really understand the world, the media establishment
– the mediaocracy that links politics and the media –
and the activist community that doesn't even have a strategy about
media! They don't talk about it, but they complain about it. Every
NGO here will complain "Why isn't my issue in the news? why aren't
people covering me? isn't it terrible? don't they realise how important
what I have to say, or what our group has to say, is?" But they
don't take responsibility for an inability to explain their issues
clearly, and to understand that the media is a problem in the world,
not a solution! They think like "if I can get on television for
ten seconds, I've made a big difference about things." But you really
haven't, because what works on television is sustained coverage.
If you look a the big issues of recent years – O.J. Simpson,
Monica Lewinsky, Gary Conditz, all these issues, Iraq, Saddam Hussein
– reinforcement, constant exposure is what creates public opinion!
Not an occasional sound bite here or a reference there.
But they don't get this, their approach is outdated,
it's antiquated, it's not connecting, and it doesn't see this as
a political problem. And as a consequence, if you look in the world,
look at the governments that are here. What do these governments
care about? A lot of them are democracies. They care about their
press, their image! They spend a fortune on spin doctors, and handlers,
and PR agencies, why? To get the image of their country up. They
understand the importance of it. Every politician, at least in the
United States, raises money to do what? To buy ads on television!
It's all about media. They all want to be involved in the media,
the need the media, and the media needs them.
But the activist world doesn't get the media. First of
all, they don't watch television, for the most part. Most activists
are too busy to really plug in to the popular culture in their own
country. They listen to radio reports, they listen to more intellectual
things, but they're not really clued in. As a consequence, they
don't say anything about it, they don't challenge it. They don't
say "look, media companies, you should be accountable. You must
be transparent; you must be honest and ethical in your business
practices." You rarely hear that from activists.
Now there is a group of media reform groups that are
raising these issues, but by and large, they are not included in
the big NGO world. They are not part of it, they don't connect to
it.
We've organised mediachannel.org which is a network on-line,
connected to oneworld.net, the big NGO portal. And what we've done
is brought together a thousand groups from around the world who
are concerned about media, concerned about the content of coverage,
concerned about the structure of ownership, concerned about the
issues that are not getting covered. And mediachannel.org should
be something that every environmental activist pays attention to,
because it directly connects to what they're doing. But they don't
get it.
So the question is, how do we get them to get it? How
do we encourage people who care about water or food or any of the
issues being debated, trade, to try to take a minute, step back:
how is that issue being covered in the media? How clearly are people
really understanding what the choices are, what the points of debate
are? And as a consequence, we have activists who are way out in
front, they're way ahead of where most people are. And we've got
to kind of get them to say, listen, slow down, pay attention to
this, you lobby governments all the time, do you lobby media? Do
you ever go and try to talk to executives and journalists and challenge
their coverage, based on an analysis of what they've done and haven't
done? Very rarely! They just don't, you know, its like PR. Media
is PR. You have somebody who sends you a press release, that's how
they think about it, a completely antiquated approach. Every smart
media strategist doesn't even think about that. They think about
how do you reach the public directly, how do you get your message
across, how do you finesse it, how do you package it, how do you
brand yourself, blah blah blah blah blah. On the left? Pfff! They
don't... and the foundation world? The right wing foundations in
America spend, media is number one on their list, number one or
two, they invest a lot in it. The more progressive foundations,
it's number 10 on the list, number 15 on the list. They don't think
about it, too much, or not enough. And so you have this – and
they have more money than the right wing foundations, but they don't
invest it in communications, and that's one of my complaints.
We're at a conference, a UN conference [WSSD in Johannesburg],
where the structure of the UN is undemocratic and unrepresentative.
Everybody here is talking about reforming the World Bank, reforming
the IMF, reforming corporations, reforming everything but the UN.
Nobody's talking about it! Why? It's right in front of them and
they don't see it. Now [suppose someone is] trying to raise this
issue, he calls a press conference, very few reporters come. Why?
Because they don't even know that this is an issue. Why? Because
the activist community isn't making it an issue. And that's the
problem. We have to find a way to go directly to the people, because,
when you do, when the people hear the case they say, wow, that's
interesting, gee, you mean the people in Europe vote for the European
parliament? And why can't we vote for a new UN? You know, they do
it, why can't we do it, it makes sense. But there's no platform
to raise the issue, and talk to journalists, cause it's not on the
agenda. And it's not on the agenda because activists don't put in
on the agenda, and this is the problem that I have.
O'CALLAGHAN: In the last 20 years in
biology, research has revealed a whole lot of cognitive activities
going on within cells and throughout the metabolism of living systems.
It turns out there's a whole lot of perception or "information processing"
taking place in organisms and in ecosystems.
The same is true on the global level.
You can describe the global crisis in the various languages of history,
politics, religion, psychology, ecology, technology, economics and
so on. But if you look at it from the point of view of cognitive
processing and information theory, the main threat to our survival
appears to be not some group of bad guys somewhere, but rather a
gigantic information gap which is preventing the human species from
integrating and implementing most of the solutions to those global
problems which pose the greatest threat to our collective security
and survival as a species. I'm talking about knowledge which already
exists, but which is scattered throughout the global body politic.
Do you think the American intelligence
community including the CIA still don't understand this aspect of
information theory? Do you think they still try to manipulate or
influence the information that gets on Time magazine, Newsweek,
and the New York Times?
SCHECHTER: There is a kind of a merger between the military
and the media. There is a way in which the intelligence community
plays a role, but it's not direct, it's not the way most people
think. Like in the old days in the Soviet Union when a guy calls
up and says do this and do that! They don't have to do it that way,
it doesn't work that way. There is a way in which an agenda is set,
the media is set up structurally to cover that agenda. I mean, recently
the head of CNN International was speaking at Newsworld Asia in
Singapore – a big conference – and admitted. He said "Yes,
we censored the news since 9/11, because we don't want to get ahead
of the public opinion, we don't want the public turning against
us by telling them things they don't want to hear, so yes, not only
have we done it, but everyone has done it." It's the President of
CNN! You know what? It wasn't reported in the United States! It
was reported in the Press Gazette in London as if it's only something
that other media people would be interested in, not something that
the public would be interested in!
So yes, there's a lot of information management. There's
something called IO which is short for Information Organisation,
where there are officers that plan out, the same way that they plan
a battle, on the media side they plan an information campaign around
it, and they structure how to do it, and they do it very well. There's
a whole American military school that teaches this kind of military
management of media. They believe that the American media lost the
war in Vietnam for them, you know, ahem! They believe a lot of things
that are ridiculous, but this has been an operating assumption,
that they have to manage media because today we live in an age of
military conflict and media war. And that's what my book is about,
Media War. It's about showing people this relationship between government,
big business, and media as a big business. And how the ideological
assumptions work, how people are recruited and trained, how dissidents
are screened out and are never heard, how issues are framed, and
how agendas are set and agendas are cut, and what the issue is that
matters.
I'll give you an example. In the war in Afghanistan,
there was a prison uprising in a place called Mazar-i-Sharif. Six
hundred Taliban prisoners supposedly had an uprising. A CIA agent
was killed. It was the top news around the world. It was a story
ending up with the prisoners in a cellar in the fort, they were
pouring gasoline in and lighting it, to try to burn them up alive!
I mean it was a hideous battle! It was one of the only battles in
the war where actually the other side was in direct collision with
American forces and with the Afghan forces that the US was supporting.
Now in the British press, you had the Times of London – right
wing – you had the BBC and the Guardian and the Independent
– left wing – all reporting that there were war crimes
committed here, that this was a case of hideous abuse by the United
States. There were suggestions that the reason the CIA agent was
killed was because he executed somebody at blank range. All this
was reported by extremely reputable reporters across the spectrum.
This story was not reported – in the United States – at
all! Nobody knew about it! I knew about it because I write for mediachannel.org
and I read the press from all around the world, and I try to have
a more diverse approach to news coverage.
Well in August, these last two weeks, Newsweek magazine
had a cover story about war crimes in Afghanistan. But by now, the
impression of what's happening – the Great American Victory,
the Victory for Freedom and all this – has been set in the
public mind. You know it's like the first day's story is always
the most powerful, the corrections on page 29 afterwards nobody
pays much attention to. So here you have an issue which – if
this had become framed, this war, early on when this happened –
the whole course of events might have been quite different. You
know, I mean the My Lai massacre in Viet Nam was suppressed, it
was only a few people who brought it out to the world, and it changed
the whole image of the Viet Nam war. And so, there are a number
of instances like this, I don't have to go into them detail by detail
(but I do in my book Media Wars, I do try to offer some detail and
analysis).
I think this is a challenge to those of us who want a
better world. This has to be an issue that we care more about. If
we don't, we're lost, because we're just going to be marginalised
and co-opted, as has been happening here, where the language of
sustainability – which has long been a language of advocacy
and protest and resistance – has become a language of convention
and co-optation. And you know, as a result, the people who are trying
to define what the real challenge is tend to get lost, or stereotyped,
or labelled, or forgotten.
And I have to say, part of it is we do it to ourselves.
We don't take responsibility for our own media choices, first of
all. We do not support independent and alternative media adequately
enough. We'll buy an ad in the New York Times for $50,000, but do
we spend any money supporting independent media that actually works
on an on-going basis to get these issues out? Not really. So, you
know, this is the problem: in a way, the values of the dominant
system and its information approach have infiltrated into our movements
and into our approach to trying to change things. And unless we
recognise it and are willing to think about that for a minute or
two, as a problem, we're not going to be able to shape a news agenda
that will give our issues the kind of resonance we want them to
have.
I say this as somebody who was part of the start-up team
at CNN. I worked for ABC news for eight years, I worked for ten
years in commercial radio. I worked in public television. I worked
in local commercial stations in television. I've had a lot of experience
in this, this is not stuff I'm just talking about because I'm an
academic of some kind. I've been there, done that, in the newsrooms.
And I've seen how the process works, and I've seen why people with
good values feel marginalised, frustrated, and end up leaving the
business, because they don't get any support, not only inside from
their industry, but outside from the people who should be their
friends. You know, I do a report on ABC news that reaches, you know,
26 million people, and do I get one letter from any activist group
saying "good job", to my boss, saying this was great, we need more
of this type of thing? No, very rarely, if ever. So this is a problem
that is a problem that's invisible.
Marshall McLuhan said "television is transparently invisible."
It's in front of us, we see it, and you know, don't think that the
internet is that much better, gang. Yes, everybody has a web site,
but the top 50 web sites, a study done at Leicester University of
the top 50 web sites, all but two of them have only two sources
of international news, Reuters and A.P. – which in effect is
one source, because they are both competing for who's first, not
necessarily for who's best or who has the most information. So this
is a problem too. We've created the Globalvision News Network, gvnews.net
[not affilliated with Global Vision Corporation and this web site
- ed.] to offer more diverse coverage of the world's issues. Because
clearly, if you just have an Anglo-American, it's not surprising
most people don't know what's happening. And a lot of the stuff
from below, the activism and the community organisation doesn't
get attention until a crisis happens. When there's a crisis, you
know there's an old saying "It's not the ship that makes the waves,
it's the motion on the ocean." And the motion on the ocean is the
people, and the people are out there are doing great things but
they're not being heard. They're powerless because they're voiceless,
because their voice is not being heard in the debate. It's not being
heard because the media screens it out, in large part, not always,
not everywhere.
So what are we going to do about it, gang? Are we going
to take this on as an issue? Are we going to say yes, media matters
enough to care about trying to change it? Or are we going to say,
well, that's my PR person, let them handle it, I'm too busy? And
yet when you talk to every decision maker, what do they worry about
most? Jesus! We've spent, you know, here at Human Rights Watch,
we sent a delegation of ten people to Beserkistan, we've issued
a report, you know, 48 pages on two thousand human rights abuses,
nobody picked it up! You know? Why did we do it? We did it to get
it into the media, but our effort at working with media was like
a secondary thought, an afterthought, we didn't think about that
as like what we should be doing. And this is the problem, you know,
with a lot of activist movements and groups in my opinion.
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