Dear Bono....

Before we can criticise our media for the devastating repercussions of news censorship and news omission, it would only be fair to discuss what it is exactly that makes news recognisable as news in the first place. I mean, it would be unreasonable to reproach an estranged father for not paying child support for a kid that isn’t his, as it would be unreasonable to cast judgment on our humble media for not taking ownership of a story that meets none of the basic elements of newsworthiness. In order to know what responsibilities the media has in reporting news, we must first clarify what attributes of a story the media identifies as newsworthy, and therefore, worthy of enjoying an obligation to report.

Media academic Murray Masterson wrote in his doctoral thesis that there were six universal components of what constitutes news with three core fundamentals. This does not mean all six have to be a part of the one story, but that for a press release to transform into the handsome swan that is news, it must have three of the core factors of timeliness; clarity; and interest. In other words the distributor circulating the press release has to give the information currently, comprehensibly and with the reader having the potential to actually give a shit about what they are about to read. The other factors Masterson discusses include: consequence, proximity, conflict, novelty, human interest and prominence.

But after further reading on some new journalism theory as well as surveying some people in the industry, approximately another four or so criterion can be added to Masterson’s list. Today, in the year 2009, we can also say that the elements of: shock value, pathos, number of people affected and titillation are also part of what makes news newsworthy. And as we are all but simple creatures, let’s break down the dirty dozen into what they really represent, beginning with Masterson’s fundamental three.

Timeliness:

Clarity:

But while there would usually be no excuse for some unappreciative killjoy calling for the death of the Page 3 Girl, the fact that she takes up space where news belongs makes her a counterproductive anachronism. Forget the fact her inclusion might be demeaning or degrading or on the flipside, even just a bit of harmless fun – unless Page 3 Girl is a missing person where the only photo her family could find was her on the beach wearing nothing but wet sand and mauve-coloured lipstick – should she be taking up prime news space on the pages of a metro.

Therefore, in somewhat of a conclusion, when we look at the elements of newsworthiness we can see that extreme poverty deaths fall under several of these categories. We can factor in timeliness as it happens every day – but clarity perhaps not as there are many factors that impede on people’s perspective of hope. For instance, clarity becomes non-existent when people wonder why the birth rate is so high in sub-Saharan Africa or question whether people bring death upon themselves with the AIDS virus as rampant as it is. Audiences question whether corrupt governments keep humanitarian aid for themselves to buy guns or increase military expenditure. At the risk of putting ideas into people’s heads, the main reason extreme poverty is so unreported is because of the lack of clarity that can be gained in telling its stories. Journalism has somewhat adopted an attitude that since the profession is unable to ‘beat’ the task of explaining these myths convincingly then it, in turn, quite passively ‘joins’ the rest of us, in the blissful privilege of pleading ignorance.

Next in Masterson’s fundamental three, came interest. There is plenty to be interested in regarding extreme poverty as these people live in countries we visit on holidays and make clothes we buy at the markets. They live in exotic places like Rio de Janeiro, the Philippines, Madagascar, Tibet and Tanzania. They sell us the magic beans that give us Coca-Cola. We’re business partners, starving kids and us. We enjoy friendly competition at the Olympic Games and we are culturally enriched when we try their delicious food in the trendy parts of town with ethnic restaurants. Anyone who doesn’t find the third world and its people absolutely fascinating needs to watch a travel program where the absurdly good-looking reporter eats a bug and then rewards her cultural journey by getting a massage in the hotel sauna.

Like clarity, proximity is another attribute we cannot ascribe to extreme poverty. I mean, they don’t call it the third world for nothing; and for most places the people are in such dire straits that they might as well be from another planet. Proximity along with patriotism, perhaps are the major reasons it remains so easy for us not to care and not to take responsibility over extreme poverty. The events of world news are for our entertainment as well as to maintain our class. We cannot continue to be educated and informed if we do not know what is happening in other parts of the world. For most of us, it is not our business to be interfering with humanitarian aspirations; but it is our business to maintain our awareness by knowing what is going on. This is similar to a priest who abuses kids; who then one day comes to the understanding that the most likely reason he is abusing kids is because papa abused him 50 years ago; and then acknowledges this epiphany before going on to keep abusing more kids. The moral being, mere knowledge doesn’t always make us wiser; it just makes us know more.

Conflict is a tricky one because it can both help and hinder the crusade to publicize extreme poverty. The main point within this text is trying to explain that the reason extreme poverty is so absurd is because there is no cloudiness to the situation. Cancer and war both kill millions of people every year but we are yet to find simple solutions to these problems. The developing world needs food, clean water and basic medical attention which the rest of us are in abundance of. However, it is also no secret that conflict does exist where famine thrives. Somalia for example, has no effective national government and Sudan has been plagued by genocide for decades. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has seen about five million people die through conflict in the past 10 years and you can forget about spending your honeymoon in a romantic getaway in Sierra Leone. But civil war and poor governance is no reason to neglect starving civilians due to political complications. In fact, it should provide even more motivation to help. And while conflict does influence the economic climate in Africa, it should not take away or romance-away the fact that hunger kills more people in Africa than anything else.

The attribute of newsworthiness through prominence does makes its way into extreme poverty stories however, never credibly; and always too few and far between. Whether Madonna is stealing a kid, Angelina is adopting a kid or Michael Jackson is molesting one – the link between prominent figures and extreme poverty never quite sits well. Extreme poverty should need no gimmicks to be reported on. And while it is never the celebrity’s fault for being hounded by paparazzi, the damage is already done where the end result is quite unsettling, and the core subject of – extreme poverty in the third world thriving because of first-world neglect – is trivialized by the exploitation.

Consequence plays a huge role in extreme poverty as the consequences are endless. However, what this book is about is recognizing that the sheer magnitude of extreme poverty’s neglect has clouded the key fact that these deaths are preventable. And as a result of this cloudiness, discussing these consequences can sound not necessarily ludicrous, but like a conspiracy theory or a hypothesis by an academic. Alas, the repercussions are excruciatingly clear. The consequences of extreme poverty alongside our media’s neglect to report on it and alongside our governments’ neglect to address it – makes the ‘free world’ a racist world. We forfeit a people’s basic human rights merely because we cannot understand it. Remember how hard it is to fathom how much a trillion dollars is; or comprehending a mass murdering dictator killing a million people. The reality that we dismiss these figures merely because we struggle coming to terms with their meaning makes us not only highly ignorant, but gravely destructive.

Is there human interest and pathos imbedded in extreme poverty news? Of course there is. While we might think we have already read these stories, we have not. All that has been reported has been that starving kids want to grow up and become teachers and what they enjoy most is playing soccer. But even if this is true they have now become stereotypes. What we want to know is who these individuals are. What are their sexual preferences? What is the worst thing they’ve seen? What is the nicest thing they’ve seen? What is their concept of romance? Why do they continue wanting to live when they are in circumstances where we would not? What is life like without a washing machine and an ATM? Are they ambidextrous? Can they roll their tongues? What do they do when they get wisdom teeth? There is more to famine than starvation. Human beings affected by extreme poverty are not only dying, they are also living.

There is a fine line between repetition cementing a point and flogging a dead horse. The number of people affected is paramount in establishing extreme poverty’s newsworthiness because of how many people are indeed affected. While 25,000 people die each day from neglect – even if one person died each day it would be too many. In the ‘free’ world (whatever that means) we have orphanages for dogs, cats, horses and donkeys. We are obligated to call a hotline if there is an injured animal on the side of the road which we may or may not have accidentally hit driving our cars. We are even more obligated if the animal is cute and we are most definitely even more obligated if the animal is cute and cuddly. Again, the sheer magnitude of the daily body count continues to cloud our understanding of the matter. Hence, it makes it even more believable that if we can allow 25,000 preventable deaths to go by every day without losing a night’s sleep – then it is certainly achievable to allow its non-coverage by our media.

Ironically, the shock value affixed to extreme poverty is this number of people affected. We have become desensitized by bags of bones and we have become unfazed by token blacks in not-for-profit child sponsorship commercials. If the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper stated: 25,000 PEOPLE LEFT TO PERISH with a kicker headline reading: 25,000 more scheduled for tomorrow – readers would wonder exactly what the hell is going on. Even though some might think they might have known this information already, if the newspapers are printing it, then it has to be important. This news is shocking but the reason we are not shocked is that (a) nobody is shocking us and (b) the people in charge of enforcing those with the power to shock, are not doing their jobs.

And speaking of shocking, the final attribute in the dirty dozen, titillation, is another we cannot add to our list. Unfortunately, there is nothing very sexy about extreme poverty. Sure, we might see the odd bare-breasted ‘African’ woman grace our television screens now and then, but the whole malnourished/plastered in blowflies look is not the most enticing image to be titillated by. In the western world, such nudity would only be allowed for children to see if a mother were breastfeeding. However, for these nameless women who we will never know are gay or straight; funny or stern; left or right-handed – their tribal animal-like culture of accepted nudity is treated as footage that is educational, anthropological and, ultimately, completely dehumanizing. While these women are riddled with AIDS yet utterly determined to bring children into this miserable world, our media has made them mere subjects in a thesis, sexless, without personalities and for the sole purpose to influence our latest opinion for our next dinner party.

* * * * * * *

Tragically, history has made us only too aware of the potentially devastating effects media censorship can stir. You only have to consider the infamous Nazi propaganda from the Second World War to see the sort of influence subjective and one-sided information can have on the masses. The damage Joseph Goebbels can be held responsible for is a shining example of the plausibility of a news censorship worst-case-scenario.

Omission is even worse than censorship in the sense that it suggests nothing. Omission offers no clues, no suspects, and no outline of what’s going on. And no matter how much Confucius will try and convince us – a falling tree in the woods still falls even when there is no one there to see it. And using the same logic, unreported news has still happened even when it hasn’t made the headlines. If we were to apply the rules for both crimes outside the parameters of the media – censorship would be like the police showing up at your door in the middle of the night to inform you your teenage son has crashed your car, without telling you he was also killed. Omission is when the police decide not to show up at all. While the difference between both might be a night of uninterrupted sleep, it doesn’t change the fact that the son in the analogy is still dead.

While Goebbels implemented the policies of news censorship throughout Germany, he equally applied the murderous dogmas of news omission. In Nazi Germany, the State had more than just control over the media, it had become the media. When Hitler employed Goebbels as his Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda in March of 1933, he six-months later instated the totalitarian legislation of Editorial Law. Journalists were now public sector employees ordered to report only news that had been approved by what was known as the German News Bureau, a Reuters, if you will, of the 1930s. Private news agencies were cordially closed while private Jewish news agencies were also closed with the added bonus of being set on fire. And subsequently the news bureau began censoring every word inauspicious towards the government in power and omitting every story that didn’t serve the interests of Nazi ideology.

As far as newsworthiness went, Goebbels himself knew only too well what made audiences pay attention. News had to be interesting. There had to be novelty. In a very Nazi lecture to his very Nazi staff in the oh-so Nazi year of 1933, Goebbels relayed to his henchmen the sheer magnificence of radio as if being interviewed on a cooking show.

"I consider radio to be the most modern and most important instrument that exists for influencing the masses. The first principle, at all costs, is to avoid being boring. I put this before everything. You must use your imagination. Bring to the masses a new attitude which is new, modern, interesting and engaging."

And with some fresh basil and a little bit of rocket, you’ve got yourself a nation that doesn’t know the meaning of the words ‘concentration camp’. Today the same principle still applies. The media blaming a slow news day for news being boring is like a tradesman blaming his tools. We still need news to be interesting in order for it to be reported. And since starving kids and an HIV-positive Africa is sooo 1988, the only way of revamping old news would be, as Goebbels had put it, to lie. How dire a state did the reasonable everyday German believe his or her country had become in 1933? The answer is most probably not at all. And how dire a state do we believe we are in today when a sixth of our planet live in agony from a simple lack of food and basic medical attention? If we were to go existential for a second and disregard our mums, dads, ancestors, personalities and favourite colours, it means that when we were born, we had a one in six chance of being brought up in a world with nothing but suffering the agony of hunger and chronic malnutrition. How do we keep inviting the people of Mali and Uganda to the Olympic Games every leap year, and then send them back home to this life of deprivation.

The 2000 Sydney Olympic Games and the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games were the last two major international sporting events Australia had the privilege of hosting. At the former, more than 75 athletes overstayed their visas. At the latter, 14 Sierra Leone athletes proved to be such great runners, they found themselves so far into the zone that they ran and ran and never came back. Further still, a Tanzanian boxer, a Bangladeshi runner and nine team members from Cameroon also took off like they were fleeing taxis not too different from the ones they are probably now driving. Meanwhile, even Colleen McCullough’s Tim could have put the proverbial two and two together in deducing that these wayward athletes were clearly not representing the proud nations of Monaco or Sweden. They were residents of third world countries, giving up their exceedingly hard-earned Games accreditations to illegally live in an incredibly lucky country rich in peace, indulgence and prosperity.

While some of these athletes have since been granted temporary asylum, if the story was not so tragic it would be funny. Sierra Leonean teenager Isha Conteh told Australian immigration authorities that if she were forced to return back to her village she would be compelled to undergo female circumcision. Others claimed they were desperate not to go back to their hometowns, fearing more violence and torture from the local militia. These troubles are ones we in the developed world are fortunate enough not to have to worry about.

While it might be comprehensible to accept the goings on in Africa in a time when ignorance would be bliss, the Olympic Games has enabled us to meet these distant neighbours of ours every four years. We catch up; we have beers; we chat; we do the friendly competition thing. We consider ourselves worldlier just by mixing with those from the other side of the world – experiencing another culture. We even have the nerve to patronize their fine athleticism by acknowledging their overcoming of hardships, struggles and political hurdles just to make it to whichever well-off host-city could afford the suitable venue and facilities at the time.

There is no excuse for being a cynic during the course of an Olympic Games. Few will disagree that there is little more uplifting than watching a closing ceremony on TV with youngsters who for the past four years have treated their bodies like temples, now wearing Hawaiian lays around their necks and downing shots of Jack Daniels and flaming margaritas in an exotic foreign city. Jokes aside, it is indeed the celebration of humanity it says it is and should be enjoyed for its entertainment value and the opportunity to see the world mingle. But its rhetoric is racist. The hype in the power of the human spirit is a two-week vacation from suffering for some. If there was any human spirit at all, then we would not be letting some of these fine people go home to motherlands saturated by extreme poverty. While there is little more annoying than the paranoid screaming ‘racist’, it is fair to say that the attitude of the developed world hardly reflects an equal treatment of everybody as, in effect, equals.

While it is easy to come across as ‘never satisfied’ when discussing the issue, sub-Saharan Africa is never treated as an equal continent. It is a charity case, a liability or the crippled cousin on the in-law’s side. The developed world treats sub-Saharan Africa like a multi-million dollar corporation treats a charity donation as an investment in credibility; we bring their spirits up, they bring our tax thresholds down. Gone are the days when racism was a bunch of skinheads setting fire to Chinese restaurants or hillbilly farmers from Montana telling the Red Indians to go back to their own country. Unfortunately, our readiness to allow our neighbouring countries to continue to perish is equally as unbridled as it was in Nazi Germany. The only difference is the body-count is much higher; and once again, the discrimination is led by our media.

On February 26, 2006, on the CNN current affairs program Reliable Sources, former reporter for the Wall Street Journal Laurel Leff appeared as a guest to talk about her research-based book, Buried by the Times. Among her investigations, Leff discovered that in 1939, Harvard professor Karl Frederick endeavoured to save 78 Jewish journalists attempting to flee Nazi Germany. Frederick liaised with 39 American communication schools begging them to take on two refugee journalists each who had lost their jobs through Goebbels’ newly implemented editorial legislation. Frederick even asked for ten minutes to speak at the Newspaper Association of America’s 1939 convention, which he was refused.

Leff explained that Frederick had received letters from numerous deans of these journalism schools stating they were unwilling to take part in the refugee program in fear of an inherited competitive zeal the Jews seemed to possess. One dean even wrote, "Once you let a few Jews in, they tend to take over all the positions," going on to add that "you need to hurt them in order to help them." It was quite the contradiction to the Statue of Liberty’s appeal to ‘give me your tired, your poor, your midgets, your Sagittarians, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free etc’. Leff even went on to say that the New York Times frequently downplayed and even buried news about the threat to Jews at this time. She states:

"These stories weren’t always on the front page. But actually, and especially, when you’re talking about the 1930s period, it was mostly stories about the concentration camps that weren’t on the front page. The stories about discrimination were occasionally front-page stories...As a journalist…you do have to say, and ask, and maybe even be a bit outraged by the fact that stories about what turned out to be the extermination of six million people were not on the front pages of American newspapers."

Unfortunately just as Leff had begun to approach some interesting terrain on American news omission of the 1930s, she is told to have run out of time, subsequently being thanked and cut short by the host, Howard Kurtz. Ironically, the story is followed by a cheesy voiceover regrettably letting us know what is ‘coming up next’; which happens to be all the inside gossip of the television feud between Donald Trump and Martha Stewart with a story promising to divulge all the ‘juicy details’.

But if we revisit Leff’s research for a moment longer, as a result of her findings, a number of American journalists signed a petition, calling on the Newspaper Association of America to apologise for its lack of action in a time when others desperately needed the association’s help. But Kurtz also raised an interesting point, querying Leff’s idea on what an industry’s obligations essentially are in a time of crisis; pointing out that American journalists today are not in the business of offering jobs to Cuban or Chinese dissidents just to help them get out of an anti-democratic country.

And the answer is there is no answer. The ethics relating to what an industry should do to help in a time of crisis can be argued and debated infinitely. As a result, the course of action would vary from organisation to organisation. There is nothing specific guiding an industry on how to act and what to do in a specific moment of crisis. There is however an industry code of ethics that is specific in the running of a particular industry, aimed at preventing moments of crisis getting out of hand or happening in the first place such as a holocaust or mass famine for example. Such a preventative, proactive and ‘nip-it-in-the-bud’ course of action would be, say, the crazy outlandish notion of reporting the friggin’ news in the first place.

Seventy years ago a holocaust took place in Europe. And while, however, one might personally define racism in one way and ponder what it all means – reversely for a change, the present actually illustrates to us that racism was indeed the core of the Holocaust’s failure to be prevented as much as it was its execution. While no one is shouting nigger, Africa suffers an identical system of racism the Jews endured in Nazi Germany. If 25,000 people were dying every day from preventable causes of death in Canada, Scotland and New Zealand; the neighbouring countries of the US, Great Britain and Australia would be there in a heartbeat Bruce Willis style. Trust me, no kiwi is going to make Australia look bad by highlighting our neglect, we are far too arrogant to let this happen. It could be argued that extreme poverty in South America is proof that the United States is little fussed about image, but with Cuba in the ideal location to act as a communist buffer zone and a reminder of what the opposite of a ‘free world’ looks like – any misfortunes that take place down south (bar a hurricane of course) act merely as a token of how things could be.

Therefore, we have established the western media could have done more to highlight the frivolities of the Holocaust in our newspapers. We have also established, or in the middle of discussing, that the entire world can be doing more to highlight the similar atrocities going on in the third world. But does this news omission mean our news mediums are liars? If censorship is more or less failing to disclose facts and omission is failing to disclose entire stories, does this make all our information we receive based on lies?

Let’s go back to our humble non-media analogies. In The Crying Game, was Dil really lying to Stephen Rea’s character? Just because she didn’t tell him she was really a man technically doesn’t make it lying. Is an adulterer a liar if his wife never asks him if he’s having an affair? Of course opinions might vary. One would assume the majority of wronged parties involved would believe, of course, the man is a liar; a no-good liar at that. Semanticists on the other hand might think the man in the analogy to be many things, but a liar not being one of them. Therefore, what comes next is a question of moral obligation. If cheating isn’t exactly lying, then it has to be something. The same goes with a ‘girl’ not telling her boyfriend she can make pee pee standing up. The media’s refraining from telling us the body-count of hunger deaths each day is not only an abandonment of moral duties, but a breach of its industry’s code of ethics. This is not only immoral, it is criminal.