By Bilal M. Ayasrah - London*
How much do we receive about the world around us? How much truth is there in what we watch, hear and read every day? To what extent is there transparency in what the perpetual propaganda machine conveys to us about events? How faithful are media outlets in disseminating news and circulating reports on those events that shape our own lives?
If we believe that journalism is the first draft of history that justly records events as they occur without adding to them or subtracting from them, are we accurately provided, precisely in warfare, not only with material losses and death tolls but also the causes and circumstances that ignite those wars and wage them?
As soon as war masterminds bang the drums of wars, body count statistics and death estimates commence on the account that death squads are the real (and only) casualties of wars! In fact, truth: the absence of truthful numbers and factual accounts, as the old adage believes, is the first real casualty of wars and armed conflicts.
Lately, particularly over the last decade or so following 9/11 and similar atrocious atrocities thereafter, mass audiences have seen an implausibly schizophrenic attitude and a huge mismatch between reality on the ground and the reported material that they cannot winnow the good from the evil or sift the wheat from the chaff.
Media businesspeople, propagandists and their partisans, who quite often act as regimes’ “spokespersons” and lack the needed ethical qualifications and professional standards for the practise, insist on this state of confusion by way of retaining a selfish grip on power and holding awful and unlawful monopoly over truth, which provides the fuel for bias.
Bias usually creeps into a story through the reporters’ choice of facts and preference over accounts who usually respond to a number of “stimuli” as this article will show. I believe that some media outlets and their surrogates are guilty of deliberately partial reporting and unprofessional practice which present forms and shapes of deformed and misshapen truth.
Conflict reporters opt for a multitude of manipulative tools to fudge facts and fabricate truths in a bid to propagate their flagitious agendas and propagandise their in-built belief systems that only feed into their own ideological instincts and political affiliations, no matter what.
Worse still, war zones, unfortunately, provide a fertile ground for unethical reflections to the extent that absence of such noble values as objectivity, neutrality and impartiality has become the norm rather than the exception. War zones are affluent with much confusion, haggling and wrangling amid the flowing upsurge of accelerating events.
Reporting in times of conflicts, by spreading muddling exaggerations, misperceptions and misconceptions, drastically affects (and governs) our perception of reality. Such practises undeniably play a pivotal role not only in constituting reality but also in changing and reframing it according to the measurements and yardsticks of powerful and hegemonic dominant groups. "Twenty-four-hour news actually changes the reality of warfare, it is not just reporting on it", UK's former Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, was quoted as saying on the eve of the fall of Baghdad in 2003.
Also, slanted reporting and prejudiced accounts in conflictual times not only form and reframe reality; they also do so in some way, which should inevitably tarnish reality, deflower its ‘chastity’ and distort the general public's attitudes vis-à-vis events around them, particularly in this turbulent, tempestuous and volatile juncture in human history that has revolutionarily remapped the socio-political scene and cast its shadow over many aspects of life.
Given that journalists and news producers should draw upon events disinterestedly, I must note that they, at the same time, should act as critical analysts drawing a line between this criticality and the principle of factuality. In other words, they should look deep down into those events as to peel back the layers, reveal and unveil the truth that lurks inside and behind them. That is, to debunk what they do not (or do not wish to) say, to discern their hidden associations, decipher their concealed implications and unmask their unacknowledged agendas.
In a purely additive sense, I also believe that journalism is an honest truth-seeking activity in the first place and that truth does not always appear explicitly. This intimately chimes with the modern “dogmas” and “doctrines” of the profession and finds its echoes in the veteran conflict journalist, John Pigler, who pithily claims that “it is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and myths that surround it”.
But what are the motives and driving forces which may propel reporters who work in hot spots and under fire conditions to garnish truth and present it deceptively embellished? What hinders them to be neutral and report the truth credibly? Who is running this chaotic of bias and prejudice, after all?
I believe there is a plethora of reasons behind this kind of practise; material benefits and cheap gains (sadly, our profession has been seen as a mercenary practise), absence of ethical commitment and codes of professional conduct, ideological interferences of all shapes and forms, editorial policy lines not to mention governments’ hold on freedom of expression. If this freedom, I should say, is allowed, truthfulness and faithfulness will automatically be secured, won’t they?
To ensure better coverage of conflicts, one may, therefore, wonder how an honour pact or a professional code of conduct with a binding force can help reporters adhere to the core values of the journalistic practise, not least in wartime.
Despite many tries in this concern both on domestic and global levels, they have unfortunately remained dead letters. The gap between those pacts and their actual implementation on the ground has dramatically widened. To narrow this gap, I believe we should stop beating around the bush and work hard towards a practical translation of these archived dusty pacts with strong will, solid determination and never-failing wish. Also, we should push for collective public awareness particularly amongst media elites irrespective of their ranks and however they are classified.
Enough is enough! Unsurprisingly, audiences today are parroting Mark Twain’s judgemental statement “if you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed and if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed” and that of Thomas Jefferson “the man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers”. Isn’t it time to polish, refine and redefine our own honourable profession?!
I believe there is a perennial need, today more than ever before, to rise to the moral tones of our profession, the fourth estate whose majesty lies in its involvement of a very noble human value: truth. Our profession today is at a serious perilous juncture and its intrinsic values are on the verge of collapse owing to this crazy “rebellious” world. Therefore, let us acknowledge that we do have a problem. Let us nip it in the bud. Let us not shun the stable door after the horses had run away.
*The writer is a researcher based in London. His current interests are media and the Arab Spring. He contributed this article to Ammon News Agency.
comment replay 