THE SHASHI THAROOR COLUMN
Weapons of mass distraction?
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Can the media do more to promote both awareness of and dialogue between civilisations?
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AP
WHENEVER I hear talk — often enough at the United Nations — about the importance of promoting a dialogue among civilisations (instead of succumbing to the Huntingtonian conviction that a clash of civilisations is inevitable) I fear we often tend to underestimate the subtle influence that the media has in helping us define who we are. And though I am a writer myself, I am not referring to the media of the written word — because the literate are all too often the most persuadable of the virtues of a dialogue across all kinds of boundaries. Rather, I am thinking of the most pervasive medium around the world — television.
It has been said that the reason that TV is called a medium is that it is neither rare nor well-done. Yet it is the most potent of modern media; television today brings to our living rooms and offices glimpses of events from every corner of the globe. Any doubt I might have had about the reach and influence of global mass communication was dispelled when I happened to be in St. Petersburg, Russia, for a conference and was approached by a Tibetan Buddhist monk in his robes, thumping a cymbal and chanting, who paused to say "I've seen you on BBC!" New communication technology has shrunk the world, and, in a real sense, made it all one, one market, one audience, one people.
But let's face it: the global media reflects the interests of its producers, and the producers of much that passes for world media are based in the developed West. Does TV do the best it can to give a voice and a face to the world's marginalised people? Who makes the cut to get on the air, to earn screen time in the brave new world of today's TV? Yes, there is the occasional developing country voice, but it speaks a first world language. In the first Congo war in 1962, the journalist Edward Behr saw a TV newsman in a camp of violated Belgian nuns calling out: "Anyone here been raped and speak English?" It wasn't enough to have suffered; one had to have suffered and be able to convey one's suffering in the language of the journalist. What passes for your world in the global media is often a stranger's perception of your world. We have to ask, are those speaking for their cultures in the globalised media the most authentic representatives of them?
I do not want to alarm the journalists among my readers who feel that their only responsibility is to their profession. I am not seeking to be prescriptive: rather, I would like everyone to be free to be themselves on the global media. The challenge I am raising has one answer: pluralism. By giving voice and visibility to all people, and especially the poor, the marginalised, the distant, and members of minorities, television everywhere can help remedy inequalities, including those that are the root causes of many conflicts within societies and between civilisations.
A world in which it is easier than ever before to see strangers on our TV screens must also become a world in which it is easier than ever before to see strangers as essentially no different from ourselves. And it doesn't necessarily require conscious public service programming on television, telling people what's good for them. Most people don't like to watch propaganda. The challenge is to use mainstream programming to promote the right messages. Broadcasters sometimes do this with their news and current affairs programming. But mostly, television educates people — children and adults — through the values it espouses in its entertainment shows. Soap operas and game shows and mini-series teach us about culture, about society, about history and about interpersonal relations, even when they are not deliberately aiming to do so. A great contribution has even been made to peace by sports programming: look at the positive effects on the subcontinent of the televising and reporting of the recent Indian cricket tour of Pakistan. The media, especially TV, can help dissolve hostility and tension by revealing, in real time, real people and real emotions.
The fact is that we can only tackle hatred and incomprehension about each other by attacking the ignorance that sustains them. To survive in our globalising world, we will have to know each other better, learn to see ourselves as others see us, learn to recognise hatred and deal with its causes, learn to dispel fear, and above all just learn about each other. This is best done through education. But who are the educators in today's world? Certainly schools and families are great teachers. But even Einstein admitted that what he couldn't picture, he couldn't understand. That is where television comes in. A recent annual survey on television viewership, conducted across 72 territories, found that 2.5 billion people, nearly 40 per cent of the world's population, spend on average almost a quarter of their waking hours watching television: absorbing what television has to say about them, and about other people. Television is one of the great educators of the modern world, even when it is not consciously trying to be. The question isn't whether television teaches. It is "what does it teach?" It can reinforce existing negative stereotypes, or build new positive ones. It can denigrate and dismiss cultures that are different, or it can show how wonderful the diversity of our world is.
As the custodians of the airwaves, television broadcasters can choose to be purveyors of weapons of mass distraction. Or they can choose to be builders of a better world.
Some may doubt that it is possible to make entertaining lively television that also educates.
The American comedian Groucho Marx said that he found TV educational because when anyone turned on the TV he went to another room and read a book.
But we all know the media can do more to promote both awareness of and dialogue between civilisations — and that is the challenge I hope TV broadcasters around the globe will try to meet.
Shashi Tharoor is the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information.
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