----- Original Message -----
From: "Andy Mensah" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2004 7:48 PM
Subject: [unioNews] Fwd: BBC, Africa, Conflict and Censorship


Thursday, February 12, 2004
<H3>BBC, Africa, Conflict and Censorship</H3>
By Paul Ejime
PANA Staff Writer

Dakar, Senegal (PANA) -  The influence of the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on Africa is so
phenomenal that millions of listeners, government
officials and ordinary citizens alike, rely on it
as a veritable source of news and information on the
continent.

Still, many African governments are unhappy with what
they call the corporation's incisive and sometimes
"biased, slanted or negative" reporting.

Media experts, too, are concerned by the stereo-type
reporting of Africa by Western media in general, with
their undue emphasis on wars, conflicts and misery.

In the case of the BBC, a typical example is Liberia's
14-year civil war that has killed more than 250,000
people.

A school of thought dubbed the conflict a "BBC war" because
of the undue airtime the Corporation devoted to the rebels,
especially to warlord-turned-President Charles Taylor.

Before Taylor invaded Liberia, he told the world through
the BBC in December 1989 that he would wage war against his
country, then being ruled by President Samuel Doe.

And throughout the bloody conflict, Taylor and his comrades-in-
arms enjoyed and still enjoy unparalleled airtime on the BBC to
the point of undermining sub-regional efforts to restore peace
to Liberia.

Thanks to the satellite phone, dissidents and rebels in Africa
would appear to be winning the propaganda war even against
democratically elected governments with many critics accusing
the BBC of complicity for generously devoting so much airtime
to them.

Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d'Ivoire, Sudan, Uganda, Guinea
Bissau, Angola and Somalia are some examples of how the
satellite phone has become an instrument of rebel war in
Africa with the BBC at the epicentre.

There has not been any empirical evidence to support the
charge that BBC's reporting fuels conflict or instability in
Africa, but given its wide reach coupled with the fact that the
corporation remains a major source of news out of Africa, its
influence on events on the continent cannot be underestimated.

Yet, the no-love-lost relationship between the BBC and African
governments, which complain bitterly against the BBC's coverage,
is such that officials of these countries still turn to the
corporation to put their views across to a much wider audience.

To its credit, too, many Africans rely on the BBC for crucial
alternative reportage on events in their respective countries
shunned by the mainly state-owned and controlled media.

This is because many of the local media, by their ownership
and control structures are considered biased in favour of
the governments in power.

Still, not a few media experts pick holes in BBC's standard
of reporting Africa, which they argue is well below the
internationally accepted professional standards, and could
put the corporation in trouble in Western societies, such
as the coverage of the 2003 Iraq war has shown.

The impression had been created that the BBC as a model
in Pubic Service Broadcasting enjoyed unfettered freedom
and independence.

But the report of the Lord Hutton inquiry into the suicidal
death of British weapons expert David Kelly last year after
he was named as the source of a controversial BBC report on
the Iraq war, has since shattered that myth.

It emerged from the inquiry that BBC's Andrew Gilligan had
based his report that the British government had "sexed up"
intelligence dossier on Iraq's weapons to justify the
US-led invasion, on a suspect interview with Kelly.

Lord Hutton, in his report, dismissed by critics as a
"white-wash," cleared Prime Minister Tony Blair's government
of any wrong doing, but descended heavily on the BBC
for failing to vet Gilligan's report before it was aired.

The corporation, apart from suffering the ignominy of being
made to apologise "unreservedly" to the government, its board
chair Gavyn Davies, as well as Director General Greg Dyke
and Gilligan resigned after Lord Hutton's stinging criticism.

But responding to a call by the National Union of Journalists
(NUJ) and the British Broadcasting Union, hundreds of BBC
workers staged a public protest against "political pressure
and interference" in the BBC's operations.

NUJ Secretary Jeremy Dear said the protest was the start of a
campaign to protect the independence and funding of the BBC
and the right to carry out investigative reporting.

Following Lord Hutton's report, the US and Britain have
since set up separate inquiries into apparent intelligence
"failures" in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, especially
after the resignation of former American chief weapons
inspector David Kay.

Kay, who spent some seven months with his estimated 1,000-strong
team combing all nooks and crannies of Iraq in search of weapons
of mass destruction, Washington's and London's justification for
the Iraq war, admitted no "smoking guns" had been found.

According to him, the contractions in intelligence information
"raised the possibility that the intelligence community had
been telling the White House one thing and the White House
had been hearing something else."

Nonetheless, Lord Hutton did not concern himself with details
of the intelligence dossier, or what the British government did
or did not do with it, or why Kelly apparently took his own life.
The retired Judge, instead, over-concentrated on BBC's editorial
management style, thereby raising the spectre of censorship,
which resulted in the senior resignations and the protest by the
corporation's workers.

To be sure, this is not the first time that the corporation
or the British media in general, would come under political
pressure over conflict reporting. But Lord Hutton's criticism,
arguably, has done the severest damage not only to the British
broadcasting giant, but press freedom as a whole.

Unlike in developing countries, where governments use
"crude or unrefined" methods of censorship such as closing
down publications or broadcasting stations, jailing and
sometimes even killing journalists, the "civilised
democratic governments" use the "subtle" but equally
deadly approach in censoring the media.

One of such methods in Britain is the "Lobby System,"
which binds parliamentary reporters to some unwritten
codes of reporting that tend to protect MPs, the
Parliament and the establishment.

Also, the Ministry of Defence in London often issued reporting
guidelines to editors, one of which at one stage, barred
television stations from showing the faces of Northern Ireland
Republican Army (IRA) leaders.

Part of the subtle censorship also required reporters to
"reference upwards" reports that touched on the sensitive
Northern Ireland conflict and the Falklands war of 1982.

<B>Usually, authorities, whether in democratic or authoritarian
regimes, censor the media in the name of national interest or
national security, even though government officials cannot
claim to be more patriotic than journalists.

It was part of this desire by politicians and the military
to control the media, especially in conflict situations, that
journalists were "embedded" within US-led Coalition fighting
troops during the 2003 Iraq war.</B>

Though the effectiveness of the embedding system vis-à-vis other
methods of war reporting remains to be seen, Lord Hutton through
his controversial one-sided report has reinforced the notion that
truth is the first casualty of war and also puts freedom of the
press and independence on the firing line.

The report has badly hurt the professional pride of the BBC,
especially the freedom and independence associated with its
reporting.

There is the danger too, that journalists in the corporation and
Britain as a whole may now become timid or over-cautious to
venture into investigative reporting, and therefore indulge in
self-censorship, an insidious type of censorship that is equally
injurious to the profession.

Another negative fall-out of the Hutton's report is that it could
become a bad example for developing countries, especially Africa,
with its huge BBC audience, and whose governments may now see the
development as an excuse for further media repression.

<B>The media, as the public watchdog, have a social responsibility
to expose corruption, mismanagement, rights violations and all
other ills in society, which government officials would rather
keep secret.

This is not to say that journalists are Angels. Like in any other
profession, journalists do make mistakes for which they must take
responsibility, and where recognised laws are infringed by
journalists, they must be held accountable.

However, while the government-media tension cannot be avoided, it
has been proven that censorship of any type or political pressure
and interference in media performances, whether overt or covert,
are unhelpful to democratic governance, the society and even
governments themselves.</B>

Copyright © 2004 PANA

lllll
QUOTATION:

"All of us may not live to see the higher accomplishments of an African
empire, so strong and powerful as to compel the respect of mankind, but we
in our lifetime can so work and act as to make the dream a possibility
within another generation"
-<html><A HREF="http://members.aol.com/GhanaUnion/afrohero.html">Ancestor
Marcus Mosiah Garvey <i>(1887 - 1940)</i></A></html>

llllllllll
 *  //\\//\\ unioNews Newsgroup //\\//\\   *
 * http://members.aol.com/GhanaUnion *
 *          We're One People         *
 *          Join the Chorus          *
 -    African Union Shall Succeed    -
 =====================================
A luta Continua!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/CGI/wa.exe?S1=gambia-l
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]

To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~