| Number 426 | April 24, 2009 |
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This Week: Pirates
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Greetings, I said that I was going to write about the military establishment this week, but the big news about pirates in Somalia was just too good an opportunity to pass up. It illustrates so well one of the more poorly-understood aspects of our media system that I decided to spend some time this week looking at the pirate story before I get to writing about the military. In a way it's all part of the same story, as the militarized nature of the U.S. Empire is a large part of the context that gives the pirate story meaning. This week's issue starts out with a piece about profit and media, a preface to understanding the pirate story. I think people have a general feeling that profit in some way distorts the news that our corporate media organizations offer to us every day. But how, exactly, does that work? After all, aren't many reporters and editors simply committed to providing us with the facts, in service to the public welfare? Of course they are. But an institutional problem goes beyond individual good intentions. Or bad intentions. So, to sum up, this week the Notes is an All Pirate Edition. Next week I hope to get back to the military theme. No promises this time! Contextually yours, Nygaard |
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The Somalians referred to as "pirates" in the U.S. media in recent weeks are called by some the "Volunteer Coast Guard of Somalia." So we see that now, early in the 21st Century, as in the "Golden Age" of piracy early in the 18th Century, pirates are viewed differently by different people. The reasons are explained in Marcus Rediker's 2004 book Villains of All Nations, Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Scholar Tim Sullivan of Cedar Valley College in Texas had this to say in his review of Chapters Seven and Eight of Rediker's book (the emphasis was in the original): "[These chapters] present ‘golden age' piracy as an early example of class warfare, pitting pirates against the emerging nation-state and the rise of capitalism. . . . The influence of powerful merchant companies on state politics becomes evident as Rediker explains how pirates had to be declared hostis humani generis (the common enemies of mankind). Piracy, he reminds us, was above all, a crime against property (specifically vessels of large merchant companies) and, therefore, against all property owners and law abiding citizens. Pirates were evil monsters, not heroes, as the Reverend Mather informed his parishioners, and any who sympathized with them were, themselves, sinners." So, in 1725 pirates were declared hostis humani generis. In 2009 we're told that "pirates are terrorists," which is the modern "common enemy of mankind." Hmmm... |
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Back in 2005 I wrote an essay called "How Propaganda Works: The Profit Factor." My main point in that essay was to explain one particular way in which the profit orientation of our major media shapes the news we get. Basically, I said that a profit-oriented media needs to attract and retain its desired audience. Since media organizations pay the bills by selling advertising, and advertisers need to reach consumers, this means that the desired audience of an advertising-based media organization will be consumers. And, I always add, the preferred consumers will not be just any old consumers, but will be the ones that have some money and are the most likely to spend it on their advertisers' products. One of the ways that media organizations succeed in building and maintaining relationships with its desired audience is by basing their stories on premises that are the most comfortable to the most people. This means sticking, by and large, to "conventional wisdom," which tends to be made up of the most "uncontroversial" ideas held by the largest number of people. This is so because the alternative—using challenging or unconventional premises upon which to base a news story—will induce in many people a dissonance that will tend to corrode the trust upon which every media organization relies. So editors and reporters who stay in the business for any length of time come to know—consciously or not—that they had better stay on well-traveled ground. Notice that "truth" doesn't really enter into the equation. The important thing is that most people have ideas about the right and natural "order of things"—which I call Deep Propaganda or the Propaganda ABCs—and media organizations want to reflect these pre-existing ideas. The legitimacy of these ideas is then tacitly affirmed by the repetition, and the cycle perpetuates itself. (For more on this, see Nygaard Notes # 314.) Beyond the upset that new or challenging ideas tend to cause in the target audience, such ideas have the additional disadvantage of requiring justification, which would take valuable time and/or space in the limited geography of the newspaper or news broadcast. All of this has been true for a hundred years or more. Here's how "The Father of Public Relations," Edward L. Bernays, put it in his 1928 book "Propaganda." Speaking about the motion picture (the mass media of his day), Bernays said that "Because pictures are made to meet market demands, they reflect, emphasize, and even exaggerate broad popular tendencies, rather than stimulate new ideas and opinions." A similar point was made 77 years later, by Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Speaking to the New York Times in 2005, he said: "Media coverage both shapes and reflects public opinion." Here's where people often get confused. Does the media shape public opinion? Or does it simply reflect the opinions that people already have? It's both, and my hope is that the following article about Somali pirates will help to illustrate exactly how this works. |
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A perfect example of the insidious way that profit shapes our daily news was provided on April 8th, when the U.S. media reported on "a riveting high-seas drama [in which] an unarmed American crew wrested control of their U.S.-flagged cargo ship from Somali pirates ... and sent them fleeing to a lifeboat with the captain as hostage." (Those are the words of the Associated Press.) Almost immediately one could see some familiar premises being used to shape the coverage of this story, with the result being that certain points were highlighted while other, equally important, points were rendered invisible. My state of Minnesota—specifically, my neighborhood of Cedar-Riverside in Minneapolis—has a huge population of Somalian immigrants, the largest population of Somalians in the U.S. That's the context in which the local newspaper, the Star Tribune, printed the following sentence on April 14th, 2009: "The pirate crisis . . . showed Somalia for what it is: A textbook definition of a ‘failed state,' whose lawlessness explains . . . why so many have eagerly chosen Minnesota over Mogadishu..." The U.S. media was filled with similar references during and immediately after the hostage-taking, including references to "the scourge of piracy," the claim that "Pirates are terrorists," and so forth. While I cannot condone the behavior of these so-called pirates, I can't help but notice the deafening silence in regard to what one analyst calls "the other piracy" which has remained almost unmentioned in the tsunami of coverage in the U.S. media of this "riveting" story. That other piracy is "the massive illegal foreign fishing piracy that has been poaching and destroying the Somali marine resources for the last 18 years following the collapse of the Somali regime in 1991." That's Kenyan journalist Mohamed Abshir Waldo speaking, referring to what is known as Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing. Waldo adds that "Another major problem closely connected with the IUUs and illegal fishing is industrial, toxic and nuclear waste dumping in both off-shore and on-shore areas of Somalia." The twin problems of IUU fishing and the dumping of toxic waste have caused untold suffering to unknown numbers of virtually defenseless Somalian fishermen and coastal residents. The Voice of America published a story in 2005 on "reports from northern Somalia of illnesses consistent with radiation sickness, including respiratory infections, mouth ulcers, abdominal hemorrhages and unusual skin diseases." The Agence France Presse news service reported at that time that "Somalia's government in exile [has] demanded an urgent probe" into these reports. None of this was deemed newsworthy by the U.S. media. According to Waldo, "The countries engaged [in the illegal practices] include practically all of southern Europe, France, Spain, Greece, UK.", and more. None of these European states are ever referred to in the West as "failed states," despite their past and current practice of exploiting and stealing from weaker nations around the world. Nor is that bleak term applied to the U.S., despite its "failure" exemplified by a long history of military aggression against sovereign states around the globe, from Iraq to Nicaragua to Vietnam. Not to mention the U.S.'s poisoning of the world economy, and its being the world's largest producer of carbon dioxide, and its having 50 million people uninsured, and so forth. Sticking to Familiar Ideas As I have followed the Somali piracy story in the past couple of weeks, it has occurred to me that the story provides an illuminating example of the way in which mass media both shapes and reflects public opinion in the complex fashion that I spelled out in the previous article. In this hostage rescue story the media, by and large, reported the crimes of the so-called "pirates" in vivid detail, engaging in fear-mongering—referring to "high-seas terror" and "failed states"—while ignoring the pattern of crimes from which the piracy was born. By doing so journalists as a group were doing exactly what the Father of Public Relations, Ed Bernays, said the mass media must do in order "to meet market demands." And that is to "reflect, emphasize, and even exaggerate broad popular tendencies." The "tendencies" upon which much (not all) of the reporting on the Somali pirate story relied include: 1. A tendency to racism, in which poor, largely dark-skinned people are identified as "pirates" and "terrorists" while more-affluent, largely "white" people are assumed to be nothing but innocent victims, if they are characterized by race at all, which they are typically not. (The crew of the U.S. ship was not entirely "white," by the way, but that doesn't change the racialized understanding of perpetrator and victim to which I here refer.) 2. A tendency to Eurocentrism, in which the victim/perpetrator dynamic is invariably viewed from the vantage point of the European West, where there are no "failed states", but only tearful reunions and heroic feats of military "precision killing" (that's the actual phrase used in an April 13th, 2009 NY Times report headlined "Obama Signals More Active Response to Piracy.") 3. A corollary of the previous tendency is the tendency of people in the more powerful nations to focus on threats to people like themselves. That is, threats to the powerful. To use a crude analogy, when a human is bitten by an insect it is nearly certain that action will be taken to address the threat. In contrast, when a human steps on a less-powerful insect the death will rarely be noticed by humans, much less addressed with action. In the current example, the "piracy" that threatens European shipping moves our President to say that "we have to ensure that those who commit acts of piracy are held accountable for their crimes." He doesn't say, and needn't say, that he is referring to one "piracy" only: that of the less-powerful people in the story. His silence helps perpetuate the invisibility of the piracy of the powerful. 4. A tendency to simplify and individualize human behavior. In this way of thinking, the explanation for "piracy" is that some people are simply evil. This is in contrast to a systems way of thinking which, while it may also condemn the behavior, would attempt to understand the behavior by considering context, history, and the possibility that the perpetrators may have some complex and comprehensible motivations for their criminal behavior. A good example of how this might apply to our understanding of pirates comes from the work of Marcus Rediker (see sources for further reading elsewhere in this issue.) The key to understanding the news coverage that we have seen on the Somali Pirate story is to remember that the driving force behind the modern market-based news organization is the need to reach the largest number of the consumers that are desired by advertisers. The fear of alienating those consumers has an insidious effect on the ideas and opinions that are distributed, both consciously and unconsciously, as part of the news "product." The desires and intentions of individual journalists are of little importance in this dynamic, since the bottom line is this: The news corporations that best "meet market demands" by best "reflecting, emphasizing, and even exaggerating broad popular tendencies" will be the ones that survive in the marketplace. The organizations that consistently rock the ideological boat will not thrive, and will likely not survive. It's not a conspiracy. It's an unavoidable consequence of the profit orientation of the modern media industry. |
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Here are a few articles and essays that provide a little context for the recent—and, I suspect, ongoing—story about Somalian pirates: 1. "We're Being Lied to About Pirates," by Johann Hari, Independent UK. Posted April 13, 2009. 2. "‘Toxic Waste' behind Somali Piracy," by Najad Abdullahi, posted on the Al Jazeera English website on Saturday, October 11, 2008. 3. "The Two Piracies in Somalia: Why the World Ignores the Other?" by Mohamed Abshir Waldo, Journalist/Consultant 4. The United Nations issued a report on the washing up of toxic waste on the Somali Coast in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami in December of 2004. That 12-page report, with the boring title "NATIONAL RAPID ENVIRONMENTAL DESK ASSESSMENT – SOMALIA" can be found online at ReliefWeb. Click on "Full Report" at the bottom of the page. |
