Manufacturing dissent

The touchiness in the U.S. administration and press about media freedoms abroad appears a bit far-fetched and holier-than-thou.

Ever since the end of the Second World War, the United States has taken itself mighty seriously as the champion and enforcer a outrance of the freedom of information and the press across the world. Already in 1946 Assistant Secretary of State William Benton was declaring that the State Department plans to do everything within its power along political or diplomatic lines to break down the artificial barriers to the expansion of private American news agencies, magazines, motion pictures and other media of communications throughout the world. Freedom of the Pressand freedom of exchange of information generallyis an integral part of our foreign policy.

What those political lines were became clear enough during the Reagan years when the U.S. quit UNESCO in a huff over the demand from the emerging and developing nations for a New World Information and Communications Order (NWICO), as codified by the McBride Commission report, which sought to upend the one-way information flow from the north to the south. And the diplomatic lines resorted to were often of the gun-boat variety and were impatient with social and cultural differences which resisted U.S. media consumerist fare.

The crusade was as disingenuous as it was unilateral because it really was more about prising open unwilling markets to the business of American media than about any ideologically inspired democratic concern for freedom of the press per se. It sought to hold the world, by force or persuasion, in awe of an idealised-Americanised holy grail of free speech and expression. The short shrift these noumenal concepts got in the socialist camp did not help matters on that side of the Cold War either, and the razing of the Berlin Wall at the end of the 1980s had as much to do with the allure of the free market world peddled by the media, and the consequent revolution of rising expectations, as the dogma-ridden leadership and bureaucracy of the East Bloc.

Around the same time, Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann were giving us a reality check of the American media by pointing to the collusion of the state and the media market in manufacturing consent, particularly in matters of U.S. foreign policy. They went on to reveal the selective and nationalistically self-serving nature of media evangelism of the Freedom House variety, which abets U.S. arrogance, arbitrariness and intervention across the world, all in the name of protecting imaginary and omnibus freedoms. The freedom charade continued as the U.S., as the sole superpower, its head in the stratosphere, strode into the new globalised epoch. Even as they have marginalised Chomsky, arguably the tallest public intellectual alive in the country, as an uncomfortable, albeit truthful, naysayer, the mainstream media cannot help continuing to live up to his characterisation of them as a collective aberration, reporting the world in their image of it, rather than as it is. It is as if they would consensually will into existence an alternative reality and live by it. And if they kept at it long enough, perhaps the rest of the world would turn deferentially, even reverentially, to these shores with the aspirational chant thy mediadom come. That would be another triumph for U.S. exceptionalism, which, incidentally, the Republicans have been touting this election season as a core American value that, they charge, the Democrats have lost sight of.

But the knight errant smugness is beginning to wear thin as the U.S. finds that it is itself at the receiving end of some discomfiting media liberties. WikiLeaks is perhaps as embarrassing to the U.S. for the disclosures of diplomatic faux pas and lethal covert operations as for the gumption the man behind it all poses to that peculiarly American divine right theory of media championship. If the U.S. administration hoped to make an example of Julian Assangehaving put away its own soldier and whistle-blower, Bradley Manning, for what could be a long, long spell in jailthey were almost there, with British courts ruling that Assange must be deported to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning in a case of sexual misconduct. From Sweden he would be extradited to the U.S. to face prosecution under a slew of U.S. laws, including possibly the Espionage Act. Or so went the plot, as suspected by Assange and as speculated in the media. That in itself would have been, and could still be if Assanges fears of a witch-hunt against him are not unfounded, an extra-extraordinary rendition of the type WikiLeaks helped bring to shocked public notice.

Script goes awry

But the script went awry when Ecuador inserted itself, as a U.S. spokeswoman inelegantly described it, into the picture and offered Assange asylum in its embassy in London. The disquiet over this development and the ensuing standoff with the British police takes the form of two constant caveats which qualify their reportage in much of the U.S. media: remember that Assange is possibly a rapist-fugitive from justice; and dont forget that the socialist President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, has a sullied record when it comes to media freedom.

The devastating public interest impact and implications of WikiLeaks do not, in any way, become extenuating factors for Assange in the cases against him of possible rape or molestation or non-consensual sex involving two women in Sweden. He must answer for himself and face the legal consequences, if any. At the same time, to seek to flag this grand inquisitor of imperialist power play, this supraeven if maverickjournalist as a byword for sex crime instead in daily news notice comes across as pathetically below the belt. Select newspapers which made roaring headlines week after week from the tranches of cables he provided them and which continue to cite wikileaked information in sundry news contexts seem to have, for reasons not fully clear, all but forsaken him. Assanges stated fears about what is in store for him if he travels to Sweden may well be a convenient ploy to evade punishment under the law of that land. The one sure way to find out would be to guarantee that should he go to Sweden he would not be repatriated onward to the U.S. But oddly, neither Sweden nor the U.S. are willing to assure him this. The U.S., which, everyone knows, holds the key to this tangle, pretends to look the other way.

The mandatory prefix socialist to Rafael Correas name (for that matter to any known name of that political persuasion) fixes him and sets him apart as the other. To boot, or true to type for a socialist, he harasses the media in Ecuador, where he has shut down 19 radio stations and a TV channel, whips up popular passion against what he considers excesses of journalism, and has won a high-stake libel suit against a columnist, Emilio Palacio, whom he then pardoned and who now lives in Miami and seeks political asylum in the U.S. Correas side of the story, which suggests bringing to heel a section of the media under corporate control, and the historical context of media-instigated coups in Latin America by Miami-based dissidents of the type that briefly displaced Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 2002 are not part of this narrative. Be that as it may, and without cutting Correa any slack for his attitude to the media in his country, how this takes anything away from his bold move to offer Assange asylum, even if it is only to cock a snook at the West, is never made clear but left hanging in the air as a vague and sinister insinuation.

Foreign affairs coverage in the average U.S. mainstream media now seems as much about manufacturing dissent as manufacturing consent. Apart from the Assange imbroglioand Syria, which of course is the news happening placetwo other hobby horses of the season are Iran and Egypt, which keep popping out of their assigned slots. That Iran was able to successfully host the summit meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement received frowns all round and was seen as some kind of an upset victory for Tehran. The tenor of the reporting leading up to the event and the incremental editorialising ratcheted up dissent and dissuasion. Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy must boycott the summit; his visit to China was bad enough. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon must not go, unless he used the trip to tell Mahmoud Ahmedinejad & Co. off to their faces. It was difficult to tell whether it was the Washington administration or the American free press speaking and whether U.S.-led sanctions against Iran extended to its fourth estate.

As it became clear that both Morsy and Ban Ki-moon would attend, there was even a note of sour grapescoming from a columnist of no less a stature than Thomas Friedman. By the way, he asked in his New York Times column titled Morsis Wrong Turn, what is the Non-Aligned Movement anymore? and went on to cite a foreign policy specialist at Johns Hopkins echoing the same doubt: Non aligned against what and between whom? There is no communist bloc today. The main division in the world is between democratic and undemocratic countries. So you generally got the drift. It did not matter that the 120 countries which participated, the biggest group in the 193-member U.N. General Assembly, thought otherwise.

Orchestration of consent and dissent

Morsy redeemed himself somewhat in the eyes of this coercive press by attacking Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his speech, and Ban Ki-moon salvaged his reputation by talking tough on the Iranian nuclear programme. But the orchestration of consent and dissent, like alternating flux and reflux, continues to inform coverage of nuclear weapons-capable Israels victimhood vis-a-vis Irans (peaceful says Iran, cant be, say its detractors) nuclear agenda. Not all of this is driven by the Zionist lobby or the state-media nexus. There is a genuine journalistic crisis of a weltanschauung mismatch, which shows up as biased or predisposed coverage. The fairest-minded reporting can look skewed when it is stuck in a paradigm warp.

The case for perspectival flexibility to engage more equitably with the rest of the world apart, there are prickly issues cropping up at home that become, in the persisting war on terror climate, systemic in nature and test the limits of the vaunted freedoms of the First Amendment. On the heels of Bradley Manning, whose virtual heroic presence in the WikiLeaks saga must worry the Pentagon no end, came another soldier, Matt Bissonette, who broke ranks with his alternative account of the raid at Abbotabad by the Navy SEALS team, of which he was a member, and the killing of Osama bin Laden. Threatening noises from the Defence Department did not deter him or his publishers from releasing No Easy Day under the pseudonym Mark Owen.

The realm of the social media, too, has come under pressure. Twitter has been repeatedly ordered by the courts to hand over to the Justice Department data of posts by WikiLeaks supporters and Occupy Wall Street protesters. The company itself blotted its copybook when it took a British journalist working for it to task for his tweets criticising the coverage of the Olympics by NBC, Twitters corporate partner for the event. Earlier, Yahoo had handed over information that compromised a Chinese dissident and journalist, in 2002 and 2005 respectively, and led to their convictions. In this altered context, the touchiness in the U.S. administration and press about media freedoms abroad appears a bit far-fetched and holier-than-thou. Some of that dissonance between media speak and practice was apparent when the U.S. reacted to the recent Indian clampdown on social media to contain rumour-mongering feeding into an ethnic strife. The State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nulands observation, .. as the Indian government seeks to preserve security, we are urging them also to take into account the importance of freedom of expression in the online world, could, as pertinently and gratuitously (with just U.S. replacing India), be a message from the Indian Foreign Office to Washington.

Sashi Kumar is a journalist, film-maker and media thinker and initiator who launched the Asianet TV channel and subsequently founded, and chairs, the not-for-profit public trust Media Development Foundation, which runs the Asian College of Journalism. He can be contacted at sashi.acj@gmail.com