Howard W. French
In the United States, in the space of little more than one week, the long-time heads of three major television news programs all stepped down, two of them fully of their own accord, and the other because of a political and journalistic scandal involving him and his brother, the recent former governor of New York.
The ins and outs of television news programming in the U.S. might seem on the surface to be a strange topic for a column that focuses by design on international affairs. But the case will be made here that the ongoing and worsening crisis in American democracy is, to some serious extent, a crisis of its journalism, too, and none more than television news, which is where most of the country’s citizens get their information.
Deserts are nutrition-poor environments, where the variety of life forms is restricted by a harsh climate and lack of irrigation. American television news has long been a kind of desert in many regards, but it has grown steadily narrower in focus and more predictable in its shallow left-right argumentation. And at least in terms of one of the leading networks—Fox News—it has also become the willing and even eager purveyor of known and often toxic falsehoods aimed at stoking the Republican Party’s political constituency.
This week, proof emerged that Fox News hosts had proffered advice to then-President Donald Trump via his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, home to the U.S. Congress. Dropping whatever limited pretense of journalistic independence they had until then tried to present, personalities from that network sent panicked messages during the assault to Meadows urging him to convince Trump to tell his rioting supporters to go home. The revelation was major news, but over the 24 hours after the story broke this week, one would have watched in vain for Fox to even broach the subject, never mind weigh in on the serious conflicts of interest involved in collusive behavior between a president and the supposed Fourth Estate.
The area of the TV news business that has declined most dramatically during my life in journalism, though, has not been domestic coverage, as truly awful as it can be. What has almost entirely disappeared from the airwaves is any kind of purposeful or energetic coverage of the world. Regular world news segments have long ago disappeared from most programs, and viewers of primetime news in the U.S. can go days on end without learning a single interesting thing about what is happening elsewhere on the planet.
The severely provincial character of the U.S. news business is tremendously costly to the country, both in terms of its domestic politics and its role as a global power with interests—obvious and subtle—in every corner of the world. My modest starting proposal for a solution, which I have little realistic hope of seeing realized, is that the three networks that just announced the departure of highly paid stars—CNN, MSNBC and Fox—replace the traditional, heavily U.S.-centered shows on these outlets with new, hour-long, daily programs dedicated to international reporting.
The severely provincial character of the U.S. news business is tremendously costly to the country, both in terms of its domestic politics and its role as a global power.
With the limited and occasional exception of references to Europe, Americans are not used to weighing the experiences of others in forming their views of how their own society functions or what kinds of options exist for dealing with social and political problems. Two examples from other parts of the world help illustrate my point. When I covered Japan for half a decade at the turn of the century, then-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi urged the people of his nation to embrace openness to the outside world, arguing that every major crisis Japan has experienced in its long history has been related to self-inflicted isolation.
The other example is China, a country I covered for several years following my assignment in Japan. China then was relatively open by the standards of the present, even if the state maintained a sophisticated censorship apparatus and enforced strict limits on some kinds of debate. Since then, however, China has become much more closed, sharply limiting the circulation of ideas and points of view from abroad, increasingly enforcing a state-sanctioned interpretation of history, and strongly ratcheting up censorship, conformity and propaganda.
This is a serious problem for the rest of the world, because to the extent that a great power like China is closed to the views, theories and assessments of others, and often even to basic facts, it becomes all the more difficult for other nations to engage in open and fruitful discussion with it. This is a problem for China, too, though, because a country that cuts itself off from outside experiences, currents of thought and sources of information is an impoverished society.
And here is where this column returns to the United States.
On issues ranging from battling COVID-19 and protecting the environment, to addressing global migration, the international crisis of democracy, the renewed threat of fascism in the West and the global challenge of racism, American television viewers receive next to nothing by way of serious information. The same is true when it comes to the reality of how people in the so-called Global South—including Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia—live. They also learn nothing from societies that, though reflexively covered by the U.S. media only in terms of the putative menace they present to Americans, nonetheless have something to offer in the way of potential solutions to shared problems.
Here, China is by far the most important example. There are plenty of things worth criticizing about that country, but when that is all the U.S. news media does—rather than also taking serious note of its achievements, say, in reducing poverty or building public infrastructure quickly and on a transformative scale—consumers of the news are not just being disserved, they are being cheated.
Because of habits like these, Americans, who are already somewhat isolated from the rest of the world geographically, tend more and more to see their problems as being sui generis and self-contained, and this impedes clear thinking on many fronts. Understanding that most problems are in fact broad, human problems, rather than peculiar to oneself or one’s country, helps relieve a great deal of fruitless and sometime dangerous moral panic. Opening one’s mind to the methods adopted and solutions attempted by others offers the best hope of managing these challenges in more productive, and often more cooperative ways
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