Мэдыі ў посткамуністычных грамадзтвах: аб’ектыўная інфармацыя супраць ідэалягічных скажэньняў
Матэрыялы міжнароднай канфэрэнцыі, Менск, 18-19 кастрычніка 2002 г.
Кніга па англійску - Mass media: a mechanism for maintaining and ensuring a democratic society
Kjell Olaf JENSEN, President, Norwegian P.E.N.
The responsibility of a free press
In many parts of the world, the Scandinavian countries are looked upon as models of democracy and human rights.
To a certain degree, this picture is correct: We are a happy corner of the world, maybe partly because no major powers seem to be very interested in what is going on in our small societies, maybe also because not very much is really going on. And on this year’s survey made by the UN, Norway figures as the one country in the world where living conditions are the best, followed by Canada, Sweden, Denmark and the USA.
Still, even our people did learn, some time ago, that political freedom, freedom of expression and other human rights were something one had to fight for. But this was 60 years ago, and it concerned my parents’ generation. Today, this seems to a certain degree to be forgotten knowledge. We are happy, so why care? The obvious answer to this question, “Why care?”, is formulated by the Finnish 19th century poet Runeberg, in a beautiful poem entitled “Paavo, the Peasant”. Paavo is a poor peasant with only a small field of rye somewhere in the Finnish forests. One year, the rye seems to yield a beautiful crop; but just before harvesting time, there comes a hailstorm destroying most of the corn. And Paavo tells his wife: Grind 50 % pine rind into the bread flour, so that we shall survive the coming winter. Every year, this scenario is repeated. Each year, the crop looks great, but then some calamity occurs — frost, hurricane, thunderstorm, destroying the rye; and every year, Paavo tells his wife to grind 50 % pine rind into the bread flour, in order to survive the coming winter.
But finally, one year, everything goes well, and Paavo is able to make a magnificent rye harvest. Now at last, we can make real rye flour for our bread, says his wife. No, says Paavo, you just grind 50% pine rind into the flour, for behold: Our neighbour’s field lies there, frozen, and he needs bread to survive the coming winter.
The second answer to the question “Why care?” when you live in an idyllic society, is less altruistic and maybe more realistic. If we do not maintain a continuous fight for our right to freedom of expression, it will die; a freedom, which is not used continually, will get lost. An emblematic illustration for this is the famous Lutheran priest Martin Niemöller from Nazi Germany and his laconic remarks: “First, they took the communists,” said Niemöller, “and I did not protest, since I am not a communist. Then, they abducted the Jews, but I did not say anything, for I am not a Jew. Afterwards, they arrested the catholics, but why should I bother, I am not a catholic? And when they came to get hold of me, there was, strangely enough, nobody left to protest”.
The Norwegian government established some years ago a commission under the leadership of the former President of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, history professor Francis Sejersted, whose task it should be to reformulate the constitutional article guaranteeing the right to freedom of expression, which is article 100 in Norway’s almost 200 years old Constitution. The commission should find out whether or not there was any reason to change the wording of Article 100. They arrived at a conclusion which was dangerously erroneous according to my view, namely to leave unchanged the old idea that the right to freedom of expression should be granted by the Parliament since it is essential for the maintenance of a free society. But if this is the case, the Parliament may also, any time, decide that the right to freedom of expression is no longer essential for a free society and abolish it. Meanwhile, if this right is defined constitutionally by what is useful for society and not by some sort of divine or natural law like the French Revolution’s Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, it would not be possible for any given Parliament to abolish it.
The Norwegian Commission for the Freedom of Expression, as this commission was called, also stressed the importance of having a continuous debate. The debate, if we want to keep our right to freedom of expression and a real democracy, is viewed to go on in what the commission called “the vast public space”, in which the whole population has a right — and a duty — to participate. This space, or this permanent forum of debate, is defined, managed and governed mostly by what we, a little derogatively, call the mass media, which puts an extremely heavy responsibility on these media, both on the written press and on radio and television. (Maybe on the Internet users as well, but since Internet is neither edited nor published by anyone, the responsibility in this case falls on every individual user of the medium.)
So far, everything seems quite logical and without problems. And yet, when we take a closer look at the media in our free society, we immediately feel that something is very wrong.
I come more or less directly from the International Book Fair in Frankfurt, where there were, as always, interesting and essential debates all over the place for a week, also concerning the right to freedom of expression and how to conserve a free society. Little of all this was reflected in our Norwegian media, and mainly in the smaller newspapers, magazines and early morning and late night programs on the radio. One of our largest newspapers, priding itself of being a cultural paper caring for the right to freedom of expression on which it lives, had three journalists at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Excellent. But these journalists spent three days on following one Norwegian publisher around everywhere, reporting on all his doings. The reason for this peculiar interest in a small publisher was that he had just published a book written by the Norwegian King’s young daughter, the Princess of Norway. Her Royal Highness described in this book her marriage ceremony — an event that had already been most plentifully covered by the media at the time. This was seen as more important than all other events going on at the Book Fair.
Some years ago, Moris Farhi visited Oslo. Some of you have to know Moris Farhi — he is a very interesting novelist and essayist. And at that time he also was the Chairman of International PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee. He is a Jew, born in Turkey, half Greek, with family roots in Egypt and Lebanon, living in London as a British citizen. Briefly speaking, an international figure of the highest interest for “the vast public space”. We arranged interviews by several interested journalists. But in some of the main Norwegian newspapers we met a problem. Yes, the editors saw the point and understood why they ought to be interested in. The problem was, however, that Monica Lewinsky was visiting Oslo at the same time, promoting the book about her eventual relationship with then president Bill Clinton. So, all the journalists were busy with a person much more interesting and important than poor Moris Farhi. Television, both public and private: same thing.
This begins to resemble the society described by Aldous Huxley in his famous novel from 1934: Brave New World. In Huxley’s society, no repression is necessary, because everybody is conditioned to think that the existing society is wonderful, and that they all are extremely lucky to live in just this society and to have just this position in this society. All literary classics, with Shakespeare as the foremost example, are banished: “We are not interested in such things”. Instead, citizens play stupid ball games and drug themselves. The American professor Neil Postman approached the same question several years ago, by calling his most well-known book We Are Amusing Ourselves to Death. In this book professor states, among other things, that American university students today are not able to concentrate their attention for more than 20 minutes at a time, this being the average time between two publicity spots in most American television channels.
In Aldous Huxley’s society, there are no expressions worthy of the name. And what does the right to freedom of expression mean, in a society where there are no real expressions because all meaningful expressions are deemed to be “unnecessary” or not to be funny or “cool” enough?
This is where the activities of many of the larger media in the West may be bringing us today. This is what may happen when the media do not know their responsibility in a free society, namely to be a watchdog for the society. This may happen, if they do not scrutinise the society continually and put it under continuous debate, as the Danish literary critic Georg Brandes said more than 100 years ago. In the post-communist societies, you know from personal experience what George Orwell’s society from his novel 1984 would look like. Today, we have to guard our media against the danger of falling into Aldous Huxley’s trap, amusing ourselves to death.
Do you remember Homer’s episode about Scylla and Carybdis, from the Odyssee?
Alexander PATUPA, Belarusian P.E.N.-Center, Center for Studies of the Future
Mass Media and Controlling Mechanisms
A social organism can count on a successful evolution only on condition of being exposed to a powerful controlling and correcting mechanism. In other words, one needs to detect errors on time and correct the behavior promptly in order to scale down their consequences. Obviously, the traditional branches of power play a huge role in shaping and functioning of the controlling mechanism within the society. The famous system of checks and balances between the parliament, the government and the judiciary is an important element of this mechanism, which ensures not only the viability of democracies, but also their high efficiency at the background of all the other, more rigid, state system models. However, in highly-developed yet complexly-organized societies, the above mentioned mechanism is being considerably strengthened, while its concentration in the field of the state gives rise to temptation of creating a security belt around those at power. A state, which uses controlling and correcting levers and prevents everybody else from having access to them, risks to turn from the society’s steward sub-system into something self-valuable, which, of course, clears up the way for different dictatorial scenarios. It is worth stressing that in the span of the twentieth century, all the countries with now-flourishing democracies faced this problem. Some of the countries even had to live through all the consequences of the collapses of totalitarian dictatorships.
The modern western civilization found a brilliant way out of this situation through a certain denationalization of some controlling functions. They, in fact, passed a considerable part of those functions to non-governmental structures. This, in my opinion, outstanding discovery of the second half of the twentieth century provided for both the intensification of progressive evolution and the strengthening of liberal and democratic tendencies. One can say even more pathetically: it brought democracy to a new quality level. It was this very process which, along with the massive introduction of electronic information systems, allowed the media to become what they currently are, and to head to their global future. It is important, however, to understand several essential aspects of this new situation.
Firstly, media are chiefly an intermediary amplifier, used by different social groups. In this regard, for instance the fourth estate is realized in close interaction with the fifth power: analysts. The latter circumstance plays a special role. A sharp strengthening of the modern mass media is connected with electronic systems of relaying and receiving information. In the epoch of print media, people could receive only the yesterday’s or the-day-before-yesterday’s news from foreign lands. Radio and especially television allowed them to feel themselves present at the site of events however faraway they are developing. Media have come from the past into the future and have existed in the real-time mode. Intensive interaction with analysts allowed the media to penetrate into the future. Viewers and readers are of course interested to know what happened earlier and what is happening now. But, their curiosity grow a hundred times stronger, if there appears a possibility of looking into tomorrow. What starts to work here is a certain dominant in our social and cultural genes, which allow us to design prompt scenarios of the future. This is our major specific advantage that turned Homo sapiens into “the king of nature”. And now, in the “choice pressure” epoch, this very skill helps us in our decision-making in the situation, when the social system has sharply become more complex.
Media engage with party and union leaders, scholars from different fields, business interests, human rights activists and religious figures. In other words, all those who want to make their contribution to the implementation of the controlling functions and to raise at the same time their rating in the political, scientific or any other market. Every concrete medium, of course, may head towards a certain self-sufficiency by including, say, serious analytical groups into their structure and/or reflecting constantly the views of a certain party. And what is more (many believe what is worse!), they head towards reflecting extremely transparently the views of their founders and/or permanent donors. However, the latter is especially likely to narrow the audience in our pluralistic century. The primitively designed suggestive machines lose a thinking consumer very quickly.
The problem of independence of the media is closely connected with the latter. Strictly speaking, I am talking about the independence of journalists, which can emerge only in a sufficiently developed market situation with a great number of competing mass media in place. In such situation the demand for good professionals appears to be higher than the one for the product by straightforward and importunate media owners. It is understandable that under the total state monopoly of, say, the Soviet type, independence is simply incompatible with the legal professional work. However, even in a non-monopoly situation, the state-owned media are, in my opinion, the atavism, which still exists in a number of highly developed countries in the form of state-owned television and radio channels. But, the problem here lies in the specific assessment of electronic media as an informational weapon, which I will touch upon in a greater detail below.
Unfortunately, the issue of state-owned media is often linked in this country with the problem of state financial support. It is assumed to be a common knowledge that when supporting this or another mass medium, the government is expected to have directly or indirectly at least some of the founder’s rights and influence decisively on the chief editor’s policy. However, this is nothing but a typical delusion of neo-Bolsheviks, who sincerely consider themselves as sponsors of not only the loyal media, but the whole nation, in general. In a civilized sense of the word, financial support to the media is a budget line in the framework of the law. Such situation looks justified, when an authoritative public commission, with bureaucrats playing only their assigned technical and bookkeeping roles, controls distribution of such financial support.
Finally, it is important to realize distinctly the dangers coming from the media. Simply speaking, it is important to understand that there should be general rules of how to handle weapons, including the informational one. The universe is organized in such a way that substance and energy parameters of the cudgel as the instrument of labor and as the combat arm are the same. One and the same carrier rocket is able to deliver a communication satellite on the orbit and a megaton-strong nuclear warhead onto the neighboring continent.
Media are the most powerful and already global suggestive generator. The human being’s psychological defense from suggestion (so to say, the anti-suggestive immunity) is not designed to endure such a powerful energy of influence. As for the pace of necessary adaptation, this question is poorly studied yet.
At the same time, the fact of psychological influence on human beings by information organized in a certain way is obvious. A deliberately composed news video row, for instance, can produce a remarkable influence on the mood and even health conditions of viewers.
The role of future-oriented programming — the influence on television audience (readership, too!) by well-prepared scenarios of developments of given events — is studied considerably less. The beaten-off example — an advertising sermon (all who believe in my words will be saved in paradise, yet those who doubt them will be doomed to judgment and eternal hell, etc.) — has still been attractive to a huge number of people, who sacrifice their property and put their faiths to religious commercial cheaters. There are certain problems with the modern products of think tanks, too. The mass audience is naturally not always prepared to perceive concentrated system scenarios. Roughly speaking, similarly not every human being can and is ready to cope with the influence from a powerful energy source. If we take into account, that with the increased pace of civilization development, the role of think tanks and the forecasts generated by them is swiftly increasing, while the media will demonstrate more and more actively the models of tomorrow’s world system, one can imagine that future-oriented programming represents one of the most serious challenges of the twenty-first century.
In its extremely narrow projection, the problem of informational weapon is linked with a quite sensitive topic of the freedom of speech in the field of personal or group criticism, or, if you wish, the freedom of critical word. In principle, one could use here a popular rule: “your freedom ends five inches off my nose’s tip”. However, the problem is that with the vulgar application of this rule, the media would not be possible at all to carry out its controlling and correcting functions, which are useful for the society. One should clearly distinguish here the critical statements against a subject as a physical entity and a subject as an institutionalized person. State and public figures, renowned writers, singers, etc. have the role of the latter in this case. In other words, they are those who have deliberately taken up a special social mission and who are associated, to a large extent, with a certain social institution. This measure represents the most serious problem. Formally, any criticism can produce a negative influence on personal image and lower its rating. Simply speaking, it can defame its honor and dignity. But, the lack of criticism is even more dangerous. And, the higher status a person has, the greater danger exists. The person also is expected to sacrifice a part of its private life. Such is the payment for being able to rise up the hierarchical scale. But, the question emerges: what part? How can one draw an optimal border, beyond which something completely private and absolutely untouchable begins. This problem will continue to keep lawyers busy for a long period of time, and the solution to this problem yet lies in the field of moral competence of each concrete journalist. It could be good to simply turn to the deep Christian idea: do not do anything to your neighbor what you would not want for yourself. But, it is very difficult to design a person, which stands far away from us. It is always easier to consider it to be an aggressive alien and deal with it in accordance with the reaction of glands and the sum of the fee. Of course, very few VIPs here are able not to use their whole arsenal of measures, including their own powers, for the purpose of allegedly necessary defense.
The majority of the views presented above presuppose the existence of a civilized situation of a democratic society with its shaped and progressing political and legal space.
Under another scenario of the societal development, when a setback or a backward phase transition to totalitarism takes place, many positions change their sense. The state is advancing, and the islands of independence are going under water.
The state-owned media along with the state’s analysts are openly used as a one-target informational weapon. They are simply being turned into a supplement to the real power, which can be described as something like a squared trunk instead of branches, very convenient for being “decorated” with barbed wire and bars. Society is being turned into a voiceless servant of the government, deprived of any rights. And, the corresponding media become the means of mass idiotization, while their analytical partners under the guidance of ideological front soldiers (not any longer the analysts) become the crematories of the future…
Belarus is a concrete example. This is the country, which demonstrates with nearly a laboratory accuracy the restoration of many elements of a totalitarian society. The accumulated experience may serve as the basis for a manual about the role of mass media in the fight for preserving the controlling and correcting mechanisms, or basically, for a civilized future of the country.
The above mentioned mechanisms had been thoroughly dismantled in the state system of Belarus by late 1996, when the president found himself free from any control by the legislature and the judiciary. Opposition parties were forced out from the power structures together with the transformed Supreme Soviet into the National Assembly, which represented nobody. The remaining deputies represented less than 40% of constituencies. The third-sector structures — the non-state media led by the Belarusian Association of Journalists, the Belarusian P.E.N., human rights and entrepreneur groups, and think tanks — attempted to take up the controlling functions. These four groups along with the opposition parties and independent trade unions, which also found themselves within the third sector, made up the nucleus of active resistance. The independent media, being a intermediary amplifier, which worked for all mentioned groups, found themselves in an extremely dangerous situation, not only in connection with the direct pressure from the authorities, including the forced closure of several publications, criminal prosecution of journalists, etc. Over the past several years, both the internal and — what is especially curious! — foreign financial support have been monotonously decreasing. A strange logic of several solid donating foundations led to the situation, when many influential non-state media permanently found themselves in the situation “between life and death”. The operation of their editorial offices in the course of considerable periods of time turned into a heroic deed for the sake of supreme aims.
Well, the logic is not that surprising, if we take into account that in the process of democracy teaching in Belarus, the specific gravity of fourchetology always remarkably outweighed a serious analysis of the local situation. Due to the lack of serious model-building (and even an order for it), teachers would often successfully take use of extremely irresponsible and incompetent consultations by either their trustees or the “white noise”, which was produced during numerous allegedly expertise-based roundtable meetings.
Meanwhile, owing to their special role the independent media should accumulate the sufficient internal and external support. The weakening of the independent media leads to the collapse of the whole inner system of distribution of the controlling mechanisms. In a more global sense, it leads to the destruction of the demarcation line of the world democratic community, which the structures of civil society in Belarus have yet managed to maintain.