1995 Global Cultural Diversity Conference Proceedings, Sydney
Culture, Education and Language
Culture and Control of the Media
Ms Ratih Hardjono
Foreign Correspondent for Kompas, Indonesia
Cultural diversity is not new. It is as old as the human race itself. What is new is that this cultural diversity is now almost instantly available to television viewers all over the world.
For hundreds, even thousands of years, voyagers and explorers have brought back stories of different kinds of people living according to different kinds of culture in other parts of the world. But the circulation of information was slow and mainly among elites.
Today, as the world of telecommunications becomes more global and sophisticated, television images are beamed anywhere twenty four hours a day. Television crews travel around the world self-contained, not having to rely on any existing telecommunication structure to get their pictures out. As television is a very popular medium, this has meant that the world's awareness of different places and different cultures has increased dramatically. Suddenly, to ordinary people sitting at home, cultural diversity has become a part of their every day life.
In Australia this is considered a good thing. I am not so sure that from the point of view of people living in circumstances of cultural conflict in poor countries, in other words the subject of this television coverage, it is.
In Australia the term cultural diversity is taken for granted as enriching cultural and economic life. Diversity in Australia did not happen at once. First, there was Aboriginal culture, then Anglo-Saxon culture, then continental European culture, now Asian and other cultures.
This process of layering will no doubt continue and it will no doubt continue to be (except at the beginning for the Aborigines) mostly peaceful, because immigrants come to Australia of their own free will. When they arrive, most are prepared to adhere to Australian ways while retaining their own culture.
This kind of cultural diversity is constructive and it is making Australia a strong and interesting place. This is what a liberal democratic system can create and nurture diversity. But it is not always the case in other parts of the world.
In some places, cultures are made to live together due to colonial inheritance. Indonesia is one example. So far, except for difficulties in Timor and Aceh, unity has prevailed over diversity without an outbreak of real conflict. There are many other examples, but I will mention Nigeria, which I visited recently, because it is similar in some ways to Indonesia, but not so peaceful. The Biafra war in the 1970s was a serious conflict and there is still bickering among the four major ethnic groups (Xhosa, Fulani, Yoruba and Ibo) over which tribe should rule. There is a tribal conflict brewing in Nigeria and, unlike Indonesia, consensus and cooperation seem to be an alien concept.
Another form of enforced cultural unity was the old Soviet Union where a variety of diverse cultures were forced to live next to each other but at the same time separate from each other. It is obvious to anyone travelling now in Central Asia that the five new republics there are facing the rise of Islamic Fundamentalism, at least partly because they had been forced for seventy years or more to look to communism and Moscow and away from their religious roots and their cultural heritage. The Islamic culture among the different ethnic groups in Central Asia is part of the golden and glorious days when the silk route was the superhighway of that era, carrying a stream of economic and cultural activity. Their experience during the Soviet occupation was both painful and humiliating and they see Islam now as both the way back to the past and forward to the future.
East versus West
There is another sort of cultural diversity globally, which has always been with us but was frozen during the "Cold War". It is the division between the East and the West. In the old days the term used was the North and the South. Today this dichotomy is slowly reemerging in some parts of the world.
Roughly speaking the East is equated with terms like ancient, sometimes "primitive" cultures, poor, third world countries and often Islamic. In most of the countries in the East, democracy is still very much developing. But there is much more diversity in the East than the West. In the category of the East there are countries like Nigeria, Egypt, Burundi, Brazil, Chile, Indonesia, Thailand etc.
The West has different cultures too but there are more similarities. These are the modern successful countries, with a mass popular culture, mostly rich, the populations mostly not as religious as in the East, with its roots in Christianity. Most of these countries are governed by a democratic system. These are very rough and general divisions and do not always apply neatly; there are cultures belonging to the East category which are Christian. But still at the basis is a difference. Most of the countries in the East still very much adhere to the old traditions, some them quite stiff and severe. The West on the other hand has had popular culture as an umbrella to the many different ethnic cultures living in it.
This dichotomy between the East and the West is seen by some as an aspect of the rise of Islamic Fundamentalism, which some also equate with terrorism. The recent bombing in Oklahoma City showed the uneasiness and fear of Islam in the USA. Within twenty hours of the bombing, Muslim leaders around the USA were making statements, asking the American general public not to jump to the conclusion that it was done by Muslims.
For some reason Islam today is seen by some in the West as the "enemy" replacing Communism. Some argue that it is the nature of Islam which is seen as dangerous because it does not separate the political and religious powers; that Muslims carry within them the idea of a "jihad" or holy war against the West. The perception in the West is that Islam is not just a religion but also a culture. In fact Islam as a religion is very much steeped in the local culture, and there is no universal Islamic culture as such. Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia and in Indonesia religiously is the same, but culturally is very different. This is nothing new; Islam has always been like this. Unfortunately the actions of a small fundamentalist group have been taken to be the behaviours of Muslims around the world.
The real and most important difference between the West and the East is economic, despite the different culture and ways of life surrounding the two. In my interviews with Uzbek Islamic fundamentalists, and recently with Hutu militias in Burundi, the words and terms used by these people are cultural, they talk of cultural preservation. But, the bottom line is economic deprivation and these people are tired of poverty. They want a better life.
The East has been poor for a long time and is still poor. The aid which used to prop up these countries to stabilise them has gone with the end of the Cold War. Suddenly these countries are not regarded as important any more by the West. Instead they are left to fend for themselves and there is a growing feeling of humiliation among many members of these countries. Islam and its teachings provides comfort and dignity for a lot of these people. I feel this is one of the reasons why we are seeing the rise of the fundamentalist Muslims.
In the midst of all this the whole human rights issue has become important, although the abuses have always been there. For some of these countries the increasing poverty and the criticism of human rights activists is seen as a double blow. It is, unfortunately, in this context many developing countries defensively see the whole question of human rights and an anti-Western feeling is emerging.
The Role of the Media
If global cultural diversity has been with us for a long time, the role of the media in its reporting of it has become more precise and explicit due to the technological revolution happening in this area. I am thinking in particular of a big international television company like CNN. The social problems have not changed, but the way it is being reported has. Policy makers now are making decisions based on such coverage. This means in decision-making, public opinion of a certain kind has become more important. Decision-makers in the US had to take account of public opinion when the American public saw dead American soldiers being dragged around in Mogadishu by soldiers of the war lords. But what kind of policy does public opinion want?
This kind of global reporting penetrates most viewers in the West and the elites in the East living in capital cities. At this international level, control of the media is in the hands of a few individuals and companies, and is motivated by income earned by the media company. People like Murdoch and Turner are thus able to play a crucial role in international politics, because it is through their companies that images of one part of the world are beamed to another. Unfortunately it is conflict and blood bath which brings most of the income. CNN's ratings go up when it reports some dramatic tragedy. What this does to our understanding of the world, I am not sure.
There is another level of media which is the national level serving the population mostly of a country. For countries in the West the population has access to both levels, international and national. Not so for many of the poorer countries in the East. CNN and the whole internet network requires expensive equipment which most of the population of the world can't afford. Instead they rely on their national and local newspaper. For these people national boundaries of countries are still very much in place and are impenetrable. For a lot of these people a name such as Australia is just a far away place which requires the crossing of the major oceans and strange lands.
The technological revolution in the media has only affected half of the world. The other half is still living in a world of their own, some are still living in the last century. The focus of their lives is still finding food to eat. Occasionally the village centre will have a television program beaming from the capital city carrying footage of some Western countries. The one thing which always captures the minds of these people is the wealth of the West. Democratisation, economic development and decentralisation do not mean much. Unfortunately television can't televise systems or countries nor ideas, only action and images.
For many of these poorer countries the national and local media play an important role in politics. A dramatic example can be found in Burundi at the moment. The warring factions, the Hutus and the Tutsis each have their own weekly magazines. Each side claim they print 3000 copies each week. These magazines carry articles of hatred for the other side and also false information about what the other side is doing. So much so that killings done by both sides has been done based on the information of these magazines. In this case the media is very much tied to the sense of identity of each group, there is no sense of national unity which is needed to preserve cultural diversity in Burundi.
Control of the media has been an effective mechanism in the past for a lot of countries to keep a ruling body or elite in power. There are degrees of control of the media, Burundi being a very extreme case. In Singapore there is a threshold line on how much anti-government reporting can be done. The government demands that only certain points of view be written about. A lot of its citizens support this government stand. The Singaporeans argue that order in their tiny country is important for economic growth and to them this is the most important thing. This point of view is also held by many of its press members.
The whole debate about press freedom and press control depends on one's point of view. The first amendment in the US gives the media there total freedom to report on anything, but elders of the American media industry in the US are beginning to question where it is all going. The trend is to report and investigate peoples' private lives, using the first amendment as protection. What about the right of privacy for individuals? The serious public issues which need investigative reporting and the first amendment to protect the journalists do not interest readers or viewers. A good friend who worked for The L.A Times last year complained that the paper did not want any stories about Afro Americans, it doesn't sell papers. Yet if any section of the American population needs coverage about its plight it is the Afro Americans.
There is no doubt that total control of the media by a ruling elite to sustain its power, means ordinary citizens are being denied the many points of views it is entitled to, in order to make decisions about its own government. The role of the media is not just to criticise governments, it has a responsibility also to try and offer different alternatives to the problems governments face. The media should always try to be forward looking.
But the question which begs to be answered is, which is more acceptable, the Singaporean style of control of the media by government to sustain its power, or control of the media by individuals like Murdoch who is driven by profits, by feeding viewers images of calamities of poor diverse countries? This is a question I struggle with all the time.
With the end of the Cold War, the contest between the two superpowers for the "hearts and minds" of the people and governments of the Third World has ended, and the flow of development aid had dried up. Also the rise of economic factors to the top of the international agenda, replacing strategic and political factors, has meant that backward economies are regarded as having "failed" and often cultural reasons are given for this failure.
The focus of international television images of bloodshed due to cultural conflict underlines this failure. This has caused fatigue in approaching the economic problems these countries experience. The gap between the world of trading currencies with its enormous capital and, say, the refugee camps in Rwanda, is enormous.
My experience in reporting has taught me one thing - poverty is humiliating and denies people dignity. Constructive cultural diversity will only be sustainable when poverty starts to be alleviated.
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