The MDC formations and the NGOs and newspapers supporting their neoliberal “reforms” are funded by the British, the European Union, the North Americas and other Anglo-Saxon countries in order to champion the same notions of the unfettered Press, the opening up of the airwaves and media self-regulation. Yet these have already come to grief in the sponsoring countries.
The Sunday Mail
By Tafataona Mahoso
The Rupert Murdoch-News Corporation scandal unfolding in Britain constitutes a beautiful blowback against neoliberalism as the latest totalitarian myth.
The details are still sketchy but the following developments can be confirmed: As part and parcel of the neoliberal “reform” movement intended to relocate the capitalist crisis from the North Atlantic to the rest of the world and associated with former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former US President Ronald Reagan — the Western “democracies” embraced the idea that the market should be allowed to determine all values; that especially in the media it was backward, costly and inefficient to use regulation to protect, let alone determine values.
A few billionaires emerged, including Rupert Murdoch and Silvio Berlusconi (now Italian Prime Minister) who were well placed to benefit from the “reform” in at least five ways:
Using the myth of the unfettered Press as “the fourth estate” in order to defeat laws against media cross-ownership;
Using the defeat of anti-trust laws and the legalisation on media cross-ownership in order to build multi-media, multi-sectoral monopolies in the communications industry;
Using political advertising, intimidation and even hate speech (through the media) to make and un-make politicians;
Corrupting the entire social and political system by trying to make universal the neoliberal nonsense that everything and anything can be sold; that whoever sells anything and generates profits becomes good, noble and even sacred; and
Reviving and propagating the old missionary view which said “Ichokwadi nokuti chakanyorwa”, which is to say: It is true because I can show where it is written: which is to say whatever you can make people believe (through the media) becomes the truth and the reality. If it can also generate profits, that makes it even better.
As documented by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, the first extremes of neoliberal reform were wars and other disasters which became instantly and directly profitable because most services, including the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, were out-sourced to private companies and NGOs. For instance, the first instance of foreign-sponsored destabilisation and illegal regime change demanded by NGOs and humanitarian relief agencies was Somalia. NGOs in fact urged the US government to invade and occupy Somalia because they knew the resulting disasters would boost their income; since most of the services (to the occupying forces and to the victims of invasion) would be out-sourced to themselves. The media played a big role in agitating for invasion. The second set of extremes which triggered the current blowback against neoliberal reform took place in the arena of global finance and produced what has been dubbed the “global financial tsunami” centred around North America and Europe.
This was the result of unregulated or “self-regulating” markets. The outrage from this was that the welfare state was literally turned up-side-down: dishing out the people’s tax revenue in order to save bankrupt global banks and other monopolies, instead of using the people’s tax revenue to provide social services and support poor families and unemployed workers. This outrage is playing out in Greece as we go to press.
The third series of extremes in neoliberal reform is what has erupted in Britain and includes the destruction of journalism through neoliberal media reform and liberalisation. Just as the daily torture and murder of Iraqis and Afghans became profitable as outsourced business to companies and NGOs, the daily suffering, private misery, bereavement, illness and agony of ordinary British citizens (obtained via the hacking and stealing of private telephone numbers) also became profitable for The News of the World and other newspapers. Private, confidential and secret information (obtained illegally and even through organised crime syndicates) was used to create the appearance of a “robust” and thoroughly investigative journalism; or simply to exploit the vulnerability of readers in the face of a prurient Press which appeared to know every detail about everyone’s life without revealing how the details were obtained.
Those who were powerful and those aspiring to amass power began to believe that the only way they could protect or increase their power, or the only way they could become powerful, was by befriending or cooperating with the owners, editors and journalists of the corrupt mass media houses.
This went on until the evidence of criminal conduct by the Murdoch media empire was so massive that it became obvious that the emperor had clay feet and could be toppled. The result is a massive blowback and a great sigh of relief among those politicians who felt totally cowed and intimidated by the mass media. They call it “pay-back time” now in Britain. As a result Murdoch has now been prevented from acquiring more shares of British Sky Broadcasting beyond the 39 percent he already owned before the scandal broke out.
What Does the Neoliberal Blowback in Britain Have To Do With Zimbabwe Now?
Since 1999 Zimbabweans have been white-mailed and cowed by a British-sponsored political formation and an Anglo-American-funded Press claiming to own the holy mantle of “democratic reform” and represent “the democratic dispensation” just because everyday they kneel in front of the altar of British-defined “benchmarks” to which they seek to subject the whole nation. Yet in the same sponsoring Britain of the Westminster Foundation and the Zimbabwe Democracy Trust, all the three major political parties who sponsored the MDC formations and the attendant Press in Zimbabwe are now saying an unfettered Press has turned into an unfettered security threat.
Indeed, even the Queen’s security personnel were selling numbers belonging to her family for payment in preparation for hacking into calls. How and why have the British rulers found courage to say no? Well, because the unfettered Press has now claimed the scalps of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and former prime minister Gordon Brown by bribing and buying senior police and other security officers who willingly sold supposedly secured telephone numbers to journalists and editors who then hacked them in order to gain access to most sensitive and most intimate details. In addition to the Queen and the Prime Minister, there are more than 3 000 victims of the same phone-hacking spree which also involved crime syndicates serving the Press.
That is really some “robust” journalism!
The MDC formations and the NGOs and newspapers supporting their neoliberal “reforms” are funded by the British, the European Union, the North Americas and other Anglo-Saxon countries in order to champion the same notions of the unfettered Press, the opening up of the airwaves and media self-regulation. Yet these have already come to grief in the sponsoring countries.
The debate is so uninformed that it has not even recognised the illegal sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe as causing the greatest damage to freedom of expression and access to information here.
Britain, the US and EU have barred from entering their borders all those Zimbabwean leaders and intellectuals whom they fear might present a picture of Zimbabwe contrary to the one created by their regime change collaborators. Moreover, since the media business requires as much investment and credit as any other modern business, the illegal sanctions have also created a situation whereby 80 percent of all prospective publishers applying for publishing licences in Zimbabwe from 2004 to 2009 could not take off for lack of funds or lack of business. Illegal sanctions have greatly reduced access to information in Zimbabwe, but Misa will not look at the mounting evidence because it is paid to oppose media regulation.
It is useful to remember that Misa and the Windhoek Declaration are manifestations of a Cold War regime change model transplanted from the US experience in destabilising Eastern Europe. Likewise the Sadc Protocol on Culture, Information and Sport (ratified 1995) has also become outdated in view of the current post-September 11 2001 and post-global recession period which now includes The News of the World scandal. The sponsored regime change NGOs and media organisations in the Sadc region are stuck with the line of US 20th century media propaganda for regime change which was based on the assumptions of modernisation and information scarcity.
According to that Cold War regime change recipe for the South and the East, emphasis was put on dismantling controls and denying any strategic direction in public communication in order to enhance the mythical free flow of information, free flow of scarce hardware and software as well as plurality of platforms, a cacophony of voices and “free access”. But even in the 20th century, this was a myth. The Unesco Declaration of 1978 was about the myth. The Cold War approach is obsessed with the scarcity information technology as well as the scarcity of its output, so much so that any and all technology is better than nothing and any and all books, papers or magazines should be welcomed by a people viewed as merely waiting for information, aid and even rescue. Yet real freedom should mean freedom for a nation to select appropriate technology, appropriate content and appropriate information output as wells as suitable exchanges with other nations.
Contrary to the Cold War model, the majority of students in Northern universities studying engineering subjects in ICT happen to come from the South and the East and they do return to their own countries, making a mockery of the stereotypical “digital divide”. The Cold War approach is obsessed with the apparent contest of technologies and machines while missing the more central contest of ideas and values which alone can guide the strategic choices of machinery, software and platform. With reckless opening up, with abandoned free flow, there can be no national strategic choices of machine or software, nor can there be any strategic self-positioning in a changing public information environment. What is worse, the supposed free flow of information in the Murdoch case was never free. It was based on crime and bribery.
In fact the whole world now suffers from a choking saturation with unsorted information which is driven and exploited by those who have developed appropriate structures and systems for strategic research, strategic framing and positioning, deliberate segmentation of audiences, strategic delegation and optimal outsourcing and co-ordination.
From the very same USA, which is largely responsible for the antiquated model to which Article 19 and Misa are wedded, we learn that the events of September 11 2001 and the current global financial tsunami have forced a rapid abandonment of that 20th century model. This is also going to happen in Britain after the recently launched inquiries. Instead of the presumed information scarcity, there is too much information and too little knowledge; too many unrelated platforms; and too many “piped” channels to be deployed or received in an ad hoc and tactical fashion. The information climate cries for strategy, direction, order, clarity, ethics and rule of law.
Research done by the US Defence Science Board’s Taskforce on Strategic Communication in 2004 led to the conclusion that “the US doesn’t know what it knows”. That is because of the crisis of disordered information saturation in a society which still wants to presume information scarcity.
One year before the Seattle WTO Conference, Canadian journalist Linda McQuaig predicted that the myth of uncontrollable “free flow” of money and information resulting from digitalisation would come to an end.
“Computer technology has now made it possible to move money (and information) even more quickly. But does it follow that the faster movement makes it impossible to control money? On the contrary there is a flipside to this computer wizardry that is almost always omitted from discussion about the new technology of global finance: the very same technology that makes it possible to move money more quickly than ever before also makes it possible to trace (and control) that movement than ever before.”
This tracking and control is precisely what British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and US and EU leaders are demanding now in the wake of the global financial scandal and shock and the Murdoch scandal.
In media as in finance, five years before the Seattle WTO conference, one British media owner dismissed the same myth of media ungovernability arising from digitalisation. Clive Hollick, owner of Meridian
Broadcasting and Anglia Television, also agreed with Professor Robert Machesney, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy, that statutory regulation of media was the only way to protect democracy and meaningful access to information against corporatism. Now we hear that we need tight laws to protect citizens from media criminals. Hollick stated:
“Contrary to the general view, regulation can be the defender of free speech and the forces of the market place the chief threat to a plurality of views. But new technologies demand new forms of regulation and government intervention may be the best way of ensuring the plurality of voices on which democracy depends . . . The claim that technology makes regulation more difficult, even impossible, is a fallacy. On the contrary, it makes it easier . . . Rapid and complex technical change should not divert governments from addressing the more predictable consequences of enduring and straightforward human instincts which drive media organisations. The quest for market domination and the desire to wield influence and control are familiar and enduring characteristics of these organisations. Governments must defend public interest by protecting and sustaining freedom of expression, diversity of views, plurality of ownership and consumer choice, safe in the knowledge that media companies are unlikely to go hungry.”
We quote these informed passages at length because the preachers of Cold War neoliberal ignorance in our midst falsely cite British, European and North American claims as constituting “best practice”. The West will protect its people whenever that becomes necessary, as is evident from the panic response to the financial tsunami which is forcing heads of state to fire corporate executives in order to demonstrate popular public anger against reckless corporate behaviour. But with the help of Misa, the same leaders who are going as far as firing corporate boards and CEOs will turn around and claim that AIPPA is
“Draconian” because it requires just the mere registration of mass media services and accreditation of journalists.
In her Wall Street Journal article on April 23 1999, Peggy Noonan called the poorly regulated US media “The Culture of Death” which engulfs young people like a contaminated and untreatable ocean. Its corporatism is so absolute now that there are few alternatives.
“It is part of the reason that Hollywood people, when discussing these media matters, no longer say, ‘If you don’t like it, change the channel.’ They now realise something they didn’t realise 10 years ago. There is no (really different) channel to turn to.”
All the information pointing to the current global recession and the Murdoch scandal was theoretically available but no meaningful player, not even the free Press, really knew about it, let alone investigated or reported it. The global financial tsunami would not have been a surprise or shock if the free Press were really free from the perpetrators of the casino economy.
What we need in national information management therefore are strong government leadership, strategic direction, adequate inter-agency co-ordination, strict standards, sufficient resources and a new culture of strict media monitoring, segmented opinion research and evaluation. The performance of the media as well as the government agencies and ministries responsible for strategic communication for the nation must all be subject to evaluation by appropriate and qualified centres of authority and expertise.
The reason for these requirements should be obvious: From the point of view of strategic communication, the prevailing phenomena of information saturation and lightning speed demand the shortest response cycles in which the state must decide to respond or not to respond to critical issues of publicity and public diplomacy. Short response cycles at national level imply sustained direction, sustained monitoring, sustained evaluation, and sustained co-ordination rather than free flow. The current global economic crisis and the unfolding Murdoch crisis point to the unsustainability of media self-regulation. The South African government recently admitted the same prior to the Murdoch scandal.
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