COMMENT Western
media fade, new media rise in
Asia By Ioannis Gatsiounis
KUALA LUMPUR - The non-Western world
routinely alleges that the global media
represented by the likes of CNN and the Wall
Street Journal are tainted with a Western, often
pro-US bias. But the ever-growing reach of new
media entities providing non-Western perspectives
to breaking global news, ranging from powerful new
television networks to itty-bitty weblogs, has in
effect reduced the claim to myth.
Several
commercial and technological factors are driving
the shift. Previously prominent English-language
news weeklies, such as
Dow
Jones-owned Far Eastern Economic Review and Time
Warner-run Asiaweek, have dramatically fallen from
the print news scene they dominated in the 1980s
and into the 1990s. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch
sold much of his controlling stake in Hong
Kong-based Phoenix TV last year, marking yet
another blow to advance his media empire into
China.
Many Western media outlets have
seen their circulation figures stagnate, and under
growing financial pressure at home have severely
cut their reporting staffs across Asia. Newsweek
recently closed its Asia bureau and Time has
closed down all but two of its regional bureaus.
Meanwhile, the financial-loss-making Asian
Wall Street Journal's regional subscription base
has stagnated at around 80,000 for well over a
decade, and former Dow Jones employees allege
those figures are probably overblown through the
dubious use of bulk-rate subscriptions and other
promotional activities. Signaling a possible
further consolidation in big Western media,
Murdoch's News Corp on Wednesday launched a US$5
billion takeover bid for Dow Jones.
On the
other side, there is a growing demand for
non-Western news perspectives. Al-Jazeera is the
most prominent example to fill the void, with a
host of television and Internet-based imitators
quickly springing in its wake. In November,
Al-Jazeera launched an English-language channel
that is more sanitized than its Arabic version and
aims at competing head to head with the likes of
Cable News Network (CNN) and the British
Broadcasting Corp (BBC). It recently set up a news
hub in Kuala Lumpur and currently reaches 80
million households globally by cable and
satellite.
Sensing the shift in sentiment,
not to mention the commercial opportunities,
Western media companies are, somewhat ironically,
rushing to peddle their own non-Western
perspectives. The BBC World Service plans to start
an Arabic television service this fall, and the
International Herald Tribune recently noted: "If
the BBC's Arabic TV programs resemble its radio
programs, then they will be just as anti-Western
as anything that comes out of the [Persian] Gulf,
if not more so."
Those who have felt
slighted by Western bias are now fighting back
with low-cost tools of mass persuasion, ranging
from satellite television to individual-run
websites and blogs. And they are reacting to a
growing demand, particularly since September 11,
2001, for non-Western perspectives to the news.
Western media previously represented
perhaps the only outlets for independent views for
people living under authoritarian regimes in Asia.
The Bangkok-based Asia Times newspaper of Sondhi
Limthongkul's Manager Media Group was one of the
first news publications to take this contrarian
tack, first as a print publication in 1995, and
currently in its Internet incarnation as Asia
Times Online, which on average has 100,000
visitors per day.
Many people outside the
West are still living under non-democratic
conditions where state media have aggressively
resisted presenting Western perspectives on
everything from political history to civil
liberties to the "war on terror". Here in
Muslim-majority Malaysia, for instance, there was
little if any mention in the state press of the
Holocaust on its 60th anniversary two years ago.
Powerful tools Granted, in many
of these same countries the Internet has become a
powerful tool to voice and obtain alternative
views. In Malaysia, a handful of courageous
bloggers have become so effective in drawing
attention to government abuses that authorities
are considering censoring them. And while ideals
including transparency, official accountability,
and freedom of speech are frequently endorsed on
independent blogs and websites, they can hardly be
said to represent Western bias, as most of the
bloggers are local.
Most news consumers
are inclined to take what they are fed, or at
least what they are accustomed to. And what they
are accustomed to in restricted societies is
generally what governments perpetuate through
their strictly controlled mouthpiece media
outlets. I have noticed among Malaysians, for
instance, that when given a choice - say on a
flight or at multinational coffee houses - between
international newspapers such as the International
Herald Tribune and Financial Times and local
government-controlled propaganda, they almost
invariably choose the latter.
Further, if
the world media are "sullied by Western political
bias and colored by Western ideological bias", in
the words of Felix Soh, deputy editor of online
media for Singapore's state-controlled Straits
Times newspaper, then how to explain the highly
distorted, caricatured summations of Western
culture and its governments so prevalent in the
non-Western world today?
One explanation
is that media are feeding pre-existing prejudices.
In an essay in the timely book Understanding
Anti-Americanism: Its Origins and Impact at Home
and Abroad, Patrick Clawson and Barry Rubin
point out that local and satellite stations in the
Middle East are "competing with one another as to
which can be more stridently anti-American".
Media in the US may have their share of
voices that misrepresent Muslims, but most
mainstream media there can hardly be accused of
competing to see which can be the most stridently
anti-Muslim. It is not uncommon to find, even in
what many in Malaysia and across the Middle East
consider the "Zionist" New York Times, op-eds
sympathetic to Palestinian plight.
Under
fire from all sides, the US government has funded
everything from television commercials to
broadcast stations to correct what it perceives as
distorted news about the US. But as evinced by
Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes'
"listening tours" across the Muslim world, the
efforts have usually focused more on justifying
the administration's policies than on putting the
US into its global context.
The growing
presence of non-Western viewpoints in the world
media might seem to be a mere matter of leveling
the playing field, and we are witnessing an
overshooting of anti-Western views in the
adjustment. Writing back in 1986, Ahmad Shafaat of
the Molson School of Business of Concordia
University, Montreal, urged Muslims to combat the
"anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim chorus" in media
with "pro-Islamic and pro-Muslim material".
This reasoning is all-pervasive today; the
post-September 11, 2001, media landscape has, like
the world the media reflect and simultaneously
inform, become increasingly ideological. This
explains why purportedly objective media companies
today so often provide strikingly different
coverage of the same events. The problem is
compounded when the media gatekeepers of one
ideology feel those of another have misrepresented
the facts, leading to a tendency to overcompensate
in their own reporting.
Unfortunately,
what we are often left with is not a mass movement
to inform the news-consuming public better, but
rather attempts to distort the news, leading to a
great irony of the so-called new information age -
that with more and more information at our
disposal, we are no closer to bridging seismic
gaps in global understanding. That is something
Western and non-Western media are unfortunately
equally responsible for.
Ioannis
Gatsiounis, a New York native, is a Kuala
Lumpur-based writer.
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