Television – Page 25

New Face of People Power: Social Accountability in action

In an earlier post, I wrote about how citizen groups are increasingly empowering themselves with information to demand greater accountability from their elected representatives in local, provincial and central governments.

This is collectively called Social Accountability – and it represents a significantly higher level of citizen engagement than merely changing governments at elections or taking to the streets for popular revolt (‘people power’).

In 2004, TVE Asia Pacific produced a half-hour international TV documentary titled People Power that profiled four Social Accountability projects in Africa (Malawi), Asia (India), Europe (Ireland) and Latin American (Brazil).

Watch the Brazil story on TVEAP’s YouTube channel:

The experiment with participatory budgeting in the municipality of Porto Alegre in Brazil is a long-running example that we filmed. This is one of the largest cities in Brazil, one of the most important cultural, political and economic centers of Southern Brazil.

The city is well known as the birth place of the World Social Forum. The first WSF was held there in January 2001.

Participatory budgeting goes back to a decade earlier. It was started in 1989 by the newly elected “Worker Party” (PT) to involve people in democratic resource management in an effort to provide greater levels of spending to poorer citizens and neighborhoods. It has since spread to over 80 municipalities and five states in Brazil.

Porto Alegre’s challenge was how to include the poorer people in this success. Housing was a major problem as rural people migrate to the city looking for work. In the past, people built temporary houses on whatever land they could find, and the city council kept on demolishing these unauthorised structures.

As Brazil moved from a totalitarian to democratic form of government in the late 1980s, the newly elected city government adopted a program where the people participate in prioritising the City Budget.

The city is divided into sixteen regions and during each year, local neighbourhoods send representatives to people’s assemblies. In these assemblies, the neighbourhood representatives discuss priorities for the allocation of the city budget. They then elect their representatives from each region to form a budget council.

Over a year, from neighbourhood associations to people’s assemblies, up to 20,000 people have a direct say on how the city budget should be allocated.

This participation ensures democratic accountability and fairer distribution of tax revenue. It allows the poorest and the richest regions to have equal weight in the decision process.

After the introduction of participatory budgeting, an influential business journal nominated Porto Alegre as the Brazilian city with the ‘best quality in life’ for the 4th consecutive times. Statistics show that there has been significant improvement in quality of roads, access to water services, coverage of sewerage system, school enrollment and tax revenue collection.

We interviewed Joao Verle (wearing pink shirt in photo above), the then Mayor of Porto Allegre, who said: “I believe in this project since i was one of those responsible for starting it fifteen years ago. The participatory budget is now part of the organic life of this city – people can change it any time they please. And this makes it more adaptive to the people’s needs.”

First broadcast on BBC World in February 2004, People Power documentary has since been widely distributed to broadcast, civil society and educational users in the global South. It is still available from TVEAP on DVD and VHS video.

Photos are all captured from People Power video film. Courtesy TVE Asia Pacific

Read my post about social accountability in the world’s largest democracy, India

People Power: Going beyond elections and revolutions

“At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper.”

That’s how Sir Winston Churchill summed up democracy at work. Elections – at national and local levels – give ordinary people the chance to decide who would run their affairs for the next few years. At least in theory.

In the modern world, however, elections alone cannot ensure that people’s wishes prevail. Better models of engagement are needed…and are being developed across the globe.

Historically, people responded to bad governance by rejecting governments at elections, and occasionally by overthrowing corrupt and despotic regimes through mass agitation. In the past decade, this “people power” has toppled rulers in the Philippines, Nepal and Ukraine among others, and sent a strong signal to autocratic governments elsewhere.

Yet such people power has its own limits: in country after country where one political party – or indeed political system – was replaced with another through popular vote or revolt, people have been disappointed or dismayed at how quickly the new brooms lose their bristles. The solution must, therefore, lie in not just participating in elections or revolutions, but in constantly engaging governments and keeping the pressure on them to govern well – or else.

So what is to be done, as Lenin famously asked? One challenge is to find new approaches to promoting good governance.

Photo: An election awareness public rally in Rajastan, India (late 2003)

An example is Social Accountability practices – individuals or civil society groups getting together to demand accountability from different levels of government. This represents a significantly higher level of citizen engagement than merely changing governments at elections or taking to the streets.

It involves the careful gathering of data, their systematic analysis and knowledge-based engagement and negotiation with elected and other public officials. Crucial to this process is accessing and using critical information – about budgets, expenditures, excesses, corruption, performance, etc.

The new breed of citizen voice is about using information in a way that lead to positive change in government and society. People use knowledge as a pivotal tool to improve governance, better use of common property resources, and management of public funds collected through taxation or borrowed from international finance institutions.

The media can play multiple roles in such social accountability processes. At a basic level, media’s coverage of these processes adds momentum to citizen movements. At a higher level, some citizen groups are use media as an information tool or campaigning platform or both, optimising each other’s strengths.

Here’s an example from my own experience. In 2004, TVE Asia Pacific produced a half-hour international TV documentary titled People Power that profiled four Social Accountability projects in Africa (Malawi), Asia (India), Europe (Ireland) and Latin American (Brazil).

First broadcast on BBC World in February 2004, it has since been widely distributed to broadcast, civil society and educational users in the global South. It is still available from TVEAP on DVD and VHS video.

Hernando de Soto

We interviewed the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto (photo, above) of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Lima, Peru, who said: “Supposedly in a democracy, if the majority of people are poor, then they set the criteria of what is right. Yet all those mechanisms that allow [society] to decide where the money goes — and that it is appropriately allocated — are not in place throughout the Third World. We take turns electing authoritarian governments. The country, therefore, is left to the [whims] of big-time interests, and whoever funded the elections or parties. We have no right of review or oversight. We have no way for the people’s voice to be heard — except for eight hours on election day.”

When the India story was being filmed, in late 2003, by coincidence several states were holding elections for the state legislatures. Our crew followed the election process in the northern Indian state of Rajastan to see how a citizen group was forcing social accountability for all standing for election.

Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) invited the people of Beawar, Rajastan, to a public meeting where the affidavits on the local candidates were made available to everyone. This process of social accountability and transparency extends beyond the political process to the village level where the MKSS has successfully lobbied for the right to information legislation to overcome the systemic corruption in the political and bureaucratic organisations.

MKSS’s struggles has led to laws to ensure people’s right to information across India.

“India is the largest functioning democracy in the world and it has significant strengths (but) it also has weaknesses,” says Dr Bela Bhatix (photographed wearing red saree), Associate Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, interviewed on our film. “Among the strengths is that we have been able to sustain our democracy…It’s no small matter to have regular elections and we usually have something like 60 per cent turnout — around 600 million people, or twice the size of America. But at the same time there are some very important weaknesses of our democracy which we really need to think about.”

Social activist Aruna Roy, coordinator of MKSS (photographed below), says: “In 1996, the MKSS sat in a 40-day sit-in at Beawar and we were demanding the right to access records of the Panchayat, the smallest elected body in India. We involved the entire city and made it a people’s campaign. We involved people from all over India, and the national campaign for people’s right to information was born.”

Watch India story from People Power on TVEAP’s YouTube channel:

All photos captured from People Power documentary, courtesy TVE Asia Pacific.

Read TVEAP website feature, People Power beyond elections and revolutions by Nalaka Gunawardene

Wanted: Ethical sourcing of international TV news

In recent years, consumer pressure has built up against products made using child labour and blood diamonds. If these are no longer internationally acceptable, neither should the world tolerate moving images whose origins are ethically suspect.

This is a point I have been making for sometime. I feel very strongly about it, because to me, what goes on behind the cameras is as important as what is in front of the cameras — and is therefore seen by millions of television viewers.

Many media researchers and media-watchers don’t pay enough attention to this aspect. Volumes of content analysis are produced on what is broadcast, but do we probe how that content gets on the air in the first place?

My recent blog post, and international op ed essay, on cheque-book development corrupting the broadcast media reiterates this point.

When Al Jazeeera launched its English language international news and current affairs channel in November 2006, I wrote an op ed essay called ‘Ethical Newsgathering: Al Jazeera’s Biggest Challenge’. This was published by media-watch websites on both sides of the Atlantic: MediaChannel.org managed from New York, USA, and MediaHelpingMedia managed from London, UK.

I looked at the track record of the two leading international news channels, BBC World and CNN International, and noted:

“They have increasingly come to epitomise a disturbing trend in international news and current affairs journalism: the end justifies the means.

“Take, for example, a major news story that broke in my part of the world two years ago: the Asian Tsunami of December 2004.

“In a few dreadful hours, the disaster killed, injured or otherwise shattered the lives of millions. The ‘media tsunami’ that followed added insult to injury by turning the plight of affected people into a global circus. The right to privacy and dignity of thousands of affected people was repeatedly violated. The visual media, in particular, had no qualms about showing the dead, injured and orphaned: the story was gory.

“One CNN reporter later wrote a whole book recounting those few momentous days, when his team apparently managed to get stories before anyone else. Seemingly because they threw more money, equipment and diplomatic clout than others. The ‘gung-ho’ tone in that book is revolting yet revealing.

“Such journalists’ only operating guideline seems to be: get the story, no matter what — or who gets hurt in that process.”

Read the essay: Ethical Newsgathering: Al Jazeera’s Biggest Challenge, by Nalaka Gunawardene, on MediaChannel.org

Read an earlier essay, Communication Rights and Communication Wrongs, by Nalaka Gunawardene, on SciDev.Net

In the corporate media world, we the viewers are ‘consumers’ of what the multiple news channels peddle 24/7. Few of us see beyond what comes up on our screens, and even fewer bother about how those images are sourced.

If we want ethical sourcing of TV news content, that pressure must come from us, the consumers. We should react not only to the carefully packaged moving images and soundbytes dished out to us, but also demand to know if these have been acquired in an ethically acceptable manner.

Good journalism is not just a mix of accuracy, balance and credibility (the A, B and C we are taught in journalism school). There is also D (Discernment) and E (Ethical sourcing).

– Nalaka Gunawardene

Making fun of HIV: Welcome to the Scenarios from Africa

General Assembly of Diseases: In the city of Contaminobo, assorted germs in an emergency session. Tuberculosis, Polio, Hepatitis and others are all angry and afraid because their favourite target – humans – are fighting back. Enter ‘His Royal Heinous, Overlord AIDS’. Hope at last! When he attacks the immune system of humans, other germs can still have a chance…The humans are so careless, that it’s easy for AIDS to quickly spread from one to many. But wait a minute – somebody has been listening into all their talk. Which means the secret of defending humans from HIV and his cronies is out.

Iron Will: Moussah is a young man with a healthy, or bubbling, interest in girls. His male friends advise him to be play it safe — carefree sex can easily expose him to HIV, for which there is no cure. They talk about condoms, and another strategy that is an alternative to using the rubber latex. But Moussah doesn’t quite understand the expression ‘iron will’. He interprets it differently, and gets custom made iron underpants made — much to the amusement of his friends, who remind him the most important sex organ is…the brain!

Just Once: A man returns from the field and feels like making love to his wife. She is living with HIV and insists that he uses a condom — but they’ve run out of stocks. So he cycles far and wide in search of condoms – where is a rubber when you need one? Finally he succeeds and rushes home, only to find that his wife did have one last, unused condom with her. So why didn’t you tell me, he asks in exasperation. Her answer is revealing….

Intrigued? There’s a lot more where they came from.

These three stories are part of Scenarios from Africa — a highly successful and popular pan-African initiative to use moving images to get young people talking and acting on HIV/AIDS. The decade-long project has been carried out with and for young people, with community mobilisation, education and media elements.

Integral to this communication effort are television drama vignettes about different scenarios involving HIV in everyday life.

Some are very funny while others are very moving. They cover many dimensions of the HIV epidemic, from preventing the virus spreading to taking care of persons living with HIV. Underlying themes include safe sex, removing social stigma from the epidemic and dispelling misconceptions about how HIV spreads or does not spread.

The project was started in 1997 and is coordinated by the non-profit Global Dialogues Trust. It gave African children and young adults an exciting opportunity to educate themselves and others about HIV/AIDS by inviting them to participate with internationally acclaimed directors in the production of these short films.

The films are based on ideas thought up by young people in a series of contests. So far, over 105,000 young people from 37 African countries have taken part in these contests. Over 1,000 local and international partner organisations have been involved in organising the contests and selecting the winning ideas.

The films range in duration from just under 2 minutes to almost 15 minutes. They were produced by top fiction film-makers and animation specialists in Africa.

All stories use African actors, locations and situations – and employ different story telling tactics.

Scenarios from Africa is a multi-media communication project that has been widely acclaimed by practitioners, activists and scholars worldwide. The films are supported by a user’s guide and online discussion points that help teachers, trainers and activists to make the best use of these stories in their work.

The films are all distributed on a non-commercial basis across Africa and beyond, for broadcast and narrowcast use. The Scenarios films have been broadcast on locally-based television stations in almost every country in sub-Saharan Africa. The films are also collected on compilation DVDs and video cassettes for use by organisations and schools. Some 60,000 copies of the films (DVDs and video cassettes) of the films have been distributed to date.

The films are now available in a wide and growing range of African and European languages, and are reaching tens of millions of people.

Says Daniel Enger of the Global Dialogues Trust: “Although the films were originally produced for the sub-Saharan African cultural context, we have been pleased to learn over the years that the films have proven useful as awareness-raising tools in many countries of the Asia Pacific area. Indeed, most of the HIV-related topics raised in the Scenarios from Africa collections have universal relevance, making the films useful discussion starters across the globe.”

TVE Asia Pacific has recently taken on the task of distributing all Scenarios films across the Asia Pacific region. As with all other films in its catalogue, TVEAP will distribute Scenarios on a non-exclusive, non-commercial basis to broadcast, civil society and educational. We have been promoting the Scenarios films since we screened them to packed houses during the 2004 AIDS Film Festival in Bangkok

Meanwhile, the 5th Scenarios contest will be held from 1 December 2007 to 15 March 2008. Please contact for more information.

Watch Scenarios films on the official website (RealPlayer required)

Scenarios from Africa now available from TVE Asia Pacific

All images used in this post are courtesy Global Dialogues Trust.

Read my other blog posts on HIV:
HIV: Stigma a bigger killer than the virus?
Three Amigos: Funny condoms with a serious mission
Beware of Vatican condoms!
50? In South African terms, you’re probably dead!
Ratomate’s best cup of tea
A girl named Nan-nan

‘Cheque-book Development’: Paying public media to deliver development agency logos

In their ceaseless efforts to keep their organisations in the media spotlight, spin doctors of development agencies are distorting news values and corrupting the media, turning issue-based communication products into ‘logo delivery mechanisms’.

This is the thrust of my latest op ed essay, titled ‘Cheque-book Development’ corrupting the media. It has just published by the popular media-watch website anchored in the US, MediaChannel.org

Image courtesy MediaChannel.org

In this essay, I draw on several years of first hand observations in development, humanitarian and broadcasting circles at Asian and global levels. I focus on a disturbing practice that more and more development/humanitarian agencies engage in: paying intermediaries for getting their stories on global news and current affairs TV channels.

This is nothing short of cash-for-media coverage.

Here’s an extract:

“As development organisations compete more intensely for external funding, they are increasingly adopting desperate strategies to gain higher media visibility for their names, logos and bosses.

“Communication officers in some leading development and humanitarian organisations have been reduced to publicists. When certain UN agency chiefs tour disaster or conflict zones, their spin doctors precede or follow them. Some top honchos now travel with their own ’embedded journalists’ – all at agency expense.

“In this publicity frenzy, these agencies’ communication products are less and less on the issues they stand for or reforms they passionately advocate. Instead, the printed material, online offerings and video films have become ‘logo delivery mechanisms’.”

Image courtesy MediaChannel.org Cartoon courtesy Global Journalist

Some of these communication officers I write about have become friends over the years — I empathise with their pressures, but don’t approve of what their organistions do. As I write in the essay:

“This practice is wrong on two counts. One, allowing intermediaries to sell access to the airwaves is a form of corruption. Two, every time this happens, it siphons off tax-payer supported development funds intended for combating poverty and suffering in the majority world.

“It is the reverse of cheque-book journalism, where some media organisations pay celebrity or other sources for exclusive access to their stories. When development agencies are paying sections of the media to get promotional or favourable stories aired, we must call it ‘cheque-book development’.”

Make no mistake — this is a form of media corruption. It’s not just the development sector’s vanity that fuels this process. Many 24/7 news channels are struggling to fill their hours inexpensively. Some turn a blind eye to ethical sourcing as long as they can have a steady supply of subsidised content.

Read my full essay on MediaChannel.org

Note: Being a US-anchored outlet, MediaChannel.org spells ‘cheque-book’ as ‘check-book’, which is correct in American spelling of English! As I write in my essay, it appears that TV channels and networks on that side of the Atlantic seem a bit harder to corrupt. But then, what do I know?

Read my Nov 2006 essay on MediaChannel.org: Ethical News Gathering Challenge for Al Jazeera

I have been speaking about the growing threat of cheque-book development for some time. For instance, I referred to it during Communicating Disasters: An Asian Brainstorming organised by TVE Asia Pacific and UNDP in Bangkok in December 2006.

Essay republished on Asia Media Forum

A Silent Emergency: More television sets than toilets!

Read a later blog post: Faecal Attraction: There’s no such thing as a convenient flush…

It was September 2004. My daughter Dhara, eight years at the time (or ‘eight plus’ as she insisted on saying), had a complaint.

The toilets in her school were not clean enough. She was finding it squeamish to use them. So she was doing her best to avoid going to the loo: she’d drink less, and try to ‘hold back’ until she could rush home.

Like many sheltered middle class kids, she was still coming to terms with the wider world outside her home. And she attends a well endowed private school where, I am told, toilets are cleaned regularly by janitors engaged by the school.

Now we cut to eleven-year-old Susheela, a girl growing up in neighbouring India. I’ve never met her in person, but this sentence summed up her tragic story:
“I was always first in the class. I am very much interested in studies. I want to become a lawyer. But my mother stopped me from going to school after Class V as the middle school I was attending, 5 km from my house, had no toilet. Can someone help me?”

This was the opening of an article on water and sanitation written by Indian journalist Dr Asha Krishnakumar and published in the news magazine Frontline (part of The Hindu group) at the end of 2003. It was titled: A Silent Emergency.

It was several months later that I actually read Asha’s article. By coincidence, my daughter was having her own ‘toilet issue’ at the time — and the contrast was striking.

Asha’s article continued:
Susheela’s anguish is shared by a large number of girls in India who drop out of school for what sounds like an absurd reason: want of a toilet in school. “Sanitation is closely linked to female literacy in India,” says a United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) study. According to V. Balakrishnan, convener of the Tamil Nadu Primary Schools Improvement Campaign, the lack of proper toilet facilities in schools has a definite and significant bearing on the drop-out rate of girls, particularly around the time they reach Class VIII. In 2000, barely 10 per cent of Tamil Nadu’s 40,000 government schools had usable toilets; the figure is much lower for the country as a whole.

I’d been covering development issues in the media for over 15 years, but this stark reality had not occurred to me. In some developing countries, girls face a greater struggle in enrolling in school and staying on. There are cultural, social and economic factors working against educating girls.

And as Asha’s article revealed, there are other, less known factors adding to this burden.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Indian census data had revealed in 2001 that, some parts of the country had more television sets than toilets.

Asha’s was one of three dozen excellent media articles on water and sanitation that I read that month as a judge in an international award scheme to recognise the best media reporting on the issue. Organised by the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC), it was meant to to encourage broader media coverage of water supply, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) issues in the developing world.

The initiative, first launched in 2002, is open to journalists from developing countries, who write or broadcast original investigative reports on WASH issues. The Collaborative Council seeks to use the WASH Media Awards as part of the broader goals of fostering sustainable relations with journalists in developing nations, and increasing media coverage of WASH issues.

WASH has recently announced the next media awards, covering print and broadcast media coverage from 1 July 2007 to 30 April 2008. This time around, it also involves the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI).

Winning entries will be presented at the World Water Week in Stockholm , Sweden in August 2008. Deadline for the submission of entries is on or before May 15, 2008. Read the announcement

In 2004, the recipient of the first WASH Media Award was Nadia El-Awady from Egypt for her outstanding article “The Nile and its People”. It illustrated the impacts of industrial pollution, sewage and solid waste management on people’s health and dignity along the River Nile.

We evaluated a large number of high quality entries and decided to give special recognition and Certificates of Appreciation to several other journalists. Asha was one of them.

A few months later, it was my privilege to meet Asha in person at a workshop on media and sustainable development that TVE Asia Pacific organised as part of the Education for a Sustainable Future conference in Ahmedabad, India, in January 2005. The photo shows Asha addressing our workshop while Darryl D’Monte, fellow judge in WASH media awards looks on.

By another coincidence, the lady on the right is Nadia El-Awady who was overall winner of the WASH media award. At the time she was the Health and Science Page Editor of IslamOnline.net. She has since been promoted.

Either the world is smaller than we think, or our networks are larger than we imagine.

But I will always be grateful to Asha for opening my eyes on a silent emergency. One that I have since explained to my daughter. She no longer complains.

Read the WASH press release on 2004 media award winners

Read the publication on WASH Media Awards 2004

Read WASH media guide on The Biggest Scandal of the last 50 Years

Photos by Janaka Sri Jayalath, TVE Asia Pacific

Love Thy Mangrove: A Greenbelt Report from Pra Thong island, Thailand

This is Jureerat Pechsai, nicknamed Deun.

She is a member of the Moken community – indigenous people living on the coast and islands on Thailand’s southern coast. Their nomadic lifestyle has earned them the name Sea Gypsies. In Thai, they are called Chao Ley — or people of the sea.

They traditionally live on small boats and move from place to place. When the Monsoon rains make the seas rough, they set up temporary huts on islands – such as Pra Thong Island, where Deun lives.

Pra Thong is an hour’s boat ride from the mainland city of Phuket — some conservationists call it one of the “Jewels of the Andaman” for its biodiversity. It is also an important nesting beach for turtles.

It was on this island that my colleagues from TVE Asia Pacific met and filmed with her in late 2006 for our Asian TV series, The Greenbelt Reports.

The Asian Tsunami of December 2004 devastated the Moken way of life. Their temporary huts were destroyed, and many families lost loved ones. The losses would have been greater if not for the mangrove forest close to the Moken village.

“Moken loves the water, the forest and everything. And we love the mangrove forest the most. The mangrove forest is like a living creature that has helped the Moken people for years. It’s our most beloved place on the island,” says Khiab Pansuwan, an older woman who is a leader in Deun’s community.

After the Tsunami, some Moken felt that they could not return to their nomadic lives. They have chosen to live on the mainland where they feel safe from the waves. Others who remained on their island had new, permanent houses built for them. But the Moken are quick to abandon these whenever they hear rumours of more Tsunamis.

Watch The Greenbelt Reports: Love Thy Mangrove on YouTube:

The mangrove replanting work on Pra Thong island is led by two women, Khiab and Deun.

Deun has been a volunteer with conservation organisations. She learnt about ecosystems and how to protect mangroves and endangered species like sea turtles. She can see many changes in her environment after the tsunami.

“After the tsunami, there are a lot of changes. We didn’t have much grass before, but now weeds are everywhere. The weeds are now more than grass,” says Deun. “In the past, we used to have more and more beach every year. But now the sea has come so close…”

The Tsunami’s impact is not the only factor affecting the mangroves here. Dynamite fishing, oil from boats, foam from fish and oyster nets are all damaging this life-saving greenbelt. Some people also cut down mangrove trees.

But Khiab and Deun are determined to rally everyone around to replant and regenerate their mangroves.

Says Khiab: “The community forest is part of the Moken people. We don’t want to cut the trees or clear it. We want to replant the trees so the forest is like before. We don’t want anyone to cut down trees because the mangrove forest saved many Moken lives.”

The two women are determined to rally everyone around to replant and regenerate their mangroves.

Replanted mangroves will ensure not only protection from the waves, but also a continued supply of shell fish and crabs – the main source of income and food for the Moken.

The Moken have traditionally managed the mangroves sustainably. They fish in different areas of the forest during the year, giving time for fish stocks to regenerate. Logging for firewood is done only in moderation, in designated areas.

But these mangroves are now under threat from outsiders who see it as a source of firewood and shell fish. Only a few Moken are left in the village to protect the forest from these intrusions.

Khiab and Deun have much work to do.

NOTE: We are now looking for more stories like this to be featured in the second Asian TV series of The Greenbelt Reports. See TVEAP website news story calling for story ideas.

All images and video courtesy TVE Asia Pacific

How short is short today? Packaging Nature for today’s television viewers

On 15 July 2007, I wrote about the award-winning natural history film-maker Neil Curry, based in South Africa, whom I last met during the Japan Wildlife Film Festival in Toyama in the summer of 2005.

Most recently, Neil made The Elephant, the Emperor and the Butterfly Tree, which has won several of the industry’s top awards.

I’ve since heard from him, and want to share some of his views on how best to package Nature and wildlife for today’s easily-distracted, attention-challenged audiences. He is responding to my post on 13 July 2007 titled Mine is shorter than yours, yipee!

He says:

‘Mine is shorter than yours….’ is one of the issues I’ve been going on about for years and I’m delighted that Friends of the Earth has now come up with a competition for one-minute films. This ridiculous thing of the ‘standard’ broadcast slot for bluechip wildlife programmes being 52-minute is, in my opinion, one of the main reasons why the public’s view of Nature has become so ‘warped’.

You can’t sustain a 52-minute wildlife film without drama – so we end up with this on-going emphasis on killing, sex, things that are supposedly deadly to humans (everything from snakes and great white sharks to mosquitoes), and dramatic confrontations between macho men – and women – and animals. By insisting on these long films, television itself has actually ‘created’ the audience for wildlife violence – and I’ve been told by more than one commissioning editor that audiences aren’t interested in “place” and “habitat” films any more, they want to see big animals doing exciting things.

In short, Dallas with animals – wildlife “reality-TV”.

Based on my own experience, that’s rubbish. Yes, audiences want a well-told story but they can be equally fascinated by quite prosaic things in the complex inter-relationships of nature, provided the story is told properly. They don’t need all this ‘red in tooth and claw’ stuff. The superb, The Queen of Trees that is currently doing the rounds is a good example – as is the on-going popularity of Attenborough and some of the BBC’s mega-series.

In fact, the over-dramatised programmes often give a quite distorted view of what wildlife is really like. Most creatures don’t spend all their time fighting and killing one another, or looking for human beings to threaten and attack. But if film makers, no matter how serious they are about telling the truth, want to eat, have somewhere to live, educate their kids and so on, they simply have to comply with what the programmers want – and thus, the cycle continues. Of course, it sometimes backfires. Some years ago – unfortunately I can’t remember the exact details now – research in the UK found that school children on field trips into the countryside were bored, because “nothing was happening”. Wildlife programmes on television had led them to expect nature to be full of continuous action and excitement. If children find real nature and the countryside “boring”, imagine how that will influence them when they grow up and find themselves in positions of authority where they may have to make decisions about siting roads, factories, quarries and so on in otherwise unspoilt but “boring” countryside.

If television would just take some of their hour-long wildlife slots and break of them into shorter segments of 30 or even 15 minutes, they would open up the screens to hundreds, perhaps even thousands of fascinating stories about some of the wonders of nature that are astonishing and intriguing, and that would grab audience attention – without any of the drama that is needed to sustain 52 minutes. In my own files I have dozens of stories like that – and so probably, do most other wildlife film makers – but we just never get the chance to tell them because there’s almost no market for short wildlife films on television.

Lord Reith, father of the BBC, said the job of broadcasting was to inform, educate and entertain – but nowadays unfortunately, much of wildlife programming seems to have got itself stuck solely in the entertainment category. It’s a pity because it means a lot of stuff that could give audiences a better understanding of the other life we share this planet with, is largely kept off our screens.

In the circumstances, it’s a miracle that The Elephant, the Emperor and the Butterfly Tree ever got made. It says a lot for the courage and acumen of Mike Gunton, who was commissioning editor on The Natural World at the time, that he was prepared to buck the trend and take it on. There’s no sex, no killing, no violent confrontations – just a boring old tree and a lot of small-scale interactions going on around it, plus a few examples of the dreaded Homo sapiens (who doesn’t even exist in Nature if lots of the wildlife TV programmes are to be believed).

Channel South Asia? Yes and No!

I wrote a few days ago about Ujala TV, a fledgling and entirely private, modest effort to operate a satellite TV channel carrying education and information for South Asian audiences — a quarter of the world’s total population.

This reminds me of discussions that have been around for years about setting up a South Asian TV network.

It’s one of those good ideas too dangerous to be mentioned frequently in public — in case our South Asian governments actually take it up! And that, as all South Asians know, will be the death of another good idea.

Two years ago, Himal Southasian, the only publication that truly thinks and acts at South Asian level (even if they spell it as one word: Southasian!) ran an interesting analysis on the prospects for a South Asian channel. It was written by Indian journalist Aman Malik.

The article’s premise was this:
Isn’t it time for a regional television network that ‘thinks Southasian’ and broadcasts via satellite and cable throughout the region? While Latin America’s incipient Telesur and West Asia’s energetic Al Jazeera might provide models, it is clear that we will have to go our own way.

Read Channel Southasia by Aman Malik in Himal Southasian, Nov – Dec 2005

Himal Southasian Cartoon courtesy Himal Southasian

It looked at the experience of Al Jazeera Arabic channel in the Middle East (launched in 1996), and the more recent initiative of Telesur, the pan Latin American television network founded by the Chavez administration of Venezuela in 2005.

Aman’s article was based on this premise:
“Regionalism in Southasia, which got a boost with the official sanction of the establishment of SAARC two decades ago, has been an increasingly important theme for civil society in each of the region’s countries. Over time, such groups have felt the need for print and electronic media that cover the region as a whole; the overwhelming presence of western satellite news has made analysts call for native channels. The spread of Indian channels, in particular the satellite footprints of Hindi and English broadcasts emanating from India, has again led people in other countries to call for a satellite channel that is uniquely Southasian, without allegiance to any national sensibility.”

Map courtesy www.safeer.info

He also analysed the prevailing media mix accurately when he wrote:
“Coverage of the Southasian neighbourhood is hampered by the fact that no television channels, beyond the few big Indian channels, keep correspondents (or even stringers) in the neighbouring countries. As a result, the news that is used is filtered through the medium of Western wire services and television channels. A region the size of the Subcontinent generates an enormous volume of news, but you would not know that ‘there is a region out there’ if you watched television in any of the countries of Southasia. The Indian channels that are able do so send camera units parachuting into nearby countries – if there is a bombing spree in Dhaka, for instance, a state of emergency in Kathmandu, or a tsunami disaster in Colombo. But they themselves have neither the wherewithal nor the interest to stay with a story to do follow-up.”

He then summed up the divided opinion on the timing for such a channel:
“Some believe that now is the perfect time for a Southasian channel; they tend to be the idealists who hanker for ‘soft borders’, Southasian camaraderie, peace and the prosperity that comes from peace. There are others who believe that the time is not right for such a channel; they tend to be the realists who point out, first, that the audiences are currently not present for a channel that tries to be all things to all audiences across seven nation states. They also point to the enormous costs of running a satellite channel in Southasia. Such an investment would be unlikely to be backed by bankers and investors – at least, not until the movement for Southasian regionalism evolves into a revolution.”

Among the key issues such a venture will have to address is language. There is no one South Asian language spoken and understood by all people — between Hindu and Urdu, a few hundred million may be covered but it still leaves out a sizeable number who don’t understand these. English, for the time being, is the language that cuts across political borders, even if it has its own cultural barriers: only a numerical minority speaks English, even if they are among the more influential in societies.

Other challenges for a Channel South Asia include:
* Given the enormous diversity among South Asian peoples, societies and economies, how would audience be defined for such a channel (no channel can be all things to all people).
* How to rise above the interests and perspective of a single country
* How to recruit and nurture staff who can think beyond and above their own nationalities
* Where in geographical terms can such a broadcaster be anchored, and yet stay beyond the crushing bureaucracy and political pressures of the physical location?
* Where to find the investors with deep enough pockets yet honourable enough not to meddle with the editorial aspects of such an operation

I agree fully with Aman when he writes:
The governments of Southasia clearly cannot be expected to back a Southasian television channel — neither by themselves, nor due to their lack of trust in each other. Such a channel would be an expensive project, from the hardware and satellite hook-ups, to region-wide networks of correspondence and marketing reach. But if not the government, then who would have the required cash to promote it? While a sense of regionalism may be developing, it is still incipient as far as the marketplace is concerned; investors are hardly going to come up at this time with the multimillion dollars that the project would need.

I, for one, am relieved that South Asian governments are unlikely to come together in such a venture – we’ve suffered long enough and hard enough with our state-owned, government-controlled, ruling party mouthpieces (both radio and TV) that pollute our airwaves (a public commons) every day and night. Euphemistically called ‘national television’, these conduits of governmental propaganda have progressively lost audience share — and influence — since private channels started operating in the early 1990s. They are today reduced to vanity channels for vane politicians and bureaucrats. The mass audience has long ago abandoned them.

I’d rather take chances with a South Asian Murdoch, than with our unaccountable, selfish governments.

Read the full article on Channel Southasia in Himal Southasian, Nov-Dec 2005
Enriching South Asian airwaves: Ujala TV is one year old – and counting

Satellites and South Asia: An overview by David Page and William Crawley published in Himal South Asian magazone, August 2000

Arthur C Clarke on ‘Satellites and Saris – 25 years later’ in Frontline Magazine, 28 April – 11 May 2001

Bill Moyers and the Yes Men: The ultimate media merger?

On 20 July 2007, the Bill Moyers Journal on PBS opened with these words by the inimitable Bill Moyers:

“Here with me now are two partners of Triglyceride Investments, a private equity fund that recently announced its intention of combining the assets of all the hedge funds on Wall Street in order to bring under a single canopy of ownership every media outlet in America. Their prospectus contends that the handful of big media companies that control most of what you see, hear, and read cannot possibly produce maximum return on investment as long as each has to field its own army of lobbyists in Washington.

“If only one holding company instead of four or five controlled all the country’s radio and television stations and all of its cable, newspaper, and Internet outlets, eliminating the need for the competitive purchase of politicians, the savings on campaign contributions alone would increase the bottom line tenfold.

“Not the least of their argument is that since our present media system and Washington so closely mirror each others’ interests, it could even be possible to close down the government altogether and have the country run by Wall Street, saving huge sums of money now spent on perpetuating an impression to the contrary. Joining me are Andy Bichlbaum, the chairman of Triglyceride Investments, and his partner, Mike Bonanno, chief executive of their offshore subsidiary, Tsetse Media Inc., with headquarters in the Marianas Islands.”

Bill talks with the two ‘money men’ very seriously for a couple of minutes — before letting on that it’s all a big joke. The two men are not from Wall Street – they’re the ‘Yes Men’ and “they serve up satirical humor laced with lunacy to call the media’s attention to serious issues”.

Read the full transcript of the 21-minute interview

Watch the full interview on PBS Online

The Yes Men are Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, two impersonators who use satire to bring media attention to issues that otherwise might be overlooked.

Their premise, from their website, is:
Small-time criminals impersonate honest people in order to steal their money. Targets are ordinary folks whose ID numbers fell into the wrong hands. Honest people impersonate big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else.

It all started some years ago when they set up a parody of the World Trade Organization’s website. Somebody mistook it for the real thing and they got a serious invitation to speak as experts at an international conference in Austria.

“We actually see this as a form of journalism. Or perhaps more precisely, the form of collaboration of journalists,” explains Bichlbaum in his interview with Bill Moyers.

“A lot of the issues that we address journalists want to cover. But…in many situations, editorial control won’t let them unless there’s a good little hook behind it. And so, we’ve found a way to create funny spectacles that give journalists the excuse to cover issues.”

To me, their best prank was when they managed to fool BBC World TV in front of a global audience. In December 2004, on the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster, “Dow representative” “Jude Finisterra” went on BBC World TV to announce that the company was finally going to compensate the victims with US$ 12 billion, and clean up the mess in Bhopal. The story shot around the world, much to the chagrin of Dow, who briefly disavowed any responsibility. And the BBC was left with egg all over its smug face.

Watch how the mighty news giant fell for a prank by two determined men:

After this, would you ever trust BBC World when it claims to give us the bigger picture?

And here’s the UK Channel Four’s gleeful documentation of how the BBC and other news media fell for the Yes Men:

The Yes Men have also impersonated representatives from Halliburton, Exxon and others, giving public presentations aimed at exposing what they believe to be discrepancies between how these groups want to be seen and how they really act. They call this process, “identity correction.”

While some criticize them for deception and call their hijinx unethical, they argue “these kinds of [corporate and political] wrongdoings are at such a scale – they’re so vast compared to our white lies that we think it’s ethical.”

Take the PBS Online Poll: Do you think the Yes Men’s methods are an acceptable form of social activism?

Mike and Andy released their first film in 2004 entitled, “The Yes Men,” as well as a book, The Yes Men: The True Story of the End of the World Trade Organisation. They are planning on releasing a new film shortly.

If I ever meet them, I’ll have just one question: just how do you suppress the giggles as you fool the gullible?