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Profit, Pirates, and Propaganda
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by Jeff Nygaard
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The twin problems of IUU fishing and the dumping of toxic waste have caused untold suffering to unknown numbers of virtually defenseless Somalian fishermen and coastal residents.
On April 8th U.S. newspapers were filled with reports of “a riveting high-seas drama [in which] an unarmed American crew wrested control of their U.S.-flagged cargo ship from Somali pirates . . . and sent them fleeing to a lifeboat with the captain as hostage.” Almost immediately one could see some familiar premises being used to shape the coverage of this story, with the result being that certain points were highlighted while other, equally important, points were rendered invisible.
The story hit close to home. My neighborhood in Minneapolis, the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, has a huge population of Somalian immigrants, the largest population of Somalians in the U.S. That’s the context in which the local newspaper, the Star Tribune, printed the following sentence in a story on the Somali pirate hostage crisis on April 14th, 2009:
“The pirate crisis . . . showed Somalia for what it is: A textbook definition of a ‘failed state,’ whose lawlessness explains . . . why so many have eagerly chosen Minnesota over Mogadishu...”
Media around the nation were filled with similar references during and immediately after the hostage-taking, including references to “the scourge of piracy,” the claim that “Pirates are terrorists,” and so forth. I don’t condone piracy, but I couldn’t help but notice the deafening silence in regard to what one analyst calls “the other piracy” which has remained almost unmentioned in the tsunami of coverage in the U.S. media of this “riveting” story.
That other piracy is “the massive illegal foreign fishing piracy that has been poaching and destroying the Somali marine resources for the last 18 years following the collapse of the Somali regime in 1991.” That’s Kenyan journalist Mohamed Abshir Waldo speaking, referring to what is known as Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing. Waldo adds that “Another major problem closely connected with the IUUs and illegal fishing is industrial, toxic and nuclear waste dumping in both off-shore and on-shore areas of Somalia.”
The twin problems of IUU fishing and the dumping of toxic waste have caused untold suffering to unknown numbers of virtually defenseless Somalian fishermen and coastal residents. The Voice of America published a story in 2005 on “reports from northern Somalia of illnesses consistent with radiation sickness, including respiratory infections, mouth ulcers, abdominal hemorrhages and unusual skin diseases.” The Agence France Presse news service reported at that time that “Somalia’s government in exile [has] demanded an urgent probe” into these reports. None of this was deemed newsworthy by the U.S. media.
According to Waldo, many European countries have been implicated in these illegal practices, including France, Spain, Greece, and the UK. None of these European states are ever referred to in the media as “failed states,” despite their past and current practice of exploiting and stealing from weaker nations around the world. Nor is that bleak term applied to the U.S., despite its “failure” exemplified by a long history of military aggression against sovereign states around the globe, from Iraq to Nicaragua to Vietnam. Not to mention the U.S.’s poisoning of the world economy, and its being the world’s largest producer of carbon dioxide, and its having 50 million people uninsured, and so forth.
Meeting Market Demands
Back in 1928 “The Father of Public Relations,” Edward L. Bernays, wrote about motion pictures (the mass media of his day), saying that “Because pictures are made to meet market demands, they reflect, emphasize, and even exaggerate broad popular tendencies, rather than stimulate new ideas and opinions.”
Today’s media “meet market demands” by delivering consumers to advertisers. They do this, in part, by basing their stories on premises that are the most comfortable to the most people. This means sticking, by and large, to “conventional wisdom,” which tends to be made up of the most “uncontroversial” ideas held by the largest number of people. This is so because the alternative—using challenging or unconventional premises upon which to base a news story—will induce in many people a dissonance that will tend to corrode the trust upon which every media organization relies. So editors and reporters who stay in the business for any length of time come to know—consciously or not—that they had better stay on well-traveled ground.
Due to its size and reach, such reliance on pre-existing ideas on the part of the media simultaneously reflects and shapes public opinion. Here’s how it worked in the Somali pirate story:
In this story the media, by and large, reported the crimes of the so-called “pirates” in vivid detail, engaging in fear-mongering—referring to “high-seas terror” and “failed states”—while ignoring the pattern of crimes from which the piracy was born. By doing so journalists as a group were “reflecting, emphasizing, and even exaggerating broad popular tendencies,” just as Ed Bernays said profit-oriented media tend to do. The “tendencies” upon which much (not all) of the reporting on the Somali pirate story relied include:
1. A tendency to racism, in which poor, largely dark-skinned people are identified as “pirates” and “terrorists” while more-affluent, largely “white” people are assumed to be nothing but innocent victims, if they are characterized by race at all, which they are typically not. (The crew of the U.S. ship was not entirely “white,” by the way, but that doesn’t change the racialized understanding of perpetrator and victim to which I here refer.)
2. A tendency to Eurocentrism, in which the victim/perpetrator dynamic is invariably viewed from the vantage point of the European West, where there are no “failed states”, but only tearful reunions and heroic feats of military “precision killing” that rescue “our” victims.
3. A corollary of the previous tendency is the tendency of people in the more powerful nations to focus on threats to people like themselves. That is, threats to the powerful. To use a crude analogy, when a human is bitten by an insect it is nearly certain that action will be taken to address the threat. In contrast, when a human steps on a less-powerful insect the death will rarely be noticed by humans, much less addressed with action. In the current example, the “piracy” that threatens European shipping moves our President to say that “we have to ensure that those who commit acts of piracy are held accountable for their crimes.” He doesn’t say, and needn’t say, that he is referring to one “piracy” only: that of the less-powerful people in the story. His silence helps perpetuate the invisibility of the piracy of the powerful.
4. A tendency to simplify and individualize human behavior. In this way of thinking, the explanation for “piracy” is that some people are simply evil. This is in contrast to a “systems” way of thinking which, while it may also condemn the criminal behavior, would attempt to understand that behavior by considering context, history, and the possibility that the perpetrators may have some complex and comprehensible motivations for their behavior.
I’m not accusing any individual reporter of conspiring to promote any certain types of ideas. The desires and intentions of individual journalists are of little importance in this dynamic, since the bottom line is this: The news corporations that best “meet market demands” by best “reflecting, emphasizing, and even exaggerating broad popular tendencies” will be the ones that survive in the marketplace. The organizations that consistently rock the ideological boat will not thrive, and over the long run will likely not survive.
It’s not a conspiracy. It’s an unavoidable consequence of the profit orientation of the modern media industry.
This article is a slightly edited and updated version on an article that originally appeared in Nygaard Notes Number 426, April 24, 2009 online www.nygaardnotes.org. |
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© 2009 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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