-- Paul
================================ THURSDAY, APRIL 22, 1999
BOOKS
Real news may lie in slow news
By Paul Rosenberg
While little known in America, John Pilger is one of Britain's most honored (though decidedly unstuffy) journalists and documentary filmmakers. Like America's George Seldes or I.F. Stone, his main concerns are the stories that the mainstream press systematically ignores, downplays, or grotesquely misrepresents, and the relationship between the press and these stories.
His new book, "Hidden Agendas," he explains, "is about power, propaganda and censorship," and it spans the world from Burma, Indonesia, and Vietnam to South Africa, Australia, Britain, and America.
Pilger also introduces his book as devoted to "slow news" - the non-glitzy stories that come to the fore "on a Sunday or during the holiday period when the authorized sources of information are at rest."
But more than that, it's devoted to the point of view of those who suffer through - and make - slow news, people such as Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and the millions of Burmese citizens who support her, or Bobby Muller, co-founder of Vietnam Veterans of America, which works without fanfare to heal the wounds of that war, in Indochina and America, and keep us from forgetting its lessons.
People like these occasionally appear in the media spotlight, but only as transient curiosities. Pilger claims that media figures - owners, journalists, and politicians alike - largely ignore, misunderstand, and patronize them. He portrays these would-be giants, often through their own words, as morally shriveled figures devoid of credibility.
Thus, we encounter future British Prime Minister Tony Blair over a year before his election, "on a tour of Asia, during which he declared that the 'success' of the Singapore autocrat Lee Kuan Yew 'very much reflects my own philosophy.' " Pilger explores the sinister implications of this statement as Blair took power, and the vast gulf between free markets with "Asian values" and the Asian values of democracy and social solidarity exemplified by Aung San Suu Kyi and her counterparts throughout the region.
Similarly, the story of Rupert Murdoch's empire-building, though centered on the monopolization and tabloidization of the British media, has a revealing East Asian moment. In 1993, Murdoch delivered a "speech lauding the 'communications revolution [as] an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes every- where.' " China responded by banning satellite dishes, threatening his Hong Kong-based satellite service with ruin. Murdoch swiftly changed his tune, first by removing the BBC (which had aggressively covered Tiananmen Square) from his service, then developing a deepening partnership with the Chinese, broadcasting their propaganda, and creating a highly censored Internet interface with them.
Pilger pieces together a mosaic of such revealing moments, bits of slow news that add up to a picture diametrically opposed to the self-congratulatory portrait painted by politicians and privatizers flying under the banner of market democracy.
His sense of mission goes back further, as he recounts the struggles for freedom of the press in the 1500s, inextricably bound up in the struggles of the Protestant Reformation, which planted the seeds of modern democracy. This sense of historical and moral context sets "Hidden Agendas" apart. Alongside every spark of outrage is the oxygen of historical understanding.
(c) Copyright 1999 The Christian Science Publishing Society. All rights reserved.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"