Interesting times – but who’s listening?

I think it was Bobby Kennedy who evoked the Chinese curse about living in interesting times during a speech to a reform movement in Cape Town more than 50 years ago.

Kennedy was speaking at a time of institutionalised apartheid in South Africa, the Cold War, and the growing quagmire of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam — enough for him to describe it as an “era of danger and uncertainty”.

He would have blanched at the state of the world today.

A journalist is murdered and his body dismembered on a routine visit to his own country’s consulate; thousands of refugees, representatives of millions of displaced people around the world are being threatened with military force as they approach the US border, where a President notorious for his abusive and vulgar utterances is attacking the media for a lack of civility.

In China there may be as many as a million people in ‘re-education camps’ because the State objects to their religious beliefs; pipe bombs delivered through the mail cause chaos in American cities; billions of dollars are being wiped off the value of stocks and shares as markets around the world slump, and the Middle East is once again at melting point in Israel’s seemingly endless dispute with the Palestinians. 

Stories that would have struck horror a decade ago get just a scant reference: Famine in Africa and bombings in Yemen forced onto the back-burner by trade wars and the posturing of potentates.

When did things start to go rotten? I guess we all have different answers, but for me it was the 2016 vote for Britain to leave the European Union.

In a globalising world, beset with problems that can only be addressed by increasingly close international cooperation, that plunge back into 19^th century nationalism was incomprehensible. Voting to stay in the EU was a no-brainer.

Throughout the campaign, the Remain camp put out reasoned and responsible arguments about the advantages of EU membership and the dangers inherent in leaving. In the end not enough people could be bothered to listen.

Instead it was the glib, essentially meaningless slogans like “give us our nation back”; a hard border in Northern Ireland – oh that will never happen, and glittering fibs, such as the huge financial benefits leaving would bring, that won the day.

Then along came Donald Trump in the same populist tradition, giving simple answers to complex questions which in the end were no answers at all, but still good enough for a lazy, disengaged electorate.        

My greatest fear is that just when it is so important to look outward, mankind is doing the reverse, switching off from the important questions of the day and giving free reign to whoever says “leave it to me, I can manage it for you”.

So Trump, or Xi, or Putin, or the burgeoning numbers of petty dictators ready to demonise someone else for the ills they have no way of curing are getting a free rein.

History shows there is nothing new here. It is what a lot of decent, humane Germans must have done as the Nazi atrocities began to mount in the 1930s.

Unfortunately history is long and the human attention span is short.  

Death highlights Ganges failure

The death of Indian environmental activist G.D. Agarwal should act as a wake-up call for the Government in New Delhi which faces a General Election next year.

Agarwal starved himself to death in a 15-week hunger strike in protest at a lack of action in cleaning up the Ganges, India’s largest river system and sacred to Hindus.

The desperate action of the 86-year-old should be especially significant to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept to power in 2014 on a pledge to clean up the 2,500 kilometre river, choked with industrial and domestic waste which in places is little more than an open sewer.

While past efforts at reducing pollution in the waterway have always resulted in miserable failure, Modi projected a ‘can-do’ image based on his achievements as Chief Minister for Gujarat State, and many of his followers believed that this time it would be different.

Few doubt that the Government has made genuine efforts to tackle the problem, but an ambitious clean-up plan launched in 2015 has so far failed to even make a dent in the amount of pollution discharged into the river.

Complicated planning rules, disputes with land-owners over where to build the much-needed sewage treatment plants and arguments with industries that send their raw waste straight into the river have left the project idling on the launch pad.

Less than a quarter of the funds allocated to the program have been spent.

In an attempt to make some progress before the election deadline, bureaucrats have resorted to exotic measures, such as seeding the waters with pollution-gobbling microbes.  

Agarwal’s death was met by an outpouring of grief from his supporters, but also anger that despite his sacrifice and all the promises from New Delhi, the Ganges is still a health hazard for the faithful who seek to bathe in its waters in order to wash away their sins.

Modi took to Twitter to say he was saddened by Agarwal’s death. “His passion towards learning, education, saving the environment, particularly Ganga cleaning, will always be remembered,” the Prime Minister said.

There is no doubt these sentiments were sincere, but for increasing numbers of Indians it is actions, not fine words or visions, that are needed to do justice to the sacred Ganges and her historic role as a symbol of the nation’s ancient culture and civilisation.

Shedding blood for press freedom

It has been a terrible week for journalism — or maybe it is just one in a series of awful weeks, different only because the sheer horror of what has taken place has forced its way into the world’s headlines.

Should the details of the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi prove to be true — and the evidence seems to be stacking up that it is — then we have reached new depths of officially-sanctioned depravity in a world where previously unthinkable acts are becoming commonplace.

It does appear that what should have been a routine visit to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to collect papers confirming his divorce ended in Khashoggi being detained, murdered, his body dismembered and the parts spirited away.

The journalist, living in exile, had been a critic of the Saudi regime, and its new strongman, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who Khashoggi said had gathered too much power into his own hands.

It seems that even this relatively mild criticism incurred the wrath of the Crown Prince. The Saudi Government has issued a ‘categorical denial’ it had anything to do with Khashoggi’s disappearance, but will have to live with the fact increasing numbers of people are no longer giving any value to such official statements.

At the same time investigations are continuing into the rape and murder of Bulgarian television reporter Viktoria Marinova in the northern town of Ruse.

An investigative journalist, she was the host of a recent television program discussing alleged fraud involving European Union funds, prominent businesspeople and government officials.

Authorities have been quick to say they believe the murder was unrelated to Marinova’s work, rather the act of a common criminal in a chance encounter while she was out jogging. They said a key suspect had left the country for Germany on the following day and were seeking his extradition.

However, corruption is a significant problem in Bulgaria – the worst in the European Union – and Marinova’s murder has touched off debate about the freedom of the media in that country, with journalists on the ground saying they are frequently harassed for writing criticisms of the government.

It is appalling that this should be happening in an EU country, even worse that it is the third such incident involving journalists within the borders of the EU in the past year. It seems that Brussels, beset with problems involving refugees and Brexit, is giving insufficient attention to this escalating war against the media. 

The two high profile cases discussed here are but the tip of the iceberg. The Committee to Protect Journalists has recorded 1322 deaths between 1992 and 2018 many simply because the news gatherers were in the wrong place at the wrong time while on dangerous assignments.

However, the committee has found that 170 were deliberately murdered at the hands of government officials in countries ranging from the Philippines to Russia.

Add to this the thousands who have been harassed, beaten and jailed, and it is clear that it is not just journalism and journalists under attack, but the very structures essential to free and just societies.  

American Founding Father Thomas Jefferson once wrote: “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”

Gangsters and thugs, many parading in high office, are doing their best to limit press freedom today. We should all take note.   

What hope for the Fourth Estate?

When Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke coined the term Fourth Estate as a title for the news media, he was acknowledging the importance it had achieved in his 18^th century Britain.

He was placing it alongside the three historic estates of the realm — the nobility, the clergy and the commoners — without which the nation could not properly function.

Today, the Fourth Estate’s role as one of the pillars of a democratic society is under attack — from technological challenges and its failure to properly adjust to society in the throes of widespread change. 

The last few decades have exposed its inherent weakness — despite being an essential element in creating and shaping public opinion, in keeping governments, organisations and powerful individuals accountable to the masses, it is largely run by private interests and held hostage to the profit motives of its owners and shareholders.

Traditional media no longer has a monopoly on the generation of news and is experiencing widespread trauma as advertising content falls and companies make cutbacks in a desperate search for lost revenues.

In the United Kingdom newspapers are closing at the rate of one a week; a switch to online operations has been mismanaged and in many cases is simply too late.

The situation was highlighted in recent days by a call from the UK National Union of Journalists (NUJ) for a reporting scheme run by the State financed British Broadcasting Corporation to be expanded to include coverage of the thousands of criminal and civil courts.

In a statement supporting its call the NUJ said local newspapers no longer had the resources to cover all that goes on in the country’s courts.

“Traditionally, local newspapers always covered their local Magistrate, Sheriff and Crown Court trials,” the statement said.

“Now hardly any local papers cover trials or courts in detail. If people do not know what goes on in the courts, are not aware of what offences are prosecuted or what punishments are meted out, then they remain uninformed and justice is not seen to be done.”

The same can be said for councils, tribunals, police, planning authorities and a host of other organisations that were once regularly investigated and reported on by experienced local journalists.

Those that remain say they are so overworked they are anchored to their computers filling space with whatever comes to hand, usually media releases and advertorials.

The situation is exacerbated by the way the internet has become a platform for anyone with a smartphone to sound off on social media, leading to a public distrust of news gathering in general and support for politicians who label anything they dislike as ‘fake news’.

Attempts to fill the gap are being made by a proliferation of ‘hyperlocals’ , often run by one or two retrenched journalists, operating out of homes or garages, providing saturation coverage of small areas and gaining revenue from the advertisements and sponsorship of local businesses, societies and clubs.

With its members often managing to survive on shoestring budgets, the movement has made a robust beginning, but whether it is the future of news gathering remains debateable, the quality and content being dependent on highly limited resources and personnel prepared to face uncertain futures.

This adds up to a problematic future for Edmund Burke’s Fourth Estate. Free societies demand it survives, but in what form is as yet, impossible to tell.