Media, Peace and Justice in the United States and Africa

William F. Fore

I would guess that many of you in this room have been asking why the American public re-elected George Bush as President of the United States. How is it possible, after four years experiencing Bush's policies -- his unnecessary and inhumane war in Iraq, his withdrawal from the world court, his refusal to participate in the Kyoto agreements, and his profligate borrowing that has brought the nation to the brink of bankruptcy -- how is it possible that the American public actually re-elected him to a second term? I want to try to explain how this happened, and suggest some implications for peace and justice in Africa and elsewhere..

There are many factors at work, of course. But I believe the central factor boils down to this: who tells the stories? That is, who tells what is going on in our world? Who tells who we are, who we were, where we are going? Who tells what is good and what is bad, who should have the power and who should not? From the beginning of recorded human history, these stories -- the mythic stories that hold peoples and cultures together -- have always been told by parents to their children, and from children to their grandchildren, from teacher to students, from religious leaders to their followers. But then, about 50 years ago, this situation abruptly changed, at least, in America. Suddenly, a new kind of story teller emerged. For the first time in human life, parents and the teachers and religious figures were no longer the primary tellers. Instead, beginning about 1950, the stories were being told by the most powerful, the most colorful, the most appealing, and the most widely available storyteller of all time: television. And the new story teller had a different objective from the old ones. Instead of aiming to perpetuate the values and culture of their community, the new story teller had but a single objective --profits.

As a result of this shift, plus the enormous increase in the technical capability of mass media, the true power center, first in America and then throughout the world, have shifted from families, tribes and nations to huge corporations which depend on high tech internal communication for their internal operation, and which control the mass media communication in order to maintain their external control of the world’s populations.

The United States was the first society to be completely transformed this way, though it will not be the last. Today US citizens depend almost entirely on radio and TV for their understanding of what is going on in the real world. If they see it on TV, it happened. If they don't see it on TV, it did not happen.

In addition, the actual process of watching television has itself fundamentally changed the way American perceive the world. The US is now in its third TV generation. More than 90% of the people in America grew up with television from childhood. Neil Postman points out in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death that TV persistently trains people to feel rather than to think. Heart replaces mind. Attitude replaces cognition. A number of commentators on the recent election have pointed out that Kerry supporters tended to be conversant with facts and issues, while Bush supporters relied on how they feel. ‘Bush makes me feel secure’ was the mantra chanted by millions -- and it got him elected.

To understand more fully the way the mass media are shaping American perceptions, their values, and their world-view, let us see how the process is being played out in two key areas in American culture -- religion and politics.

Television and radio have made a significant contribution to a loss of spiritual grounding among many Americans. This does not mean Americans are any less ‘religious’. What it does mean is that too many of our citizens have been content to lapse into false religions -- religions often encouraged by the profit motive of Capitalism. The huge interest in astrology, the lottery and other forms of magic are serious enough. But the real problem is that large numbers of Christians have simply begun to worship false idols – belief in Biblical literalism, belief in a God who can be persuaded to do something for them if they do something for God in return (a vision rejected by Judaism and Jesus more than two millennia ago); belief in their own superiority and justifying themselves and their actions by claiming to be the only ‘children of God’.

When in the 1960s American theologians announced the ‘death of God,’ they were calling people to reject the old, magical, God-with-a-beard in Heaven kind of God. Most people in Europe understood what was being said and refused to go along with the false Christianity that had held sway for hundreds of years. They left the churches in droves. But in America many people instead retreated into the refuge that false Gods provide – certainty in their own righteousness, bliss in their own ignorance, safety if they blindly follow the God of wrath and judgment and Laws.

How did this happen? The difference between American and European Christianity was that in America there were dozens of television evangelists and hundreds of radio preachers on the air, day and night, preaching a bogus religion whose values and world view closely resembles the values and world view of secular America -- winning, wealth, power, being Number One -- while European media never saturated its audience with this kind of message..

Today if you drive across the United States with your radio tuned to one of more than 1,600 "Christian" radio stations, or in your motel you turn on some of the 250 "Christian" TV stations, you will hear an amazing gospel. According to the British writer George Monboit the outline is rather simple. Once Israel has occupied the rest of the "biblical lands," legions of the anti-Christ will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the "rapture." True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven, where seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the several years of tribulation that will follow. (This, incidentally, is one of the main reasons for America's support of Israel, since Israel's control of the "biblical lands" is a first step toward the "Rapture" and the much-desired end of the world!)

If you find it difficult to accept that many ordinary people would really believe this kind of stuff, consider that a recent poll reports that 75% of Americans say they believe in the virgin birth, in a physical Heaven and Hell, and almost as many hold that their God created the earth in seven days. Millions of people hold these amazing (and deeply disturbing) views, while of course millions do not. The result is a nation deeply divided between people who are concerned about real-life issues – war and peace, social justice, the health and welfare of the people – and an equal or even larger number of people who are concerned, instead, about ‘values’ – by which they mean dependence on a magical God, adherence to ancient taboos, the necessity for everyone to believe as they do, and safety in raw (though often hidden) power. Such a nation cannot prosper, because its prevailing religion is internally corrupt, divisive, and an offensive to the God of love and justice.

TV and radio have encouraged a breakdown of the American political system . A fundamental principle of our government has always been that a genuine unfettered flow of information and wide public discussion is essential to its success. But today, citizens depend almost entirely on the mass media for their ‘enlightenment,’ and most of the mass media are controlled by only six huge conglomerates.. Instead of information being open to many voices, today it is carefully, subtly, and quietly constrained by the demands of the marketplace and the opinions of the owners. There is no countervailing power in Washington. Business is in control of government.

As a result, TV constantly trivialises and distorts the real news. For example, just this past month TV focused for most of a week on poor Terri Shiavo, a woman existing in a constant vegetative state for many years. The issue was whether or not doctors should remove her feeding tubes and let her die peacefully. Republican members of Congress suddenly and cynically jumped onto the issue, which neatly diverted public attention that week from the 2006 budget Congress just passed, a budget which will drastically cut health care, education and welfare, and create at least two million more people living in poverty. And the media gladly cooperated with the Republican leadership. They all featured Terri Shiavo; and the budget disappeared from view. Even the exalted New York Times carried a four-column color photo of Terri on its front page, while its report on the budget (and thus on the future of America) was found on page A-10.

We have become ‘one market under God," with less than one-half of 1% of programming in local TV stations devoted to covering local public affairs.

Thus the public has become systematically and incredibly uninformed, and misinformed the the political realities. For example: .

And perhaps most disturbing, more than half of Americans today believe that the United States spends 24 per cent of its budget on aid to poor countries. In reality, the figure is actually less than one-quarter of one percent -- so the public view is off the mark by about 10,000 percent. As individuals, Americans are not stingy. They personally donated more to tsunami relief in Asia than their own government did. But they are woefully uninformed and misinformed by the media through which they perceive the world.

What are the implications of this situation for the rest of the world, and specifically for Africa?

When I first visited the Congo in 1959 I remember being told that not a single Congolese had yet been allowed to enroll in a college or university outside the Congo (and there were none in the Congo itself). When independence came, the only leader who might have held the Congo together, Patrice Lumumba, was kidnapped and murdered with American and British connivance. Then the Congo, renamed Zaire, was entrusted by Europe and the United States to Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled it for 36 years with monstrous and unscrupulous plundering and mismanagement.

On my second visit to Zaire in the 1980's, Kinshasha had almost no electricity or water and busses were sitting stranded on the main thoroughfare with a palm branches stuck in their gas tanks. However, I discovered that each night an airplane took off from the eastern provinces, bound for Brusssels with a cargo of molybdenum and other precious metals, the profits to be placed in Mobuto's numbered accounts in Switzerland. Then, upon Mobuto's death, Zaire became the scene of the genocide of some 800,000 Tutsis exterminated by their Hutu neighbors, and shortly thereafter it witnessed the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Hutus at the hands of the Tutsis who sought, and found, revenge -- with no action by the United States which had the power, but not the interest to intervene. During the six years after 1996, 3.3 million people died, at which point Laurent Kabila was named the next "good guy" of Zaire. US Secretary of State Madeline Albright flew to Zaire to annoint Kabila. She also visited Monrovia which was in the midst of an orgy of killing and looting, and told the Liberians that "the civil war is your war."

Thus it is that Washington has consistently supported the wrong leaders and has done nothing to provide the security and support needed for nation building during all of the last half-century.

Were average Americans aware of all this? Not at all. If anything, they were fed simplistic news releases that identified the bad guys and the good guys (which usually got it wrong) -- as if Africa were the scene of a Hollywood movie. Why? Because the multinational corporations found it profitable for Americans citizens to remain uninformed, so that they could continue to conduct their various businesses as usual in Africa. In many cases their business was called "foreign aid."

Let me describe a personal experience with "foreign aid." On that second trip to Zaire, I was given a tour of a brand new radio and television center located in Kinshasha. The building was set in the midst of a park of grass, where no grass grew elsewhere. It offered an attractive water fall -- in a city where there was no water pressure most of the day. The building was spectacular, several stories high, glass and steel, with marble floors, large production studios, the most luxurious dressing rooms I have ever seen, the latest electronic equipment -- and devoid of people expect for the guard and my guide. There was no production, no broadcasting because, of course, there were almost no TV sets in the country. On the second floor, a half dozen people in two rooms were engaged in producing sporadic medium-wave radio broadcasts, but that was all. The complex had been funded by a loan from the International Monetary Fund, but the money itself never reached Zaire. It went straight to Siemens and Alcatel and other corporations in Europe which made huge profits by building and outfitting a radio and TV complex that Zaire didn't need and couldn't use. So much for "foreign aid."

But that is the way the new post-industrial capitalism works. It is no respecter of nationality or laws. It simply looks for profit anywhere, usually at the expense of the public good. And the American public just did not know this is happening. A BBC World Service Poll conducted in January of this year revealed that of twenty-one countries from all regions of the world, the re-election of President Bush is seen as negative for world peace and security by eighteen. But not in America. Americans thought their country was working world-wide to bring about peace and security -- through the leadership of President Bush and his administration. And so long as Americans are consistently misinformed by a captive media, they will continue to know nothing about Zaire, about "foreign aid," about Africa, indeed, about the rest of the world.

I believe that in the near term the future for justice and peace is not at all bright. Bush militarists will continue to extend the American empire to make the world safe for multinational corporations. They will attempt to extend and perfect this new kind of empire, which is really a production and consumption empire. They will extend this new world-encompassing Rome, no longer bound by international law, by the concerns of allies, or by constraints on their use of military force.

But while this new imperialism will continue for some time, there is also hope. The excesses of the Bush administration are so great that the combination of huge deficits, an unpopular war that offers no easy ending, and increasingly unpopular threats to civil rights at home could well end public support for Republican administrations for years to come. That's the good news. The bad news is that even if political reform becomes possible, the United States military-industrial complex is not going to relinquish its new-found empire easily. Practically every business and citizen in America now benefits from the new empire in some way, direct or indirect, which means that fundamental change in the near term is going to be extremely difficult..

In the long term, however, things are a bit more encouraging. I see two possible scenarios. In the first, the United States continues its empire strategy until the nation collapses under its own weight. This is what happened to the USSR which collapsed, not because the U.S. forced the Soviets to overspend their military budget, but because of internal economic contradictions, imperial overreach, and an inability to reform. Similar internal economic problems already plague the U.S.. We have gigantic national and personal debt. We are rapidly overreaching our ability to deal militarily with rebellion that emerges on the world scene.

This leaves us with the question whether Americans are actually able to generate the will and direction to change, which brings us to the second scenario. It is not impossible that radio and TV could become once again the media that Congress originally designed them to be -- channels that meet the public interest, and not merely the interests of business. Simply by enforcing existing laws and requiring stations to provide more time for news and analysis, by applying the Fairness Doctrine and personal attack rules which require fairness and balance, radio the TV could once again become open channels of information and entertainment rather than mere opportunities for commercial profit and control.

Is such media reform possible? The answer is yes. In fact, it has already begun. In November of 2003, the first National Conference for Media Reform was held in Madison, Wisconsin. More than 1,700 activists, scholars, leaders, artists, producers, and policy makers gathered to strategize. A second conference is scheduled for May 13-15 this year in St. Louis. This time not only will it be attended by ordinary citizens, but also by key members of Congress. In addition to the usual speeches, the event will offer workshops on such topics as grassroots organizing, media literacy, community radio and community Internet. So there is progress.

It will take time and a great deal of political organization. But once this Gordian Knot of media dominance by a few corporations is cut, the American public would then begin to understand what is truly going throughout the world. With their information isolation eliminated, their views toward the world would surely begin to change. We have a saying that "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you MAD!" Americans can be fooled for a long time, but not forever. In the not too distant future Americans will react against the overweening hubris of their government and decide in favor of serious political reform. Then ordinary citizens will begin to address the real underlying factors that cause much of the rebellions throughout the world -- the problems of poverty and health, of unequal trade arrangements, of lack of capital for development. That is the way to fight terrorism.

And there is hope from other directions. This year the United Nations is proposing a huge increase in aid to reduce poverty world-wide. Every industrial nation is being asked to devote one-half of one percent of its national income to aid (which is only double present small commitments). This effort could be a significant step in the right direction, but again, only if the American citizens understood and supported it along with the rest of the developed nations can it come into fruition. .

The fact is that the direction of U.S. policy affects the future of every country in Africa -- and most of the rest of the world as well. African nations cannot hope to develop economically without serious aid from the United States. So which way will the U.S. go? The answer depends upon whether a majority of Americans begin to understand the true situation world-wide and are motivated to act as responsible world citizens. This in turn depends on media reform which would re-regulate broadcasting in the public interest and open up radio and TV to become channels of genuine news and information. The solution lies to a great extent with media reform. That reform is far from achieved. In fact, it has hardly begun. But I hope I have made the case for the importance of achieving that reform -- for the sake of justice and peace throughout the world.

This paper was presented at the Fourth Annual International Conference on An Inter-faith Perspective on Globalisation, Africa and Globalisation for the Common Good: The Quest for Justice and Peace, April 18 - 28, Nairobi, Kenya.