Media Responsibility – Oxymoron Du Jour

Strange as it may sound, CNN is being sued by the Chinese people. A group of fourteen Chinese lawyers filed a lawsuit in a Beijing court against CNN and commentator Jack Cafferty. According to the lawsuit, Cafferty had made insulting and derogatory comments about the Chinese people. Among other comments, Cafferty had said: “We continue to import their junk with the lead paint on them and the poisoned pet food and export, you know, jobs to places where you can pay workers a dollar a month to turn out the stuff that we’re buying from Wal-Mart”, “I think they’re basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years”.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2008-04/23/content_6638727.htm

For one, I strongly disagree with Mr. Cafferty. I think he’s playing deaf and dumb. Wal-Mart has such incredible buying power in China, that it’s able to convince (or rather twist the hands of) manufacturers to sell at unacceptable prices, possibly knowing that quality will undoubtedly be compromised. Wal-Mart also has the power to demand quality, and refuse to accept poisonous pet food or lead painted toys. The responsibility is with Wal-Mart, and some Americans who insist on low prices regardless of quality. Stereotyping a whole people as “goons” and “thugs” is unacceptable, particularly when you know many, and particularly when it’s done by a globally watched TV network. CNN is NOT an objective observer and reporter. It SIDES, it promotes, it sometimes DRIVES events.

So Mr. Cafferty is wrong, for starters. But he hides his big tongue and sharp teeth behind the “freedom of speech”, which is a good legal cover, but a bad moral one.

But this is common. Some reporters make a comment, they watch the consequences and they move on. I remember clearly when I was growing up, I used to see “apologies” in the paper. The inside column of page 11, right between the obituaries, and the library opening time, there was an “apology”, for ruining a person’s life, accusing him, wrongly, of something he’d never do. But would they pick up the pieces? Walk to the store with him to help him take the glares? Escort his kids to school? Wipe his mother’s tears? Pay his alimony bills? Of course not. The are on to the next story.

The media should have responsibility. There should be some major consequences to untrue reporting. But not only. I would love to see some punishment, when the media drives an event that turns really bad. An interesting example would be South Africa. Indeed, I was one kid who growing up screamed and yelled along with Bono: “Free South Africa”. I believe Apartheid was terrible. I still do. But I can’t ignore the fact that life expectancy in South Africa is one of the lowest in the world – a man making it to 45 in South Africa has beaten the odds. Making it there without carrying HIV is outright miraculous. Being well educated on top of that with a reasonable income and a good career horizon is as likely as being hit by a lightning rod twice at the same spot, in the summer, in the desert…

Does Bono care now that infant mortality went up, life expectancy down, GDP down, HIV up? I doubt it. He’s freeing Tibet now.

The media is important, if they were doing their jobs – reporting situations. But if, just for the sake of the argument, they were doing more – like siding with one side, supporting, promoting, driving events, then we’re in deep shit. The reason? Simple: nobody elected them to run our lives. Media driven societies are nothing but dictatorships in democracies clothes.

China isn’t perfect. Nobody is. China isn’t so bad either. Don’t let anyone decide for you, and let me assure you, the media is siding, and what you’re seeing on the news, is partial at best.