John Allen
�National Catholic Reporter�, USA
  

We have been asked this morning to speak on �Mass Media: War and Peace,� and perhaps it�s just the professional cynic in me, but I can�t help but suspect a hidden agenda. My suspicion is that the title chosen for our roundtable is intended to suggest that we journalists, when facing a story about war and peace, should act as agents of the latter and opponents of the former. That is, through our journalism we should promote peaceful outcomes to conflict. Like many other instances of the road to Hell being paved with good intentions, this sounds noble indeed, but upon further reflection I fear it creates a dangerous premise for our discussion. Hence, forgive me if I spend just a few moments on first principles.

I am always nervous when journalists are invited to speak on some good cause, because the expectation is usually that we will promise to promote that cause. Usually the aims are indeed lofty; how can one be opposed to women�s health, for example, or keeping children off drugs? Or, to invoke the present example, how can one be opposed to peace? Yet I fear where such reasoning takes us. I fear that whenever a journalist prepares a story with a cause in mind, the temptation is to skew the facts in order to support that cause, to leave out voices that sing outside the chorus, to accent points that cohere with the pre-ordained conclusion and minimize those that don�t. In the end, whether one slants a story for world peace or for Coca-Cola, the principle involved is the same: salesmanship has triumphed over journalism.

As journalists, I would argue, we already have a perfectly noble cause: the truth. My obligation is to collect as much of it on any given subject as I can, then to explain to my readers why these particular truths matter, where they fit into the larger context of global events, and what consequences might flow from them. If I attempt to do anything else � push a particular conclusion about the story, nudge my readers into a particular course of action � I have stepped over the line that separates journalists from activists and spin-doctors. Blurring that line is dangerous to the health of civil society. Newspaper and broadcast journalism is supposed to be the modern public square, a place where people from all walks of life and all points of view can meet, to at least have a shared set of information and points of reference before the ideological and political arguments begin. A trustworthy newspaper promotes a common vocabulary, it keeps people in conversation with each other, it promotes dialogue. When that role breaks down, the result is ideologization and polarization of public debate.

With that as a premise, I believe that there is an appropriately journalistic critique to be offered of how media outlets cover conflict situations. I believe that contemporary journalism often does not do these stories justice � not because we have failed to build a more peaceful world, an aim which is outside our competence, but because we have failed to give people the tools they need to understand what�s happening.

I have never covered a war zone. (I cover the Vatican, which certainly has its pitched battles sometimes, but fortunately not the kind where onlookers get shot.) However, I have written for virtually every major newspaper in the United States, and I am under contract to CNN as a Vatican analyst, so I know something of the dynamics of the TV business as well. I hope to bring that experience to bear in reflecting on the way we cover war and peace.

In that spirit, let me offer three observations.

Observation One: The �Herd Mentality� Limits Our Vision

Today�s market for information sources presents consumers with a staggering range of choices. The Internet, news radio, specialized publications and many other outlets present a wide variety of other methods of delivery. The striking thing, of course, is how relatively homogenous these means are in terms of content. At any given moment, most news channels, Internet sites and print outlets are chasing the same story � whatever �the story� of the moment is. This is the so-called �herd mentality� of the modern media. Given how expensive and risky it can be to deploy news resources, editors and producers are hesitant to move unless someone else moves first. TV networks typically don�t move on a story unless they see it on the news wires or hear it on the radio, but once one of the networks has decided to cover something, they all do it.

Ironically, the result of the herd mentality is that we have a greater diversity in means of delivery, and less diversity in content, than at any other period in the history of journalism.

One consequence of the herd mentality is that by awaiting a collective decision, we are far too slow to arrive at a story. In conflict situations, this means that the press typically arrives only after fighting has broken out, rather than covering the earlier stages at which decisions might have been made differently. Similarly, we often leave a story far too early, leaving critical questions hanging in the air. I remember quite well, for example, Pope John Paul�s 1998 trip to Cuba. American news organizations flocked to await the pope, prepared to cover another Tianammen Square-style confrontation between Communism and pro-democracy forces. Just as the pope arrived, however, those same news organizations pulled their personnel out of Cuba and sent them back to the United States. The pope had been trumped by the outbreak of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. This decision had nothing to do with whether or not the story in Cuba had been resolved, and everything to do with the instinct that ratings would be boosted by the Clinton sex saga.

The justification given for such decisions is that in a competitive news market, no one can afford to gamble hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment and personnel on stories that may not produce ratings. This is an understandable managerial instinct, but it cannot help but produce a superficial understanding of complex issues. Why, for example, was the recent resurgence of ethnic hostility in Rwanda a surprise? Anyone who thought the Hutu and Tutsi conflict had been �resolved� wasn�t paying attention � and, of course, most media outlets in the Western world were among those caught napping.

One can no longer defend an artificial focus on a few stories on the basis that information is hard to find. In the age of the Internet, information is no longer a scarce resource. The problem is precisely the opposite; there is a glut of data, and people need help deciding what actually merits their attention. Ironically, therefore, while it was once feared that do-it-yourself information gathering would compromise the traditional �gatekeeper� role of the press, as it turns out that role is more important than ever � not in terms of deciding what information is available, but in deciding what information is important. Obviously, this role is badly compromised if choices are based not on the intrinsic importance of a story, but simply whether everyone else is already doing it.

Finally, the herd mentality is dangerous because it sets up speed, rather than content, as the way news organizations distinguish themselves. A network or a newspaper scores points by being first to break the �big story,� whatever that story happens to be. Verification of information prior to publication or broadcast becomes steadily less important, which obviously allows all sorts of misinformation and mythology to take root before anyone has the time to sort out the truth. The fact that a large percentage of Americans still believe that Iraq was behind the terrorist bombings of Sept. 11, 2001, illustrates the point.

One possible antidote to the herd mentality is a greater public investment in news-gathering, so that media outlets are better insulated from the pressures of ratings and advertising revenues. For all of its limitations, National Public Radio in the United States is an example of the possibilities for this kind of news coverage. Short of these kinds of decisions on the political level, however, I think those of us in the news industry must be a bit more bold in challenging conventional wisdom. Do we really know there is not a market, for example, for better-informed and more regular reporting from Africa? How do we know? I would suggest that it hasn�t been tried. Do we know that there is no market for thoughtful and consistent reporting from Latin America? At least in the United States, the 40 million Hispanics in the country might respond well if one of the networks, or one of the daily papers, were to make Latin America a top news priority. The point is that we will not know how much diversity, how much independence of judgment and patience in approach, the market will bear until someone breaks ranks.

Observation Two: The �Cult of the Image� Distorts the Way We Cover Conflict

I�ll offer another anecdeote from a papal trip. I recall being on the CNN platform at World Youth Day in Toronto in 2002 on the morning of the concluding Mass, when some two million young people gathered to be with the pope. That morning we were competing for airtime against the day�s other big story, which centered on the rescue of a group of miners trapped in a collapsed shaft in a coal mine in the United States. Every time the control room in Atlanta had to make a decision as to which story to cut to, the question was always the same: �Who has better pictures?� It was a lucky break for us in Toronto, because Vatican liturgists know how to stage visually stunning events, and so we managed to get on the air a fair bit. Evaluated in terms of journalistic logic, however, this seemed a very strange way to do business; the decision had nothing to do with the importance of the story, and everything to do with how good it looked.

The most obvious problem with the �cult of the image� is that it pushes news organizations to cover the most visually intriguing stories rather than the most inherently important. If a story can�t be told visually, it can�t be told at all. The phrase �this is not a TV story� becomes the excuse for dismissing large chunks of important news from the public agenda. We cover war much better than peace negotiations, for example, because war is interesting to look at, while negotiations generally aren�t. As the old maxim goes, �If it bleeds, it leads.�

At a deeper level, however, the priority on images as the heart of story-telling distorts our coverage in less obvious ways. For one thing, our need for quick access to where the news is happening in order to get pictures leads us to make judgments that on journalistic principles seem awfully suspect. For example, in the recent U.S.-led war in Iraq, American news organizations by and large accepted an offer from the Pentagon to �embed� journalists with American military units, so that reporters and TV crews traveled with, slept with, and took cover with American soldiers during the critical early stages. Networks and newspapers accepted the proposition, largely because it meant that their personnel would be in a position to capture dramatic images of the fighting while it was happening. They knew, of course, that very little of this would qualify as �reporting� in the strict sense, because the journalists would be entirely dependent upon American forces for information and perspective. Yet the need for real-time images of the conflict overwhelmed any other consideration. Today the results seem open to question, to say the very least. The American media fell into a cheerleading role in the early days of the conflict, and at least in part because of this close identification with the coalition forces, Western journalists have now become targets in Iraq to an unprecedented degree. One consequence is that Western journalists can�t move out of a small compound of hotels in Baghdad, are hence are often not in a position to get the stories that really matter.

Another way in which an addiction to imagery distorts news judgment is that those with the resources to produce and distribute video have a much better shot at forming public opinion than those without. One of the reasons that African conflicts draw proportionately less attention in the Western press, for example, is that many African nations lack efficient state-run television services that will immediately feed video when a crisis breaks out. Tragedies in places with first-world standards of video production � the terrorist bombing in Spain, for example, or the latest breakout of the Chechnen crisis in Russia � will capture far more air time, and not merely because they are presume to be of greater public interest. It�s also because it�s much easier to get good video in a hurry. Similarly, organizations with the capacity to organize and execute public events whose aim is to end up on television � hence events located against a dramatic backdrop, with modern press facilities provided � have a much greater opportunity of getting their message out. Again, all this has precious little to do with the inherent importance of the story, but rather with how fast and how easily video imagery can be generated.

The bottom line is that a picture is not always worth a thousand words. Both news organizations and the public have to develop the discipline to accept that getting live video, and getting the story, are not always the same thing. Surely in an age of computer graphics and Pixar animation, news organizations can find visually interesting ways to tell stories that do not end up putting the cart before the horse � in other words, sacrificing independence and news judgement for video.

Observation Three: We Cover War Better than Peace

I recently spent a couple of days in the company of Fr. Clemente Ortega, a native Peruvian and a parish priest responsible for 24 tiny communities in the Andes outside of Lima. One morning as we were driving up a typically narrow, unmarked mountain road, he showed me an intersection where the boundaries of two communities in the area meet. He explained these two communities had been feuding for the better part of a decade over some long-forgotten outrage, and the bad blood had generated violence and even a few deaths over a period of years. Over a long period of time, Ortega helped the two communities sit down with one another and work out their differences. When the feud was finally brought to a close, Ortega brought them together for a Mass of healing and reconciliation at the intersection he had showed me. Since that day, the peace has held.

Ortega told the story in a matter-of-fact fashion, as if he were describing another day at the office. In fact, it�s remarkable, and even more remarkable is the fact that no one covered it. If the Shining Path had blown up these two places, certainly newspapers and TV stations would have paid heed. When Ortega saves them from blowing themselves up, however, no one is interested. In my view, that�s poor journalistic judgment. Our failure to tell the story of Fr. Clemente Ortega is symbolic of our broader failure to cover peace with the same zeal with which we cover war.

As a journalist, when I talk to people who come from conflict zones, whether it�s Congo or the Middle East or Bosnia or Sudan, one complaint I hear repeatedly is that the media does not pay nearly enough attention to the so-called �civil society,� meaning humanitarian groups, churches, non-partisan activist organizations, and other voluntary bodies. Often, these groups are involved in creative efforts to promote reconciliation and understanding that pay off in unanticipated ways. I don�t need to tell anyone in Sant�Egidio this, of course, because the community�s mediation in Mozambique and elsewhere is a classic case in point.

In this sense, we journalists often do an incomplete job of telling the story of conflict situations, because the violence and its aftermath is not the whole picture. Often the most battle-scarred zones also generate the most innovative and heroic attempts to envision a new future. I think, for example, of the Holy Land, where a variety of projects � such as Neve Shalom, the International Center of Bethlehem, and Jerusalem Link � bring Israelis and Palestinians together in attempts to build trust and understanding. (The Italian religious affairs writer Luigi Sandri offers a very helpful overview of such movements in his 2001 book, Citt� Santa e Lacerata). The fact that such groups remain largely unknown to the Western media, and hence to the wider world, suggests a serious lacuna in our reporting. This is not because we journalists ought to be biased in favor of do-gooders, but because we are obligated to offer the whole story.

There are a variety of reasons for this neglect, too complicated to explore here. My sense, however, is that given the cutbacks in foreign correspondents and bureaus that many Western news organizations have experienced in the last decade, most reporters are so busy trying to respond whenever the latest bomb goes off that they have precious little time to do anything else. Until news organizations make international coverage a higher priority, it is likely that civil society � whether in the form of organized movements, or individuals such as Fr. Ortega � will remain off our radar screen.

This of course is a very brief and skeletal review, which can do no more than point the way towards points for further reflection. I don�t know if what I have suggested this morning � greater diversity in coverage, less emphasis on pictures at the expense of content, and more attention to civil society � would necessarily build a more peaceful world. I believe they would, however, make the world better informed, and that alone is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Thank you.