Features
Putting right media imbalances on Gaza crisis
A matter in this connection that has gone insufficiently addressed is current international media reportage and commentary on the Gaza. From what could be gathered, a huge gulf exists in perception and viewpoint between the main warring parties to the conflict, their allies and communities and unless international efforts are made to fill the lacuna in question externally-induced conflict resolution efforts could not be expected to yield the desired positive results. Needless to say, much will depend on how fairly and equitably the international media treat the conflict, because this factor is central to how the publics of the world perceive and understand it.
The minds of more seasoned observers and commentators of international politics are likely to revert to the seventies decade when the New International Economic Order (NIEO) and the New International Information Order (NIIO) were huge topics of debate in particularly the global South. The concepts were mainly of Southern origin and they were seen as sensible and practicable answers to the crippling issues confronting the developing countries.
Under the above conceptual schemes, global economic inequalities and the need for equal and balanced access by the developing world to information and knowledge on issues facing it in the area of material wellbeing were seen to be correlated.
Essentially, a lack of sufficient awareness and knowledge on the part of the South on how it was being impoverished in the existing world economic order, was seen as compounding its socio-economic ills. One way out of this for the South was a new international information order where it could match the North from the viewpoints of access to information and knowledge on the prime issues facing it.
However, these conceptualizations of the South on how its pressing needs on this score could be met proved largely stillborn because by the eighties neo-liberalism had begun to sweep the hemisphere and the majority of Southern countries opted to tamely swim with the tide, so to speak.
It need hardly be said that on the question of international media treatment of Southern issues, not much has changed since the seventies. A number of vibrant Southern-based media organizations have come into being over the years to project an essentially Southern point of view on international developments but Western news agencies continue to dominate global news coverage and commentary. That is, the South continues to be a somewhat passive recipient of largely Northern viewpoints on international events.
This issue requires the urgent attention of particularly the South. While for the latter, equal and equitable access to information and commentary on the Gaza crisis, for example, is vital, it is equally important for the South that such media inputs to its perceptions be balanced and representative of the standpoints of all relevant sections to the issue at hand.
If an equitable solution is to be worked out by the international community to the Gaza crisis, world opinion would need to be brought into contact in equal measure with both the Palestinian and Israeli viewpoints on the conflict and the issues growing out of it. Balanced presentation of views, among other goals, was aimed at through the NIIO just mentioned and the South would do well to re-visit the issues at the heart of the information order that was thus conceptualized.
It would not be practicable to bring into being such an order in the short and medium terms but for the present it would be advisable for dominant Southern opinion to bear in mind the need for a balanced presentation of issues. In the absence of such equity, it would not be realistic to evolve a fair solution to the Gaza conflict.
Right now, the world is being exposed through the Western and Southern media, regularly and in full, to the horrors being experienced by the Palestinians in the military counter-measures launched by the Israeli state to the violence unleashed by Hamas and allied militant groups on the Israeli people on October 7, 2023.
This is as it should be, but such representations of the ground situation do not adequately cover the hardships being borne by Israeli civilians as well. If the latter requirement is met we would have a more balanced presentation of news, which would in turn help in the longer term to work out an equitable solution to the conflict. This is on account of the fact that no purported solution would prove satisfactory until it takes cognizance of the security requirements of the Israeli state as well.
A pressing requirement right now, in connection with the need for balanced news and views on the Gaza, are more people-centred and socially-responsible media organizations in the South. This is an opportune moment for peace movements in Israel and Palestine to come together in an effort to establish such institutions which would have as their nucleus of concern, the wellbeing of the ordinary people on both sides of the divide.
Besides helping to unite the communities concerned on the basis of shared just interests, these organizations could function as strong catalysts in the formulation of a peace plan for the Middle East on an impartial non-partisan basis.
The need is great for the publics concerned to work on peace schemes such as the above because right now it is the state parties to the conflict and their friendly media that are at centre stage and by virtue of that fact are dictating in the main the respective narrative of events on both sides of the divide. As a consequence, what the world is having is a state-influenced, largely jaundiced view of developments.
Even as this is being written, the US and Britain, for instance, have launched a number of air strikes on what they make out are Houthi military bases in the Yemen. The Western media are replete with the news on how the bases are being ‘taken out’ but there is little or no mention of how the strikes are affecting the ordinary publics concerned.
People-based media organizations in the region would perhaps have filled the gaps in such information and balanced the Western news agencies’ narrative with a true account of the hardships of the people.