I have a friend from Ethiopia who gets piqued that every time she tells people her nationality, the question that inevitably follows is, "Are people still starving in your country?" I myself was one of those who asked the question, and was at the receiving end of some enlightening remarks on how far the country has moved away from the dark days of the early 1980s when the country was hit by a severe famine leaving millions starving and suffering from malnutrition.
In my defence I told her that much of what people of one country perceives as their image of another country is largely gathered from what is disseminated through the media unless of course one is fortune to travel to each country in the world and experience first hand what each country is like.
Take for example the case of Sri Lanka. Many outsiders know it as place of murder and mayhem. They have little idea there is so much more to our country than what they see via television or read in the newspapers in their countries.
The unfortunate reality is that rarely does good news make the front pages or become breaking news, while bad news gets flashed across television screens all over the world and grabs the headlines.
A Sri Lankan diplomat who served in France told some journalists recently that many French nationals know Sri Lanka for its civil war and more recently for the tsunami and knew nothing or little about her culture, history etc.
Take the case of Pakistan which I had the good fortune of visiting a few years ago. I was excepting to be in a country with rigid rules, particularly where women are concerned with heavy military presence on the streets and a stringently controlled media. But many of my pre-conceived notions changed after my visit because after interacting with people of that country, it made me realise that what I had read about and seen about Pakistan was what was tailor made view of certain sections of the media and disseminated throughout the world but in reality was far from the real situation there.
Being a journalist, I am obliged to speak in defence of those in my profession but sometimes it is not easy to do that if I am to speak according to my conscience, particularly when it comes to the double standards that the western media applies when dealing with issues that affect those of us in the "majority world." Yes, those of us who live in what were once termed as "third world" countries and now referred to as "developing nations," in reality make up the majority in this world but are being forced to follow standards set by the "minority" world. But the kind of standards or ethics that the western media applies when they report events in their own countries they conveniently forget when they report from a "developing nation."
Soon after the tsunami, there were many media personnel who set up camp in Sri Lanka to get the story across to the world. While their efforts did help the country to get assistance on one hand, their reporting from here did not show the same sensitivity towards the feelings of the victims and their families as they did say for example when they reported on the aftermath of " Hurricane Katharine" in the USA a couple of years ago.
A top US television network had no qualms about taking a seven year old survivor of the tsunami, who had lost his mother and two sisters who were on the train that was washed away by the tsunami back to the scene of the disaster a few days later and getting him to re-enact how the survived the calamity. I wonder if they would very get a young American child to do the same in such situation without the whole country crying out at the psychological trauma the child would undergo being made to recall such a horrific incident which he hardly had any time to come to terms with.
It's good if we can learn to look beyond headlines and breaking news and see the bigger picture as well. |
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