Thoughts from London

Reporting Lanka: Western media catch the avian flu
Those who have followed the western media coverage of our presidential election and its aftermath might wonder at their obsession with birds. But it is not only the flocks of migratory foreign journalists who seem to have caught the bird flu.

Some of the local media persons writing for foreign news agencies and media outfits appear to don themselves with the same verbal mantles, believing either that imitation is the best form of flattery or that this is thoughtful journalism.

Though most Sri Lankans would not have had access to foreign news reports by the print and electronic media those who have studied the coverage could see the rather puerile attempts to categorise the two leading candidates and their support groups in a way that could create misleading impressions among western audiences.

Whether this was the intention one could not say. Some BBC, Skynews and CNN programmes do reach local audiences via satellite dishes or through relays by local TV stations. The more attentive of those viewers might have been struck by the avian adjectives that were flying around as freely as the birds themselves.Not many moons ago, the western media were blaming the Chinese for bird flu.

If they cannot pin the blame on the Chinese for dubious trade practices that are netting the British economy billions of pounds through investments, they could at least point their fingers at the Peking duck.
Ha, said the media panjandrums, especially those from the lowliest of tabloids, (known to most as the gutter press) whose self-proclaimed importance is only surpassed by their general ignorance.

Known for what they would like to claim as patriotism, they are prone to blame the whole world for debacles and disasters that rightly lie somewhere between their own front door and that of governments.
Fearing that the bird flu reportedly originating in China would come to Britain via Asia, the media hit the panic buttons so hard that at first the culprit was thought to be a poor parrot supposedly from Taiwan. But it was hard to tell since it did not go through immigration.

When tests proved that the parrot was as innocent as George Bush trying to identify a country on a revolving globe, the media pack turned like the serried ranks of Blair’s army in Iraq to some others of a feather who had flocked together and been shipped to England by a bird fancier or some such person.

So the bird was to blame, not the Bird-man of Alcatraz or wherever.
The truth is that bird flu has been round this country for decades provided gratis by some tabloids that daily adorn Page 3 with birds of varying shapes and sizes sans their feathers but with all the vital statistics.
The only protests have come from evangelical types or upholders of Victorian values. So media magnates, unconcerned by moralists, keep hunting birds that will readily take off their garments at the drop of a Euro dollar.

While journalists were tumbling over each other to make out that Asian avian flu was a disaster waiting to happen, government miscalculations here have led to a shortage of normal flu vaccine that high-risk persons are advised to take every year, come winter.

Now patients and doctors are howling in protest while journalists have been looking for other birds to fry. Luckily for them along came Sri Lanka’s presidential election and so we have been blessed with this political game of hawks and doves that is playing ducks and drakes with comprehension and calls for leaps of faith in the media.

Before the election was upon us, the western media was already dubbing one candidate Mahinda Rajapakse as a “hardliner. The BBC, like some other media outfits (particularly the news agencies) was guilty of attaching catch-words to politicians and parties as though it was attaching limpet mines.

As the final results were coming in BBC Radio’s Asian network contacted me to ask whether I was prepared to go on air around 6 p.m. that evening. When the BBC eventually got round to it, I was intrigued by the first question about the new president being a hardliner. I asked the woman presenter what she meant by hardliner since I had already read BBC reports from Colombo that had used the adjective earlier. Was it intended to describe Rajapakse’s politics or his economic policies that seemed to go back several steps to the discredited socialist policies of the 1960s and early 70s.

Such words are thrown at you as though they were verities that should never be questioned. On the day of the election, BBC World television channel wanted me to come in for an interview but I could not make it due to prior arrangements. Had I gone I have little doubt this same label would have been flung at Mahinda Rajapakse.

That is largely because of the quality of BBC reportage by its Colombo Correspondent Dumeetha Luthra. Now I didn’t know anything about her until I saw her on TV covering the tsunami devastation in southern Sri Lanka. But her political reporting has shown a certain naivete, to be charitable.

Let me give one but important, example. Immediately after Lakshman Kadirgamar died from an assassin’s bullets Luthra reporting from Colombo was asked by the BBC presenter whether Kadirgamar a Tamil, who took credit for engineering an international ban of the LTTE, was opposed to the Tigers.

Luthra’s answer- “Yes, he was a strong opponent of the peace process…….He’d always been opposed to them, opposed any peace process…”

Now this was utter rubbish. A couple of days later when I appeared on BBC World’s Asia Today programme I had to contradict this and set out what I thought was Kadirgamar’s position.

What is surprising is that it came from a correspondent who did not even seem to know the position of the country’s foreign minister on a critical issue.

There has been much said in Britain about the deteriorating standards of BBC programmes and its journalism. Is it surprising that accusations of “dumbing down” are being flung at the BBC?

Rajapakse is seen in some western media as a “hardliner” which is inter-changeable with “hawk”, a bird of prey. But the appointment of Ratnasiri Wickremanayake as prime minister has confused the western journalists who turn up like birds of prey when something happens, but know little about the country.

Wickremanayake, in the perception of the western media, would be a bigger hawk than Rajapakse. So now it has to find new epithets to describe the difference between Rajapakse and his prime minister. It will happen before long and both will be castigated by the western media as threats to the peace process.

What peace process? There has not been one since the Tigers walked out of it some 18 months or so ago. Do all these foreign journalists who fly in and out of Sri Lanka know about it? Some of the relatively new members of our tribe working for foreign media might worship the likes of them.
But time usually exposes the limitations of foreign journalists suddenly uprooted from elsewhere and parachuted into the country and told to cover a major political development.

In the meantime, Ranil Wickremesinghe, who is probably the darling of the western media as he is of western administrations, will always remain a dove in the limited political vocabulary of the foreign journalist.
What with this gathering on the hawks there must be a lot of cooing going on in the dove cotes.

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