Referring to the home news status being given in the UK and the US to the Burmese cyclone and the Austrian cellar stories, Mark Lawson recently wrote on the pages of The Guardian about his misgivings over the boundary between journalism and voyeurism. “[…] Mass-market outlets have favoured tales that have a direct effect on their consumers (prices, strikes, bombs, celebrities), while niche media prefer stories which, while directly irrelevant to their audience, are argued to make us better people for knowing about them,” he pointed out. In terms of this year’s American presidential elections, the widespread international coverage can be defended by either measure, since the participants are famous and the outcome may significantly impact the lives of people across the globe.

“But by no imaginable checklist, other than gruesome prurience, is there any need for us to know so many details of what happened in Herr Fritzl’s underground dungeon,” wrote Lawson. Bringing up Marshall McLuhan’s idea of a ‘global village’ where the collapse of boundaries would create a kind of universal human concern, he commented that “when an Austrian family tragedy becomes home news in other countries, it can seem that the interchange of information has created not worldwide concern but global voyeurism […] At least the Burmese coverage has an effect beyond a lethal peepshow in the appeals for western charitable cash that are already appearing amid the coverage […] a sort of licence-fee for having witnessed this pain in a place that it usually ignored.”

The risk, as he pointed out so deftly, “is that Austria and Burma — or future nations struck by flood or a psychopathic paterfamilias — become of interest simply because of the horrible fascination of their narratives, becoming genres in a schedule of entertainment: real-life horror and disaster movies. […]And so readers of newspapers or viewers of TV news become internationalist snackers, feeding their morbid hunger with Chinese one day, Burmese the next, even occasionally prepared to give Austrian a go if it’s really spicy stuff. And concern for these countries is unlikely to become a habit […].”

Lawson’s argument is perfectly valid and relevant in the issues it raises. But a deeper, perhaps far more sinister pattern is discernible in media coverage of events in other countries, and the style and scope of the coverage.

Back in 1987, media studies pioneer John Fiske identified this pattern in terms of western televised news coverage of events in the Third World. The idea retains relevance when expanded to other countries, including developing nations, and the print media.

Writing about the strategies of containment used to make international news fit into the underlying ideological thrust of western societies, Fiske pointed out that “Third World countries are conventionally represented in western news as places of famines and natural disaster, of social revolution and of political corruption. These events are not seen as disrupting their social norms, but as confirming ours, confirming our dominant sense that western democracies provide the basics of life for everyone, are stable, and fairly and honestly governed. When deviations from these norms occur in our own countries they are represented as precisely that, deviations from the norm: in Third World countries, however, such occurrences are represented as their norms which differ markedly from ours. For the western news media, the Third World is a place of natural and political disasters and not much else.”

Meanwhile, he theorised, the very act of analytical categorisation in news – politics, the economy, domestic or foreign news – encourages the audience to understand the stories in terms of the ideological context imposed upon them. These categories are merely indicative, true, but the point is that “categorisation constructs a conceptual grid within which ‘raw’ events can be instantly located and thus inserted into a familiar set of conceptual relationships.” Such groupings then become a strategy through which the news presents itself as objective, thus effectively masking the process of representation that is at work at a deeper level. While categories such as ‘industry’ or ‘foreign affairs’ appear empirical and naturally-linked, the manner in which they work and their effect is highly ideological.

Therefore, “stories on a famine in northern Africa, political corruption in Nicaragua, riots in Bengal, and guerrilla activity in Indonesia all appear to be naturally linked as part of ‘foreign affairs’,” wrote Fiske. But “putting them in one category invites the reader to understand them in terms of their similarities rather than their differences, and the similarities make a sense that serves the interests of the western bourgeoisie.”

Viewed through this lens, the coverage being given to Burma or Herr Fritzl can be understood to work as reaffirming the normative social ideologies of audiences in the UK or the US. The effect, in other words, is to reinforce in news consumers’ mind that whatever the ills in their own society, at least things aren’t as bad as ‘over there’. As Lawson pointed out, in the last few decades Austria has appeared in the international media in only two contexts, that of “men hiding young women in cellars and the possibility that certain of its politicians might be Nazis.”

Meanwhile, coverage of disruptive events such as Cyclone Nargis also allows for a sort of ‘feel good’ element which is felt by the comfortably-off as they reach into their pockets for a donation. Consequently, the voyeuristic element of journalism is made all the worse for achieving good in return for pandering to selfishness.

Post-script: In Pakistan, on the other hand, no news can force journalists desperate to fill the airwaves to put often unbelievable and entirely counter-productive spins on the same old news. If you don’t believe me, try turning on the television. — hmumtaz@dawn.com