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The Power and the Story
The Global Battle for News and Information
John Lloyd
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The Power and the Story
The Global Battle for News and Information
John Lloyd
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About This Book
In this sweeping global survey, one of Britain's most distinguished journalists and media commentators analyses for the first time the state of journalism worldwide as it enters the post-truth age. In this sweeping global survey, one of Britain's most distinguished journalists and media commentators analyses for the first time the state of journalism worldwide as it enters the post-truth age.From the decline of the newspaper in the West and the simultaneous threats posed by fake news and President Trump, to the part that Facebook and Twitter played in the Arab revolts and the radical openness stimulated by WikiLeaks, and from the vast political power of Rupert Murdoch's News International and the merger of television and politics in Italy, to the booming, raucous and sometimes corrupt Indian media and the growing self-confidence of African journalism, John Lloyd examines the technological shifts, the political changes and the market transformations through which journalism is currently passing. The Power and the Story offers a fascinating insight into a trade that has claimed the right to hold power to account and the duty to make the significant interesting - while making both the first draft of history, and a profit. 'lloyd has a vivid reporting style and his many succinct interviews with victims or justifiers of Putin, or Egyptian of Indian style journalism, make his book a page-turner for those interested in question of who decides and writers the news we are permitted to read.... His masterly book is a lament not an obituary.' - Santigo Gamboa, Tribune
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PART I
THE AUTHORITY OF THE STATE
INTRODUCTION
‘I hate your scary truth’
Journalism is controlled and suppressed in authoritarian societies because their rulers believe they have a better grasp of the truth than journalists could ever have. Theirs is not the truth of mere facts. It is the alternative truth of what keeps social peace, promotes development, preserves necessary power and serves faith.
Authoritarian societies often have the form of democratic systems, including news media which can at times report accurately and express mildly dissenting views. But the rulers and the journalists know that such licence can be revoked at any time. The Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, who had, in the early 2010s, sharpened his RBC news media group to do investigative reporting – including of the Kremlin – enjoyed a year or two of high-profile existence. However, in May 2016, after pieces on allegedly corrupt activities in President Vladimir Putin’s family, including links to the tax-dodging revelations in the Panama Papers, the group found itself the subject of a criminal investigation. Three top editors were offered as sacrifices, but by early June, Prokhorov was reported to be on the lookout for a buyer:1 he later sold most of his largest Russian assets including RBC, and shifted investments to the US where he already owned the Brooklyn Nets basketball team.2
The higher truth of Putin’s Russia – a truth that talented ‘political technologists’ employed by the Kremlin have developed for many years – is that the president is a powerful, determined but compassionate ruler, dedicated to the welfare of Russians and to reviving the glory of an abused nation. Political technologists, a very Russian term, are different from public relations people who, everywhere, give policies an inspiring gloss. The technologists construct framework narratives for the exercise of power, with the aim both to legitimize power and to show that society has no alternative but to accept it. This version of the truth is necessary for the project of patriotic recovery, Putin’s main task in his third term as president, and is based on the belief that the threat to Russia from the West is unsleeping, and criticism assists the enemy. In April 2016, the most proactive media supporter of the president, the TV presenter Dmitry Kiselev, accused the RBC group’s coverage of the Panama Papers’ revelations as assisting the United States; a few weeks later the state moved against it.3
Russia, in common with most countries in the world, has no centuries-long tradition of striving for, and gradually increasing, press freedom. Its newspapers, as its politics, had a brief and fevered period of licence at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but with the Bolshevik victory, an increasingly tight censorship choked off all criticism until, by the late twenties, none could exist.4 The Leninist party believed truth was under its control; to call its main newspaper ‘Truth’ (Pravda) was confirmation. The system’s decay under Leonid Brezhnev and his two short-lived successors, and the progressively rapid opening of the Mikhail Gorbachev years (1985–91), slithered into the post-Soviet wonderland of media, disciplined not by the state but by the market and the oligarchic lords of television who, facing an election, tuned their channels to Boris Yeltsin’s wandering star, fearful of returning Communists. Putin, stricken by the collapse of a Soviet Union that had raised and nourished him, and understanding that to consolidate his power he needed compliant media, made it a priority to wrest ownership from over-mighty (as he saw it) private hands and bring the channels, and most print, under Kremlin-state control once more.
China had little exposure to press pluralism. Newspaper and journals came first through Western missionaries in the early nineteenth century; indigenous periodicals appeared in mid century, witness to growing nationalist sentiment sparked by French and British military humiliation. ‘Journalism became the ideal career for the patriot … and the only political journalism was patriotic, change-oriented journalism.’5 When, from the 1920s, the Nationalists and the Communists began a fight to the death, the press – which had shown signs of independent development − was mobilized into political order, an approach that ‘established the absolute dominance of politics over facts: a dominance which remains in authoritarian states’.6 Under Maoism, journalism had no more freedom than in Stalin’s Soviet Union, but after the successive liberalizations of Deng Xiaoping in the 1990s (Deng died in 1997), a degree of pluralism was permitted, and there was a closely observed flourishing of investigative journalism. These openings were narrowing in the 2000s, and largely closed down after Xi Jinping’s assumption of power, as general secretary of the Communist Party from 2012 and president from 2013. In double-digit-growth times, a certain laxity flourished, in harder times, not. ‘Working in the Chinese media,’ an anonymous editor told a Guardian correspondent in February 2016, ‘feels like you are wasting your life.’7
Journalism has meaning for those who practise it if it allows the free pursuit and publication of facts seen as important, and if it is permitted to operate in a society ready to host a competition of ideas and political positions – a readiness that has waxed and waned through the centuries. A meaningful life for a journalist in that sense had been possible for centuries in the West, where freedom to propose and oppose had begun to take a grip on the nascent civil societies of England, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and others from the sixteenth century onwards. By the seventeenth came the first periodical publication of news and opinion. The professionalization of journalism in the nineteenth century created markets for sensation, scandal and schadenfreude, but rested on a steadily plumper bed of belief that this was indivisible from societies of law and political choice.
A journalist in a democracy can aspire to a sometimes harried, sometimes easy life that can be democratically constructive because of their autonomous activities in recording, criticizing and investigating the powers that be. But journalists cannot see themselves thus in an authoritarian society. There, most journalists have little independent agency, recording statements, speeches and interviews or reflecting the regime’s priorities and guidance through stories designed to underpin its wisdom and success, or opinion calibrated to its policies.
States like Eritrea, which had a lively political press,8 and North Korea, which never did,9 take care to reduce their journalists to clerks taking dictation, and succeed in jailing or killing those journalists who attempt rebellion. Populations that are cowed and constrained by long labour for subsistence living under the ceaseless gaze of secret services and informer networks struggle to produce revolts, and would mostly be uninterested in press freedom. But such complete tyrannies are now few. Umberto Eco wrote that a true totalitarian state is one where ‘a regime … subordinates every act of the individual to the state and to its ideology’.10 Italy under Fascism was not that, neither is Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, el-Sisi’s Egypt nor Erdoğan’s Turkey. Journalism exists, or is suppressed, according to the will of the ruler; but it seems presently that ideologically guided societies, such as China and Saudi Arabia, are more inclined to suppress journalism than a post-ideological authoritarian state like Russia.
The states that have been and remain least given to develop a firm basis for journalism, independent of state and ideology, are the Middle Eastern Muslim countries, where the curbing of journalistic attention to its activities suits the state, and the disqualification of journalism to say anything of real value to the people is often an aim of the state-religion, Islam.
The strength of a community of faith and law derived from Islam’s precepts varies widely in these states – from weak in a many-faiths state like Lebanon to strong in the Wahabi-inspired kingdom of Saudi Arabia, or the Ayatollah-guided theocracy of Iran. Where secularism has penetrated widely enough in society, observation of the religion is reduced to a milder series of rituals and pieties, as in Egypt – where, during the brief period in power of an ineffective Muslim Brotherhood-led government (June 2012– July 2013), the fear of a more strictly imposed observance caused public support for a military intervention, returning the country to the military rule which has been the ‘normal’ since the officers’ revolt of 1952 brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power.
Ernest Gellner noticed that Islamic societies, which are more observant than other faiths, run practical politics by networks of clientelism: ‘the formal institutional arrangements matter far less than do the informal connections of mutual trust based on past personal services, on exchange of protection from above for support from below’.11 Many Muslim journalists in Islamic societies do challenge the state, and grasp freedom where possible, but they have not succeeded in establishing a stable order where free speech is protected. In 2014, a senior member of Saudi Arabia’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, or religious police, Ahmed Qassim al-Ghamdi, read the Koran and discovered that habits in the Prophet’s time were markedly more relaxed than they had become in the Kingdom. He publicized his views on television, his wife with face uncovered sitting beside him, and was deluged with hatred; the family of his eldest son’s fiancée called off their wedding. Much worse happened to journalists who crossed the red line of extreme public sexual puritanism or showed disrespect to the sprawling oligarchic monarchy.12
The Islamic faith in the mutually hostile states of Saudi Arabia (Sunni) and Iran (Shia) shows little distinction between the secular and the religious. Christianity now leaves Caesarean matters to fallen politicians; Judaism and Hinduism, in their home states, seek to increase their influence on political conduct, but a secular core remains in both their homelands, fiercely defended by non-believers and many moderate believers alike (though the Indian prime minister from May 2014, Narendra Modi, rose in politics through a powerful organization dedicated to the promotion of Hinduism and the submission of Islam). Only in Islam, of the major religions with real social weight, do the precepts of the founding Prophet act as a practical and normative guide, usually enforced. The religion is seen as a higher truth than anything journalism could produce. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that ‘Islam is the religion which has most completely confounded and intermixed the two powers … so that all the acts of civil and political life are regulated more or less by religious law’.13 The satellite TV ‘revolution’ of the 2000s shakes that, but still far from to destruction.
Journalism had little or no indigenous tradition which could be used as inspiration, while the example of the Western media is routinely condemned as mere propaganda. The coming of Al Jazeera, funded by the Qatari monarchy, followed by other Arabic-language satellite stations has made large waves – though the autocrats retain as strong a grip as they can on their power, their politics and their societies, with Islam as their handmaiden.
The trade of the reporter, the essential act of journalism, is a Western invention. From the mid nineteenth century, the Americans were the drivers of reporting as a regular employment, progressively distancing the trade from the political parties and other institutions that controlled it, to become an institution in itself, a centre of judgement, policy development and power that could match itself against other large powers, including that of the state. This Western tradition has penetrated authoritarian societies, but has not been allowed to take strong root. The first decades of the 2010s have been testimony to the weakness of independent journalism in authoritarian states, compared to the resilience of authoritarianism itself.
Journalists can make a name for themselves in such states. In Egypt, under President Nasser, Mohamed Heikal did, in his editorship of the main state organ, Al-Ahram, and in his closeness, as adviser, speechwriter and friend, to the president. In the Soviet Union, Yevgeny Primakov made a name for himself, and indeed became prime minister in (post-Soviet) Russia, securing the post because President Boris Yeltsin needed someone with Primakov’s (abiding) Communist loyalties at a time of political weakness. But though he had been well trained in Arabic and Middle Eastern politics and knew many of the leaders, his more important job was not as a Pravda correspondent, but as a KGB agent who reported directly to the Central Committee’s international department.
Making a name for oneself, or at least a good living, in authoritarian systems means serving the system not the trade; it means cleaving to the agreed line (though you may have had a hand in making it); it means jostling most fiercely for the ear and favour of the rulers, over and above the eyeballs of the readers. There were a few, besides Primakov, i...