Paul Goble already took what I might have titled this blog, so I used this one. It was Lawrence Weschler, who wrote about the Balkan wars in the 1990s, who used to say the reverse of this saying: "War is the continuation of television by other means." The Georgian TV clip with a fake broadcast of a fake Russian invasion has incited a war of words and lots more groans of annoyance and anger, East and West, at Saakashvili -- or whomever is behind the provocation.
There was a cartoon of the Balkans war era that I used to have on my bulletin board in my office, showing a man sitting in an armchair watching TV, and looking out the window at bullets flying -- and taking his remote and clicking it out the window at the war outside, as if he could change the channel.
The new media representative for OSCE, Dunja Mijatovic of Bosnia, got right on this; it was her first statement of protest.
I hear the U.S. ambassador in Tbilisi also called it "unprofessional journalism".
She was required to speak out and did the right thing, of course, but...I'm not quite happy at the way Mijatovic dealt with this, however. She said as follows:
""My mandate as OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media does not allow me to deal with media content. However, I must underline that this particular issue is not about content; it is about irresponsible journalism and the impact it may have on media freedom and security."
That's like saying, "I'm not supposed to talk about content, but I will talk about content that is produced by what seems to be shoddy journalism, and further more, I'll raise the specter of linking freedom of expression and security". Not good. Shoddy journalism is a given in this region; precise OSCE norms should be invoked in response, without an implication that security dictates suppression of tasteless parody and even bad journalism.
I would rather that she had said something like, "Incitement of fear and panic in an uneasy post-war situation is irresponsible and we look to broadcasters to cover the news objectively" or something like that -- which doesn't imply that necessarily this is a *journalist's problem* when it's a pro-government station in the pocket of the president.
"Journalism" isn't the genre to apply here. It's like a really bad and tasteless Youtube parody of the nasty sort we see in political battle between left and right all the time in the U.S. It's poor art and terrible politics; journalism isn't what a TV station is doing when it carries a deliberately fake report as some kind of "provocation" -- it's more like crazy presidential P.R.
The question here is, if we're going to apply the U.S. Supreme Court test (and of course, we're not relevant in doing this in Eurasia), is whether there was "incitement to imminent violent action" (Brandenburg v. Ohio).
That depends on how much of a "War of the Worlds" you think it was...
There's no question that Georgian media has had a very contorted and complicated past -- and evidently present. Imedi was once independent, suffered a takeover and a fight over ownership after its owner's death; it became pro-presidential. To cover the many wild stories around these capers, the threats, the attacks, etc. would take an office such as the one Mijatovic now runs month to unravel.
I think it's safe to say that "privately owned" though it may be, it had official sanction or expectation of tolerance in broadcasting this spoof -- or, if you want to get more diabolical, it was crafted to frame the Georgian president. In Eurasian journalism, you can't just ask about the "five w's" of "who, what, where, when, why?"-- you have to ask about the "two ks" (komu vygodno, kto vinovat, "who profits, and who is to blame").
The remedy Mijatovic proposes is "self-regulation," and that's good, because it would be entirely inappropriate for her to be calling for any kind of prosecution. Next thing you know with that line of thinking, the Azeri bloggers couldn't run their youtube with the donkey and such.
But precisely because this bad-minded prank isn't really about journalism, but about the kind of manipulative use of the media we see all over the place these days, I think Goble is right in flagging the "pathology" of Georgian-Russian relation. That's a job not for the OSCE media representative to sooth with workshops on building ethics procedures, however useful, but something more substantive at a higher political level. Where is our Kazakh chair, who ought to try to convene some sort of...flying meeting?
On this round, Russia is going to be pleased with Mijatovic's condemnation of "unprofessionalism" (whether it's just about journalism, or implied to be about political leadership). Of course, in a job like hers, you can't be looking over your shoulder at "who profits" from one's statements, but make the right call -- Haraszti advised being "neutral not to violations, but to geography".
So frankly, I'm waiting now to see what Mijatovic does *tomorrow*. And I hope it's an immediate and robust condemnation of that attacks on Andrei Sannikov, coordinator of European Belarus and Charter 97, the main independent online news source in Belarus, and his wife Irina Khalip -- who, by the way, is one of a number of journalists who has gotten death threats trying to cover the twisted story of Georgian television and how it related to Belarus.
Sannikov and his wife were questioned in a tangential case in which they weren't involved, had a laptop taken at the border, and now had their apartment raided and computers taken there -- and the office searched with the computers seized there. So this is all about trying to take charter97.org offline, and about a backlash against Sannikov's announcement that he plans to run for president of Belarus against Lukashenka.
Recent Comments