Since 1998, SABC Africa has broadcast into the din to counter what channel head Phil Molefe refers to as the “cosmic black hole” in Western coverage of the continent. It’s a noble goal, but one that’s largely unfulfilled. Apart from the fact that you need a satellite dish and a MultiChoice decoder to access the channel, it exhibits a marked South African parochialism, slavishly apes Western “professional news” formats and content, endlessly repeats bulletins and shows little imagination in programming.
Much more successful at countering European and North American hegemony of international news broadcasting has been the Qatar-based Arab-language television network, Al Jazeera. With a daily audience of 35 million viewers, Al Jazeera rivals the major Western media organisations such as CNN and BBC for audiences in the Arab-speaking world. Evidence of Al Jazeera’s achievement is found in the equally irrational responses of senior US government officials and anti-democratic Middle Eastern governments. The best has been US secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, responding to scenes of US-wrought carnage in Iraq on Al Jazeera as “outrageous” and “inexcusably biased”. It follows that the compliant US media, of course, are credible and unbiased in their coverage of the US occupation.
Now comes a Latin American attempt to replicate Al Jazeera that may also contain some lessons for SABC Africa.
Latin America has traditionally been considered within the US’s “sphere of interest”. Essentially that has meant that narrow US corporate interests, in collusion with local elites, have ridden roughshod over the people of the region. As for media, large regional Spanish-language networks – often headquartered in politically conservative Miami — have reflected the politics of these elites.
The “people’s CNN” that is warming up to challenge this hegemony is Telesur. Its name suggests “television of the south” in Spanish. Promising extensive financial support are the governments of Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Venezuela. As a result, the station will be free of advertising.
Telesur began testing its signal in late April and promises to be on the air in July 2005. It will have access to content from a number of national public broadcasters in the region, such as Brazil’s new TV Brasil. Most importantly, it will share resources and correspondents with Al Jazeera.
Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez has said Telesur will “counteract the media dictatorship of the big international news networks.”
He speaks of that dictatorship from experience. Chavez has been the subject of relentless assaults, including the airing of false information, by his country’s private media. These are owned by billionaire businessmen, most notably Gustavo Cisneros, who heads the Cisneros Group that includes the regional television network Univisión Communications. Cisneros, who has ties to the Bush family, was one of the key figures behind the well documented failed coup against the Chavez-led government in 2002. Not only did his station organise meetings for coup plotters, it ran edited tapes to implicate Chavez supporters in violence and helped to legitimise a clampdown on alternative media.
Unsurprisingly, US media critics have caricatured Telesur by saying it plans to show “long, boring documentaries” about “landless peasants in Brazil” (what is wrong with that anyway?) or “indigenous movements in the Andes” (not boring if you are Indian), as well as “nitty-gritty reports about politics and sports”. Much has also been made of the fact that one of the anchor reporters will include indigenous Colombian journalist, Atti Kiwa, who “dresses in the traditional white robes of her Arhuaco tribe”.
So African activists (media included) used to looking north would do well to look to Latin America. Telesur will contribute to the overall process of integration among the countries of South America and thereby undermine US control. As Aram Aharonian, news director of Telesur, told reporters: “We need to see a point of view that comes from South America, not from Europe or the United States. Why can’t we have our own point of view? In South America, we know a lot about places like Chechnya, but we don’t know our own neighbors.”
Sean Jacobs is The Media’s correspondent in New York.