Mood of the week...
I know many disagree but as a foreign news journalist, I can't take it anymore.
The British press is obsessed with the American elections… While there are so many issues to deal with here and worldwide!
By Melissa Chemam
The US election 2020 took place on Tuesday 3 November. We're Sunday 8 and all I can see in the news is continuous obsession with the process, result and focus on power.
As a journalist who has worked on foreign affairs since 2005, it seems obvious that this focus has only intensified. And I think it's terribly harmful.
Based in the USA in 2008, I settled in Miami, Florida, for the reason that most people know: In 2000, the voting system was famously messy in this key swing State with a high number of electors in the Electoral College. But I was also in Florida to travel to Haiti (which I did in April 2008) and write about the Haitian, Cuban, and other Hispanic communities in one of the most ethnically diverse states of this country.
The problem with our journalistic coverage of America is that:
1. It focuses on the powerful, and therefore on the White upper class in power
2. It erases most of the space for the rest of the world.
So back in Europe after the election of Barack Obama, really depressed by this polarisation of foreign news, I applied a few months later for a job at the BBC World Service. And fortunately, I was hired. From 2009, I have been working on African Affairs full time, until 2015, for the BBC then other broadcasters and online reviews. And I still do regularly today, with a focus on culture. I write more predominantly on multiculturalism in Europe, Diaspora, and African - European - American relations. I'm actually writing a book on African, Caribbean and Black British artists at the moment.
Seeing the world between New York, Washington DC and London makes no one more able to understand the world we live in. And in the middle of a pandemic, which means a GLOBAL epidemic, it's more than ever outrageous. It is because our news should not be driven only by the most powerful economically and diplomatically; but also because the American model, which claimed to be a democratic inspiration for the world after WWII, certainly isn't and has become toxic and highly polluting.
How to explain?
From our community of journalists, I see why this still dominates.
Firstly, it's due to laziness!
British media read the American press every day; French ones translate wires from the US. They just follow the trend.
-It would indeed require much more effort, and more investment to send reporters in Karabakh / Artsakh in Azerbaijan to cover the war with Armenia, currently jeopardising the peace in the whole region, up to Iran, Russia and Turkey.
-It’s much harder to cover 54 states in Africa, or to understand the causes of the multi-levelled crisis in Lebanon.
-It's much more delicate to try to explain the roots of islamophobia in France, in its dark colonial past, and to decry the way Macron's government is instrumentalising the death of innocent people in terrible attacks to compete with the far right in xenophobic and stereotyping discourses that help neither the educators nor the health workers.
-And it's become near to impossible to hold the British government into account for its irresponsible handling of the Brexit negotiations, which will lead us all in a disastrous departure from the European Union without any deal with Britain's stronger commercial and political partner, while, again, we're facing the worst health crisis since 1945 and the worst economic crisis.
But this journalistic choice has stark implications.
One example is that only The Times of India reported that, on US election day, Israel razes most of a Palestinian Bedouin village in the West Bank, though the press agency Reuters was the source (see here: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/middle-east/israel-razes-most-of-palestinian-bedouin-village-in-west-bank-on-us-election-day/articleshow/79060639.cms). Other publications in the Western world just ignored this fact.
Meanwhile, urgent talks about the climate emergency have been sidetracked, and the headlines about the environment get the small share. The UN conference on climate, the COP 26, should have taken place this November 2020 in Glasgow, Scotland, for instance, it’s been postponed for a year because of the Covid-19 crisis, what are the consequences for the environmental emergency?
Same interrogations about decisions on nuclear disarmament, while the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is due to become international law.
With the current health crisis, we urgently need financial support for workers, many cities and councillors are calling for a basic income, but there is no space in the news to discuss issues impacting millions of people, because we focus on only one, the leader of the “greatest power.”
Since September 2019, I’ve also been teaching journalism here in England, on top of practicing it. And many of my students are foreign ones from China, India, Malaysia, Oman, Egypt, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, the Netherland, etc. I don’t want to contribute to reproducing this cycle. I’ve been talking with them about matters of representations, and hope they have had a look at my articles for Black History Month or those on the Lebanese crisis.
Though the consequences of this election affects the whole world, we urgently need to rethink our foreign affairs in the news, as the English language still dominates the world of communication on most platforms but languages like Spanish (or Castilian, I should say), Mandarin and Arabic are swiftly taking over. Even in the U.S of A!
The “greatest power” today should actually be seen as Russia, a country that has managed to influence deeply both the 2016 US election and the Brexit referendum, as the Cambridge Analytic scandal revealed. The most populous economy in the world and the richest is now China; the most populous democracy is India, facing immense dangers as well, as much as Brazil and Nigeria, where people have been protesting against police brutality for more than two weeks now.
The domination of American politics over the rest of the world, especially in Europe, is an anomaly. It is man-made, and by white, male, business-oriented men “made”. We give power to what we focus on. And during the 2016 American campaign, most media gave all their attention to the candidate Donald Trump, in a sensationalist move. All media does at the moment is giving too much attention to male bullies who took too much power, against the law.
It’s time for a radical shift.
It’s time to focus on the “others”, whether women, unelected people, so-called ‘minorities’, oppressed and unfairly treated people. Let’s not forget that those who are called ‘minorities’ here in England or in the USA, are the vast majority in the whole world… Asians and Africans.
As a journalist who has spent most of her 15-year career in public broadcasting, working with the values of public services in mind, I see how much the world has changed, and the domination of the few over the many cannot live on. Even in the media, and mostly not in the media.
The world is vast, and includes more than 200 countries. If the western way of thinking has defined the way we see and describe the planet for decades, if not centuries, the “rest of the world” is definitely ready for a change.
If we claim diversity is important inside our country, how could it not be worldwide?
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Melissa Chemam
Writer, Cultural Journalist, Reporter
UK Correspondent for European media
Former BBC World Service Reporter
Writer-in-residence @ Arnolfini Gallery
Associate Lecturer in journalism @ UWE Bristol
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