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Baffour’s Beefs  with  Baffour Ankomah
LAST week, I took readers through the first stages of how Britain controls information – through manifold legislation and then convention. This week I want us to look at some of the “conventions” and institutions through which the British media, which is majority owned by private companies and individuals, is yet controlled by the government and the state, and how they are used to fight for, and protect, national interests.

By “convention”, I mean an informal agreement between the state and the media covering particular matters, which then grows to become a tradition. It can also be behaviour by the media that is considered acceptable or polite to most members of society.

So let’s begin by looking at the BBC, the state broadcaster. The BBC, or the British Broadcasting Corporation, is an empire in its own right, which started as a private company but was later handed over to the state.

Like an Octopus, the BBC’s fangs go far and near through the ownership of a multiplicity of radio and TV stations and ancillary services all over Britain, quite apart from the famous BBC World Service radio and TV services broadcast in different languages of the world through which the small country once called an empire itself exercises influence.

In reality, the BBC set-up is quite unique in the sense that its “domestic service”, which covers the BBC services in Britain proper, is, by convention, controlled by the Home Affairs minister via his portfolio at the Home Office, while the BBC “foreign service”, which covers World Service radio and TV, is controlled by the foreign minister via the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO).

Not strangely, BBC services are largely funded by “licence fees” paid by everybody in Britain who has a TV set. And there are lots of such people on the British Isles. As a result, the BBC does not take advertising at home; in fact it does not need it as its funding comes from the state and licence-fee payers.

You may ask why are the two halves of the BBC controlled by separate ministers. The answer is simple: the BBC “foreign service” has forever been used by the British state for propaganda purposes abroad by way of spreading British influence and values worldwide. And who better to control British influence abroad than the FCO personified in the minister of foreign affairs.

A flaming sword

Remember that in the British psyche, the media is a weapon. Lord Beaverbrook, once the powerful owner of the once mighty Daily Express personified this thinking.

As The Guardian testified in a leader comment in 2001: “The Daily Express was once a paper whose journalism thundered out across country and empire. For more than 15 years, it sold more than four million copies a day. Its proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook, liked to think of his main paper as a weapon.

‘When skilfully employed,’ Lord Beaverbrook once wrote, ‘no politician of any party can resist it. It is a flaming sword which will cut through any political armour. Many newspapers are harmless because they do not know how to strike or when to strike . . . But teach the man behind them how to load and what to shoot at, and they become deadly’.”

I have always insisted that for Africa to develop, the African media should do as the Western media does – “know how to strike or when to strike”.

But this is a tenet we don’t teach in Africa. So we come out of our journalism schools pumped full with fanciful ideas of an “unfettered free press”, and thus we do our best to try to reproduce this mythical “unfettered free press” in our countries, often with disastrous results for our national interests.

In the process, “publish and be damned” becomes a glorious principle to die for in Africa. But “publish and be damned” does not exist in Britain or in America or France or Australia or Germany or anywhere else in the so-called democratic West.

Yet African journalists feel good if we are seen to “uphold” this non-existent “unfettered free press”, or the  “publish and be damned” philosophy which translates into being hostile to our governments. Sometimes in the process of publishing and being damned, we harm our national interest without even knowing it.

The Fourth Estate

Basically, in the West the media is accepted as the “fourth estate of the realm”. We even say that in Africa: “We are the fourth estate of the realm.”

But what does that mean?

To an African journalist, this means a “watchdog role”, a watchdog that barks at the infractions of government to alert the governed, or to protect them from being trampled upon by the government.

This, in fact, is a worthwhile cause and I am not surprised at the fervency of the believers of this cause, because the antecedents of the African media come straight from the struggle for political independence. The governments of the day were run by colonialists, and damned ones to boot, so we saw them as enemies worthy of demolition.

Sadly, nearly 60 years after independence, we are still stuck in the same mode. Therefore, you find that the “best journalist” in Africa is usually the one who fights mostly against his own government.

But it is not like that in Britain, France, Germany or USA. There, the media is taken, and behaves, as the “fourth estate of the realm” after the first three estates – the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary.

My dictionary, The Collins English Dictionary, defines “estate of the realm” as: “An order or class of persons in a political community, regarded collectively as a part of the body politic: usually regarded [in Britain] as being the Lords Temporal (peers), Lords Spiritual [the Church of England] and the [House of] Commons.”

This, in British terms, is the “body politic”, which goes, with slight modifications, for the rest of the Western world. Therefore, the Western media, being “the fourth estate of the realm” is indeed the “fourth arm of the state” or the fourth pillar on which the state rests.

The powers at work

The media, therefore, does not sit outside the state and throw stones at it. It is embedded deep inside the state, and helps the state to function as designed by the unseen powers that, in Britain, even Queen Elizabeth II claims not to have any knowledge about.

Remember the Queen’s admonition to Princess Diana’s ex-butler, Paul Burrell, after Diana’s death. She told him: “Be careful, Paul; nobody has ever been as close to a member of my family as you were to Diana. There are powers at work in this country about which we have no knowledge.”

And sure enough, these powers take themselves very seriously. If the Queen says she has no knowledge of the powers at work in a country of which she has been the head of state for over 62 years, you can well imagine how deep these powers go to hide their existence and codify their activities.

So the place of “the fourth estate of the realm”, in the body politic, is so arranged that nothing is left to chance. Which is why it is “perfectly normal” in Western countries to see the media working in tandem with the government, not sitting outside it, but as part and parcel of the state, by reporting and informing responsibly.

Therefore, the fashionable image of the media as a storming, howling enemy of the government is a myth that lives only in textbooks. It doesn’t exist in the real world, at least not in Britain or America or France or Germany or Australia or anywhere else.

Rather, the Western media exercises its “fourth estate” role by helping the government to protect national interests. This includes what they call “following the flag” or following the government’s lead in foreign policy matters.

Yes, it is true that from time to time the Western media exercises its watchdog role and may attack certain government policies or infractions, but in the main the Western media does have a very comfortable relationship with their home governments.

The mighty BBC

Let’s take for example the BBC which prides itself of its “independence”. But “independence” from whom? From the government and the state?

But just wait and see from the following exchange in the House of Commons on November  9, 2010, repeat 2010, between the man that President Mugabe once described as “the man with the round head”, William Hague, the then foreign secretary, and some MPs on the future of the BBC World Service, as recorded by the official parliamentary record-keeper, the Hansard.

Please remember, the debate was on the BBC World Service only, not the domestic service.

Ben Bradshaw (the Labour MP for Exeter who served as a junior minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office – FCO – during Gordon Brown’s government), asked William Hague: “What assessment has he made of the effect on the BBC World Service of the proposed transfer of its funding away from his Department [the FCO]; and if he will make a statement.”

Having served in the FCO before Hague, Bradshaw knew what he was talking about. He claimed that “the licence fee payer in Britain does not want to pay for programmes they cannot receive and probably would not be interested in receiving?”

Though broadcast from London, World Service radio and TV services are not seen by the British people. The services are meant for audiences abroad only.

Which raises the question: Why doesn’t the British licence fee payer receive BBC World Service programmes, and why, as Bradshaw claimed, they would probably not be interested in receiving them?

But let’s wait for the answer from William Hague. He told Bradshaw: “The BBC is very enthusiastic about the change [the transfer of its funding away from the FCO]. I have discussed it with Sir Michael Lyons and with Mark Thompson, the director-general of the BBC. They believe there is more that they can do, through bringing the BBC World Service and other BBC activities together, to develop the World Service in the future.

“Clearly, we would want them to do that, and I do not think that any future Foreign Secretary would allow them to run it down, given the powers [over the BBC World Service] that are reserved to the Foreign Secretary …”

But the Tory MP for Croydon South, Richard Ottaway, was not convinced. So he asked William Hague: “The Foreign Secretary said that responsibility for the finance of the World Service is being transferred to the BBC, but can he say whether responsibility for the strategic direction of the World Service is also being transferred? In other words, who has the last word on editorial content?”

William Hague has a bald head like me; in fact I have more hair than he has, but I bet on that day his hair stood up straight over his bald pate! Richard Ottaway was forcing him to say the unsayable. But he had to say it. And he said it:

“The responsibility for the direction of the World Service will remain exactly as it is now,” Hague said at last. “What I agreed with the BBC Trust and the director-general of the BBC is that the key parts of the governance arrangements previously agreed in 2006 will be replicated in a new agreement, so the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with the BBC, will set the objectives and priorities and, as I mentioned earlier, the Foreign Secretary will retain a veto over the opening and closing of services. So those arrangements stay the same as now.”

Last word on editorial content

William Hague must have heaved a huge sigh of relief, this great man of bald, round head. But did he actually answer Ottaway’s question about who has the last word on editorial content?

Yes, he did without being explicit. “The key parts of the governance arrangements previously agreed in 2006,” Hague said, “will be replicated in a new agreement, so the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with the BBC, will set the objectives and priorities… So those arrangements stay the same as now.”

For those in the know, “the key parts of the governance arrangements previously agreed” have forever ensured that the Foreign Secretary meets the heads of the BBC World Service on a regular basis. And you can bet your bottom dollar that they don’t just meet to have tea and biscuits.

They meet to “set out the objectives and priorities” of the World Service. And if one of the objectives and priorities of the British government happens to be regime change in Zimbabwe, they farm it out to the BBC World Service, and in no time President Mugabe will become the Hitler of Africa, and his government a “regime”.

And this will be the same man who had been a knight of the British Empire, a knighthood conferred by no other person than Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II herself.

Transplant “the key parts of the BBC’s governance arrangements” to Harare and see how the noise level would be if the editors of ZBC Radio go regularly to see the foreign minister of Zimbabwe to “set out the objectives and priorities” of ZBC or its “strategic direction”.

Or imagine if the Zimbabwe Ministry of Foreign Affairs has the last word on editorial content of the ZBC Foreign Service! Imagine the great din that would ensue, and how the ZBC would be dismissed as a mere Government mouthpiece!

Yet when it is done in London by the British government and the BBC, it is taken as the paragon of media excellence and freedom! But what freedom? And at what price? Dear reader, wait for what is coming next.

Piers Morgan confesses

In 2005, Piers Morgan, the sacked editor of The Daily Mirror, who later took over Larry King’s slot at the CNN, published his memories, in which he revealed that in the eight years between 1996 and 2004 that he was editor of The Daily Mirror, he met Prime Minister Tony Blair more than 58 times. The following are Morgan’s exact words:

“The most overriding sense I had in re-living my career in [this book], was the staggering degree of access I enjoyed for so long to the corridors of power and influence in this country.

“At the time, it seemed perfectly normal to be having breakfast with a tycoon like Philip Green, lunching with the Prime Minister, and dining with George Michael. Sometimes all on the same day…

“Bored one evening, I counted up all the times I had met Tony Blair. And the result was astonishing really, or slightly shocking – depending on your viewpoint.

“I had 22 lunches, six dinners, six interviews, 24 further one-to-one chats over tea and biscuits [that makes a whopping total of 58, and Piers Morgan is not finished], and numerous phone calls with him. That’s a lot of face time with arguably Britain’s most important person.”

What an admission! And it is not only Tony Blair that Piers Morgan met so many times, he met a good deal of Blair’s government ministers and officials, from Gordon Brown down, and sometimes their wives and husbands too. And you can bet that they did not only meet to have tea and biscuits.

Interestingly, Piers Morgan is just one representative of the editors and media barons that Tony Blair and other British prime ministers and ministers meet on a regular basis to think and talk and plan about the affairs of state. If Blair met Piers Morgan 58 times, imagine how many times he met the editors of the other newspapers in the country or called them on the phone?

If any Zimbabwean or Ghanaian or African editor meets his president 58 times in eight years (not counting the “numerous phone calls”), they would say the editor has been bought or he was a government puppet.

Or if any African president meets the editor of one of the leading newspapers in his country more than 58 times in eight years, they would equally say he is a control freak or wants to muzzle the newspaper. But when it happens in Britain, nobody butts an eyelid – because, as Piers Morgan gloriously admits, it is “perfectly normal”.

In other words, the place of “the fourth estate of the realm” in the Western body politic is so arranged that it is “perfectly normal” to see the media working in harmony with the government by reporting and “informing responsibly”, and helping the government to achieve its set goals.

But if you ever did that in Zimbabwe, you would be branded at best as a Government mouthpiece and at worst a stooge. Yet, the irony of ironies is that there are no “stooges” and “government mouthpieces” at the BBC or the CNN. Can you see why their countries are successful and ours are not.

We have to imitate what they do!

If I go to the First Street in Harare today and ask any schoolboy what roles have been assigned to the first three estates of the Zimbabwean realm, chances are that I would get some intelligible answers. But do we know the role assigned by the Zimbabwean state to the “fourth estate of the realm”? Or doesn’t Zimbabwe have a fourth estate of the realm? Or is it just an “estate” without a role?

We shall probe this question next week by looking at the role that Britain and the rest of the West have assigned to their “fourth estate of the realm” and what we can learn from it.

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