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Baffour’s Beefs with Baffour Ankomah
I ENDED last week’s column by asking three rhetorical questions: Do we know the role assigned by the Zimbabwean state to its “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?

I promised that this week we shall probe these questions by looking at the role that Britain and the rest of the Western world have assigned to their fourth estates of the realm and what we can learn from it. So let’s get on our bikes.

We shall start with our old colonial master, Britain. How does its “Fourth Estate” work in reality?

Remember, except the state broadcaster, the BBC, the rest of the very long list of British newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations that make up the Fourth Estate of the British realm are all privately owned.

In Zimbabwe terms, they would be called “independent” newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations. But “independent” from whom, and from what? It shows how misconceived, if not misdirected, our education as journalists has been in Africa.

In the British psyche, there are no “independent” newspapers or radio and TV stations. They are “private” or at worst “commercial”. Not independent. And they all take their Fourth Estate roles very seriously?

Here I run the risk of being misconstrued, so let me state my position clearly. The media everywhere has a watchdog role, by which it reports and exposes government and state wrongdoing. Remember that the government and the state are not one and the same. A government is a transient body, the state is permanent. So we should not confuse the two.

Having said that I should add, forcefully, that the media also has a “Fourth Estate of the Realm” role, by which it helps the state and the government of the day to achieve their set goals in the interest of national interest (i.e. the interest of the people). In the so-called democratic West, this role assigned to the media is much larger and deeper than the watchdog role, as we shall soon see.

The nation first
Here is a typical example: Last week, when narrating the exchange in the British Parliament on November 9, 2010, between Ben Bradshaw, the Labour MP for Exeter who served under Prime Minister Gordon Brown as a junior minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), and Foreign Secretary William Hague about the proposed transfer of the funding of the BBC away from the FCO, I inadvertently omitted a crucial piece of Bradshaw’s remarks that sumptuously summed up what the British Fourth Estate does in principle.

“Is it not the case,” Bradshaw asked Hague (who resigned in mid-2014 as Foreign Secretary), “that in parts of the world the [BBC] World Service can be a better ambassador for Britain than any number of embassies and diplomats?”

In fact, for the avoidance of doubt and because of its centrality in the way the British Fourth Estate behaves, let me repeat here in full the November 9, 2010 exchange in the House of Commons:

Ben Bradshaw 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 Foreign and Commonwealth Office]; and if he will make a statement.”

Hague replied: “The transfer of the BBC World Service funding from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to the licence fee from 2014-15 represents a £212 million reduction in public spending. I will continue to set the objectives, priorities and targets for the World Service with the BBC, and no language services will be opened or closed without my agreement [as foreign minister]”.

Bradshaw then asked the now famous question: “Is it not the case that in parts of the world the World Service can be a better ambassador for Britain than any number of embassies and diplomats? But does not the change raise some serious questions about its long-term governance and funding? Why should the licence fee payer in Britain pay for programmes that they cannot receive and probably would not be interested in receiving, and why, therefore, should the BBC continue to fund them?”

Hague replied: “The BBC is very enthusiastic about the change. 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…”

It is here that the Tory MP for Croydon South, Richard Ottaway, asked 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?

Hague replied: “The responsibility for the direction of the World Service will remain exactly as it is now. 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.”

Truly remarkable
I hope you underlined, as you were reading, Ben Bradshaw’s great admission about the BBC World Service being a better ambassador for Britain in certain parts of the world than any number of British embassies and diplomats?” As a former junior minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which controls the BBC World Service, Bradshaw knew exactly what he was talking about.

You may want to ask how the BBC does it – becoming a better ambassador for Britain in parts of the world than any number of embassies and diplomats? And this despite the fact that we are told there are no government stooges or puppets at the BBC. Can you now see how the Fourth Estate role works.

The BBC comes up again in recently declassified British government documents detailing the counter measures that Britain intended to take in the early 1960s against Chinese influence in Africa. I wrote about these documents in this column on September 13, 2014.

Apart from the measures I mentioned in the September 13 piece, the documents talk about “other specific and positive measures” to checkmate China in Africa, which include:

“(i) Technical assistance, channelled through the Department for Technical Co-operation and primarily geared to the Commonwealth, although a modest effort is now being made in the ex-French territories.

“(ii) The Information Services (of the Foreign Office, Commonwealth Relations Office and Central Office of Information) which involve the overt exploitation of mass media both centrally and by officers in the field.

“(iii) BBC Services (external broadcasting services and English language courses), which will be substantially augmented when the Ascension Island station opens, probably in 1965.

“(iv) Visits – an important and growing programme of sponsored visits by Africans to the United Kingdom (both official and through non-government agencies).

“(v) The British Council, which currently spends over £1 million and has permanent establishments in 23 African countries (including some not yet independent).

“(vi) Voluntary Services Overseas and other bodies co-operating in the ‘Lockwood Scheme’, under which about 600 graduates and school-leavers are at present working voluntarily in Africa on temporary jobs connected with teaching, agriculture, medicine, administration and social services.

“(vii) Students in the United Kingdom – there are approximately 20,000 African students in the United Kingdom (compared with approximately 4 000 in all communist countries put together).

“The second category of counter measures consists of information and related work undertaken by Her Majesty’s Embassy with the specific purpose of checking the spread of communist, including Chinese, influence in Africa. This is largely channelled through the Information Research Department which supplies posts in Africa with material and suggestions to be passed to local authorities [and] leaders of opinion.”

So 50 years ago, the same concerns being expressed today by the West about Chinese influence in Africa, and how to counter it, were as high then as they are today. Nothing has changed.

To me, as a journalist, the role assigned to the BBC, the British Council, and the Voluntary Services Overseas in checkmating China in Africa presents a salutary lesson.

Many African countries have not paid attention to the special place the BBC, the British Council, and the Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO) occupy in the British scheme of things.

Thus, if you hear Westerners pontificate about the “state-owned media” in Africa, and Zimbabwe in particular, waive this declassified document at them, and remind them of how the British use the BBC, the British Council and VSO, or the Americans the CNN and the VOA, in their propaganda and Fourth Estate activities.

John Pilger
In April 2006, John Pilger, the Australian journalist and filmmaker who has lived in Britain for most of his life, delivered a paper at the Columbia University in New York. His topic was: “Reporting War and Empire”. His paper was so instructive on the Fourth Estate role in the West that I should quote it here at some length:

Pilger wrote: “During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. The dissident novelist, Zdenek Urbanek told me: ‘In one respect, we are more fortunate than you in the West. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. Unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines, because real truth is always subversive’.

“This acute scepticism, this skill of reading between the lines, is urgently needed in supposedly free societies today. Take the reporting of state-sponsored war. The oldest cliché is that truth is the first casualty of war. I disagree. Journalism is the first casualty.

“Not only that: it has become a weapon of war; a virulent censorship that goes unrecognised in the United States, Britain and other democracies; censorship by omission, whose power is such that, in war, it can mean the difference between life and death for people in faraway countries, such as Iraq.

“As a journalist for more than 40 years, I have tried to understand how this works. In the aftermath of the US war in Vietnam, which I reported, the policy in Washington was revenge, a word frequently used in private but never publicly.

“A medieval embargo was imposed on Vietnam and Cambodia; the Thatcher government in Britain cut off supplies of milk to the children of Vietnam. This assault on the very fabric of life in two of the world’s most stricken societies was rarely reported; the consequence was mass suffering.

“It was during this time that I made a series of documentaries about Cambodia. The first, in 1979, Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia, described the American bombing that had provided the catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot, and showed the shocking human effects of the embargo.

“Year Zero! was broadcast in some 60 countries, but never in the United States. When I flew to Washington and offered it to the national public broadcaster, PBS, I received a curious reaction.

“PBS executives were shocked by the film, and spoke admiringly of it, even as they collectively shook their heads. One of them said: ‘John, we are disturbed that your film says the United States played such a destructive role, so we have decided to call in a journalistic adjudicator’.

“The term ‘journalistic adjudicator’ was out of Orwell. PBS appointed one Richard Dudman, a reporter on the St Louis Post-Dispatch, and one of the few Westerners to have been invited by Pol Pot to visit Cambodia. His dispatches reflected none of the savagery then enveloping that country; he even praised his hosts.

“Not surprisingly, he gave my film the thumbs-down. One of the PBS executives confided to me: ‘These are difficult days under Ronald Reagan. Your film would have given us problems’.

“The lack of truth about what had really happened in Southeast Asia – the media-promoted myth of a ‘blunder’ and the suppression of the true scale of civilian casualties and of routine mass murder, allowed Reagan to launch a second ‘noble cause’ in Central America.

“This target was another impoverished nation without resources: Nicaragua, whose ‘threat’, like Vietnam’s, was in trying to establish a model of development different from that of the colonial dictatorships backed by Washington.

“Nicaragua was crushed, thanks in no small part to leading American journalists, conservative and liberal, who suppressed the triumphs of the Sandinistas and encouraged a specious debate about a ‘threat’.”

The rub was coming
Pilger continued: “The tragedy in Iraq is different, but, for journalists, there are haunting similarities. On August 24 last year [ie, 2005], a New York Times editorial declared: ‘If we had all known then what we know now; the invasion [of Iraq in March 2003] would have been stopped by a popular outcry’. “This amazing admission was saying, in effect, that the invasion would never have happened if journalists had not betrayed the public by accepting and amplifying and echoing the lies of Bush and Blair, instead of challenging and exposing them.

“We now know that the BBC and other British media were used by MI6, the secret intelligence service. In what was called ‘Operation Mass Appeal’, MI6 agents planted stories about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction – such as weapons hidden in his palaces in secret underground bunkers. All these stories were fake.

“But this is not the point. The point is that the dark deeds of MI6 were unnecessary. Recently, the BBC’s director of news, Helen Boaden, was asked to explain how one of her ‘embedded’ reporters in Iraq, having accepted US denials of the use of chemical weapons against civilians, could possibly describe the aim of the Anglo-American invasion as to ‘bring democracy and human rights’ to Iraq.

“She replied with quotations from Blair that this was indeed the aim, as if Blair’s utterances and the truth were in any way related…

“Such servility to state power is hotly denied, yet routine. Almost the entire British media has omitted the true figure of Iraqi civilian casualties, willfully ignoring or attempting to discredit respectable studies.

“How may people know that, in revenge for 3 000 innocent lives taken on September 11 2001 [in New York and Washington DC], up to 20 000 innocent people died in Afghanistan?”

And here came the rub, John Pilger’s climax, and please I enjoin you to read it slowly. He said:

“In reclaiming the honour of our craft, not to mention the truth, we journalists at least need to understand the historic task to which we are assigned – that is, to report the rest of humanity in terms of its usefulness, or otherwise, to ‘us’ [meaning the West], and to soften up the public for rapacious attacks on countries that are no threat to us. We soften them up by dehumanising them, by writing about ‘regime change’ in Iran as if that country were an abstraction, not a human society….”

—The historic task—-
Now these are not my words. They are the words of one of the greatest journalists ever produced by the West. He says the “historic task”, or one of them, assigned by the state in Western countries to the Fourth Estate of the realm is: “To report the rest of humanity in terms of its usefulness, or otherwise, to the West, and to soften up the public for rapacious attacks on other countries…”

If you don’t understand this “historic task” as an African journalist, you will never be able to report or inform responsibly in the African context, in the interest of African national interests.

More often we admire the strength and power of Western countries. They did not reach that level lying in bed. Collectively as a group, the four estates of their realm – the Executive, Legislature, Judiciary, and the Media – worked, and still work, assiduously together to achieve that powerful level for their countries. And then they come down to Africa to bambozzle us with fanciful notions of press freedom, and publish and be damned.

But where was press freedom and publish and be damned when the PBS told Pilger: “These are difficult days under Ronald Reagan. Your film would have given us problems.”

Where was press freedom and publish and be damned when, as Pilger says, “Nicaragua was crushed, thanks in no small part to leading American journalists, conservative and liberal, who suppressed the triumphs of the Sandinistas and encouraged a specious debate about a ‘threat’.”

Where was press freedom and publish and be damned when, as Pilger reveals, “almost the entire British media has omitted the true figure of Iraqi civilian casualties, willfully ignoring or attempting to discredit respectable studies”.

Where is press freedom and publish and be damned when the Western media executes the “historic task” assigned to them? The African media should be streetwise – if we want our nations to be great, we should realise that, as in the West, our states also have “historic tasks” that have been assigned, or should be assigned, to the Fourth Estate of the realm. And that these tasks are to be executed with equanimity, whether we are state broadcasters or “independent” newspapers and radio stations.

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