I’ve recently returned from a UN mission to India, hence the silence. But I’ve also been thinking through my quite frustrated reactions to a couple of issues that hit the headlines. I should explain that it’s not so much the media stories themselves that set me thinking but rather the reactions to them.
I understand that, when people hear or read stories of death and destruction, bravery and boldness, madness and mayhem, they react emotionally and often, in the midst of their heightened passion, want to do something. This is a great reaction in many ways and is behind the generous donations that flow in when disaster strikes, and the spirit of volunteering that is so crucial in a world where increasingly governments look to civil society to do the work they should be doing.
What concerns me is not the reaction so much as the fact that it is informed only by media-driven coverage. Focusing on problems that the media chooses to highlight skews our understanding of the “big picture” and seriously undermines efforts to achieve balance and fairness. We are never going to achieve real change, and come to grips with the big issues, if we don’t look behind the headlines.
I once produced the nightly television news broadcast, for example, for the ABC, Australian’s national broadcaster. Every day I would pour through dozens of incoming reports of things that were happening in Australia and across the world, and I would choose the 12 or so stories that went to air that night. Yes, I chose. For the whole time I was doing this job, people saw the news that I had chosen to put to air and didn’t get to see the stories that I cast aside. I remember that when I left that job I went through withdrawal symptoms, feeling completely uninformed about what was happening in the world because now I, too, only got to see the dozen items included in the news each night.
Today of course people have more sources of news, especially on-line, but a scan of multiple sources – print, radio and TV, web-based – shows that we still tend to focus on a dozen major stories each day and in many ways the constant repetition of these stories in the various media only makes them seem more dramatic and important.
I should explain what sparked these thoughts in the first place: a great group of women I have contact with came to me with an idea to get their group to “do something” about a terrible story that had hit the headlines and received front-page news attention for a couple of days: the collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh and the death of many of the (mostly women) workers there.
To recall: On 24 April 2013, an eight-story commercial building, Rana Plaza, collapsed in Savar, a subdistrict of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. The building contained clothing factories, a bank, apartments, and several shops. The shops and the bank on the lower floors immediately closed after cracks were discovered in the building, but warnings to avoid using the building were ignored by the operators of a garment factory on upper floors and garment workers were ordered to show up for work the following day. The building collapsed during the morning rush-hour. The workers crowded into the sweatshops stood little chance of escaping death or at the very least serious injury. By 13 May, when efforts to locate people ended, the death toll had reached 1,129. Some 2,500 injured people were rescued from the building alive.
Reports soon included details of the terrible conditions under which the workers had toiled: no contracts, low pay, long hours, working standards that put their health and safety at risk on a daily basis. Classic elements of exploitative labour to which so many workers across the globe fall victim.
This was a terrible event and of particular significance for me because I was working as a journalist in TV news and current affairs when a hotel building in Singapore collapsed in 1986. I remember how terrible it was to sit day after day in the newsroom, preparing a nightly TV special on the event, watching rescue workers pulling out bodies from the rubble and seeing vision so horrific that we knew we would not be able to broadcast it.
For Australia, as for several other western countries, the Bangladesh story had a “local angle” because Bangladesh supplies some of the dirt-cheap clothes to be found in major supermarkets. My local department store, for example, is currently selling t-shirts made in various parts of Asia for $4 each – less than a latte in the cafe next door.
There was an immediate call for the major supermarket chains in Australia to review their policies of purchasing clothes from Bangladesh (with little consideration of how this might affect the workers who earn a meagre income from the factories that might be forced to close).
I understood the women’s horror and anger at what had happened but the truth is that exploitative labour is rife in many, many countries, and I wish that we could focus on this fact, and do something about it, rather than be driven by the media coverage to look only at Bangladesh. Now that the supermarkets have said they will make sure their suppliers in Bangladesh comply with labour laws – if only it were that simple – the story has gone away. We have heard nothing of what will be done to educate Australians to understand that a $4 t-shirt means it had been made by someone who is paid a few cents for that work (after the factory owner and others in the supply chain have taken their cut). Or of the obligation on governments to find and close down enterprises that are flouting labour laws.
It’s a bit like the recent push to bring to justice Joseph Rao Kony, leader of the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army. Kony is just one of Africa’s many warlords but was the focus of an Internet-driven campaign that raised millions of dollars from young people all over the world who, unfortunately, thought that by sending off money and buying a bracelet and poster pack they would somehow solve the problem of children being recruited as soldiers or abducted into slavery by armed militias.
The media has to bring us news and they can’t cover everything, but it would be good if occasionally we were introduced to the “stories behind the news”. There used to be a time when the news media would headline a story and then the feature writers in magazines, the current affairs producers in TV and radio stations and the more serious news journals like Time and Newsweek would give us background, widen the scope of the story and put the drama of the news into an issue-rich article that would help us to understand context and complexity. Only when this happens can we hope to move away from the kind of band-aid “solutions” we see way too often and instead look to long-term responses and solutions.
For the past 20 years I have watched in sadness as goodwill and kind intentions have been mobilised by media stories and people have reached into their pockets to try and help. One result of this, though, is that governments feel domestic pressure to do something too, and so development funds are diverted into short-fix aid, policy gives way to passion, and the problems that we need so urgently to address – discrimination, exclusion, corruption, violence, exploitation and more – are pushed onto the back burner. As a result we are really losing the battle to put an end to exploitative labour and the human trafficking that often accompanies it.
For every exploited worker who died in that Bangladesh factory, there are thousands who continue to toil in terrible conditions in so many countries — not only in Asia but elsewhere. We should not allow them to be forgotten. We need to do something to make sure that their story – the story of labour exploitation and the profit motive that underlies it – is the focus of attention not only for journalists and the public who depend on them for information but also for businesses and governments who should be doing something to stop it.